John Lamansky

Earlier this evening, our doorbell rang. Hmm.

My mom opened the door, and there was a trick-or-treating boy and his mom. My mom, of course, was surprised. For one thing, it was 4:55 P.M., which was five minutes before trick-or-treating was supposed to begin in our town. Plus, we were not inviting trick-or-treaters.

So my mom asked “Is our porch light on?”
“Uh, yeah,” was the response.

My mom looked and, sure enough, our light was on. In our town, the illumination of the porch light or some other light on the front of the house was an indication of the invitation of trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

My mom then saw the paper boy walking away from our house and realized what had happened and explained to the expecting trick-or-treaters. The paper boy had apparantly activated our motion-sensitive porch light as he walked past our house.

Hmm… as the trick-or-treater and his mom approached our house, they probably saw the paper boy pass our residence, an event followed by the illumination of our porch light. I wonder…

Anyway, we now return to the trick-or-treaters standing outside our front door. My mom has finished her explanation.

Silence.

“Um, okay, I’ll see if I can find you something,” my mom said. So she headed for our pantry. I followed behind her, trying to explain that just because our light was on, “…legally, you don’t have to give them something…”

Anyway, my mom takes a bag of Snickers, opens it up, and drops one into the pillow case that the little boy was using as a container for donated candy. My mom was then, as she puts it, “stunned” to see the mother of the boy hold out a pillow case too. A second Snicker candy was given away.

And then, the boy held up his pillow case and said expectedly, “More!”

My mom did not honor that last request.

The answer? “Yes,” according to Google’s PageRank, which is an indicator of how “important” Google considers a webpage to be. I have noted that Apple.com has a Google PageRank of 10 out of 10, whereas Microsoft.com has 9 out of 10. But then again, Alexa’s ranking system gives Microsoft.com a higher ranking than Apple.com. Rather interesting…

It started out as a normal Saturday. It was October 8, 2005. Shortly after waking up, I proceeded to go through the steps of turning on my computer.

I successfully completed two out of the three steps I would normally take to turn on my computer. I first plugged in the surge protector. Then I flipped the surge protector on. Normally I would then press the power button on my computer, but I was startled to hear my computer turn on all by itself. Eek! It’s trying to take over the world!… uh, just kidding.

I looked at my Dell computer case. The power light was orange instead of normal “everything’s okay” green. The monitor was blank and its power light was also orange. And so began The Mystery of the Orange Light. Dun-dun-dun-duuunnn…

Although orange is one of my favorite colors, I knew my computer was not trying to appeal to my color favorites. Something was obviously wrong. I held down on the power button in an attempt to turn off the computer. It didn’t turn off. So I flipped off the surge protector. Of course, the computer turned off (I would get really freaked out if it didn’t…). I flipped the surge protector back on. The computer turned on by itself - again. I repeated this; same result. I held down the power button… longer. The computer finally turned off. Flip off, flip on, no automatic starting up. Whew!

After that was solved, I ran downstairs and made a beeline to the location where my computer’s packaging was stored. I grabbed my Dell Dimension 8400 User’s Manual and went upstairs. After a bit of searching through the manual, I found a section that read “If the power light is steady amber - a device might be malfunctioning or incorrectly installed.” It then suggested that I reseat the memory modules, the graphics card, and the other PCI cards in the case.

Oh, great. I was a little nervous about opening my case, though because this computer had died on me before I had had some experience with accessing the innards of my computer. After going through the routine of unplugging everything from the back, I pulled out the case into an open area, put it on its side, and opened it up.

My last computer failure was due to what appeared to be an overheated hard drive. So the first thing I did was to look for any evidence of high temperatures. I didn’t see any circuitry that looked or smelled like it had been through a barbeque, so I proceeded with the actions suggested in the manual.

I had two DDR2 RAM modules in the slots. I picked the one that was the most easily accessible and delicately took it out of its slot. The instructions then stated that in order to avoid damage to the module, I had to push straight down and push evenly on both ends of the module. If I did it correctly, the latches on both sides of the slot would snap into place to hold the module in position.

The RAM module would not go in. I tried pushing softly. I tried pushing hard. It didn’t go in. I wasn’t sure if I should push harder because I was afraid I would break it. In the end, my dad was able to help me get it back in. Turns out I had to “help it in” by closing the latches while pushing…

After spending about half an hour or more on that one module, I, of course, did not want to try the second. Nor did I want to try the graphics or PCI cards. So I closed the case.

