Dave Mancuso dot Com

When I used to work at Denny’s as a server and manager (and just about every other job code), we used to have several tricks of the trade that various servers or cooks liked to practive. Here’s a Denny’s “secret” for you: if a customer wanted their sausage well done, some cooks would drop the sausages into the deep fryer. In addition to cooking the sausages extremely thoroughly, it would make them crispy on the outside.

I forgot to mention yesterday, but I moved the comments system for the page over to Squawkbox, so you’ll notice the new look if you make any comments. This does mean, though, that the old comments are all gone. That’s a shame, because they were great comments, but I had to move over–my license to the old comment system ends soon.

I’d post more today, but my laptop ran out of power playing games for the kids, since I had three kids to watch who actually were angels, but they used this laptop without a power adapter, because I lent it to Brad and forgot to take the one from work home, but then I went to work at ten after Denise got home so I could plug in and make a post, but now it’s 11:34pm and I’m tired, and I went to sleep after midnight every day this week so I’m more tired, and tomorrow I have a big day with the kids and the Easter hunt at day care but probably not the day at Strasburg with Joe and Laura because things conflict despite my great efforts and I hope they’ll forgive me and we’ll get together soon.

It was actually a pretty good week, though. I made lots of progress.

(Welcome to the mind of Dave, on which six threads of thought can be running at any given time)

For the second time in a week, this weblog has moved. The first time was invisible to you (unless you tried to connect to it while it was shuffling over to the new hosting company). This second time, you’ll have to come to my new domain name, Split Focus website (http://www.splitfocus.org).

I should write more tonight, but it would be nice to get to sleep, too. I have two good war stories to tell next time around: a big one (Joan Jett) and a smaller one (Joe Way). See you then!

The pictures of Saddam Hussein’s statue being torn down were broadcast everywhere yesterday, including the Arab world. I heard a very salient interview on NPR at that time with an Arab commentator. The questions: what was the Arab reaction to the TV images of Iraqi joy? What did the Arab news media say about all this?

The commentator said that the Arab reaction was confusion. The Arab commentary said one thing (America interferes), but the images spoke more clearly than anything else to the Iraqi liberation.

I think that the Arab world cannot help but dislike the United States, but they must also feel deep down some shame and frustration. They must be thinking “How did it get this bad in the country of our brothers that the infidels became Iraq’s saviors?” I think it’s vital at this point that The US show respect for the true country of Iraq: the liberated people we saw yesterday.

On a somewhat related note, this is tremendously embarrassing for the French, Germans, and Russians (mostly for the French, but I can’t explain why–it’s just a gut feeling). They’re in the position of looking like either dunces or cowards as far as this conflict goes: they were either ignorant of the true Iraqi situation or worse yet, ignored it. Yes, I know they could have had true antiwar reasons for their stance, but somehow I don’t think so. France at least had its fingers in the Iraqi pie. We may never know the true whys and wherefores behind this conflict, but it’s good to see this signal from the Iraqi people that some good may come of this.

I missed last night’s weblog through no desire of my own. My laptop decided to take a vacation on me and crashed with a blinking question mark on restart.

Luckily, it was my Mac laptop that died, not my PC. Since it was my Mac that hosed itself, I was able to hook it up to another Mac in Target Disk Mode using the Firewire port (IEEE 1394 to you PC types). On the other Mac, I could then see the laptop’s hard drive. Disk First Aid and Norton both choked on the drive, though–they couldn’t fix it.

Since I could see the drive I figured that I could at least copy my info off. The drive was physically OK; it was the directory structure that was corrupted. But where could I find a 60 GB hard drive to back up my data too? I didn’t have one.

I did, however, have a brand new Macintosh XServe, a Unix server with 360 GB of space. Within three minutes I had my laptop connected to the XServe and I was using the Disc Copy program to back up.

Several hours later, I came back to the office and started the restore. I blew away the bad hard drive, reformatted it, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to put everything back on my laptop. A few updates later, I had my laptop back (and I’m writing this post on it now).

An interesting point: I had access to a big hard drive to back up my stuff, but the rest of the tools are freely available for Macs. If I had this happen to my PC, I’d be up the creek without a paddle. There’s no way I’d be back up with a fully functional machine and a clean install within a day. And I can tell you from experience that my Macs have much fewer problems than my PCs. I like both, and I use both, but if I had to choose one, I think my choice would be pretty clear.

Since it was so easy to move our Mammoth Concepts website, it seemed to be a good time to move the Digital Perspective website onto its own server. The name “Digital Perspective” doesn’t really roll off the tongue as a web address, though, so I chose a name that rolls off the tongue (slightly) better: Split Focus. In a day or two, you can find me at the new Split Focus website (http://www.splitfocus.org).

Besides, if you think about it, “split focus” is a theme that fits me perfectly.

The other day I mentioned the Beaver Avenue Beggars, a band I used to listen to up in State College. I failed to mention, however, one of the best and most popular music groups that Penn State has ever produced–Cartoon. They’ve been broken up for almost twenty years and yet they still get back together to play, mostly at Penn State’s Arts Festival in July. I’m partial to them because I like acoustic rock, but apparently a lot of other people are partial to them as well.

I remember visiting Elaine Zaleski (now Elaine McCarty) at Penn State in 1983 and going into a record store where she bought an album called Native State by Cartoon. I didn’t listen to the album, but the group stuck in my mind. Six years later, I had the