I tried doing some mental troubleshooting. The job of finding the failed component was made even more difficult by the fact that the Dell Diagnostic lights on the back of the computer were off, which the manual said meant the computer is off or “a possible pre-BIOS error has occurred.” I started my thought processes with the list of components whose reseating was suggested by the manual. At first I thought it must be the graphics card, since there was no monitor output. I tried both the analog and digital cables of my LCD monitor with no success. When I thought about what the Dell Diagnostic lights were telling me, I thought “it couldn’t be that.” It must be something that would normally provide data to the graphics card. Otherwise the diagnostic lights would probably indicate a graphics card failure. Could it be the motherboard? The power supply? The power cord?

As I usually do when I’m stuck with a major hardware problem, I called my friend Jordan, who is quite knowledgeable in computer hardware, having built his own computer. He guessed that it probably had something to do with the power supply. He also suggested I check the connections on my motherboard. I checked the connections. No luck.

The only way I could think of as to test the power supply was to get a new one and see if it worked. Same with the other possibly-busted components. Ugh.

In summary, I was stuck. I was sure the warranty was expired. The only thing left that I could think of would be to call a local computer repair person later in the week.

And so concludes part 1 of The Mystery of the Orange Light! Dun-dun-dun-duuunnn…

To be continued.

(By the way, if you can guess what the problem is on the first try, I’ll be quite impressed.)

The Mystery of the Orange Light:
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Yippee! On October 20, I checked the Google PageRank of my blog and it was 4 out of 10, up from 0 out of 10. Naturally, the zero was because my blog is only, what, 3 months old. Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym “SEO,” PageRank measures how important Google considers a site to be. Google calculates a site’s “importance” by determining how many other sites link to that particular site. There are two types of PageRank: “actual PageRank” and “toolbar PageRank.” Only Google knows a site’s “actual PageRank”; that’s the PageRank used as a factor in search results. The toolbar PageRank is the PageRank that is visible in the Google Toolbar, and it is a good indicator of how high your actual PageRank is compared to other sites.

In order for you to understand what toolbar PageRank is, imagine that the web is split into ten equal slices (well, eleven, if you count zero), ordered from lowest actual PageRank to highest actual PageRank. The “slice” that you end up in is your toolbar PageRank. So that means I’m in the fourth-lowest (or sixth-highest) slice of websites. So I’m about in the middle of the Web in terms of importance. Not bad, in my opinion.

Google announced earlier this month that they’ve released a new RSS reader, dubbed “Google Reader,” in Google Labs. Like the Google Personalized Homepage, the Reader is designed to present the web user with personalized content, but the Reader is dedicated entirely to feed reading. Visit the Google Reader homepage to start subscribing. Oh by the way, my blog has an RSS feed.

I tried out the reader briefly, but personally, I think for now I’ll stick with Firefox for my RSS reading. In these early stages the reader just seems too… clumsy to use for my taste.

Bug control is what happens when John swats a mosquito that’s trying to bite him and it falls out of the air onto the Ctrl key of his computer…

(A post intended to be immediately after the fact…)

The Mozilla Foundation has recently released the second beta version of the upcoming Firefox 1.5 browser update. Beta 2 includes numerous bug and security fixes as well as updated website rendering and an improved automatic updating system. Those interested in trying out the beta can go to the Firefox Project page. Mozilla has also released the second beta of their Thunderbird email client. Go to the Thunderbird beta 2 page for more info.

Since I’m so reliant upon my extensions, I personally will be waiting until the final version of 1.5 is released to avoid extension compatibility problems. If you’ve tried the new Mozilla betas I’d love to hear your opinion of them.

When I was googling for info on Office 12, I saw this unusal Google AdWord:

Hmm… either Wal-Mart has an exclusive deal with Microsoft or they’re just trying to lure visitors to their website. But after clicking through on the ad, I was taken to a product page for Corel WordPerfect Office 12. Go figure.

Microsoft has publicly announced on their website that Office 12 will be removing menus and toolbars in exchange for a new UI element called the “Ribbon” (though note that Microsoft doesn’t mention “the Ribbon” by name on their website).

This move is in an effort to make Office’s hundreds, if not thousands, of features easily available to the user, instead of requiring the user to wade through dozens of submenus and dialog boxes in order to find the option or feature they’re looking for. However, I have heard that there are some disadvantages: in the early beta versions of Office 12 that are currently available the Ribbon is a lot less customizable than the toolbars and menus that it replaces.

So will this daring UI breakthrough set the standard for applications of the future, or will it be doomed to the same fate as Clippy?

According to this Salt Lake Tribune article:

Less than a day after making this hurricane season the second-busiest on record, the former Hurricane Vince began to break up Monday over the cooler waters of the far eastern Atlantic, forecasters said.

Wilma is the only name left for storms this season. After that, storms are named after letters in the Greek alphabet - which hasn’t happened in more than 50 years of naming storms.

I suppose now would be a good time to invest in the Hurricane Wilma stock on the Yahoo Buzz Game…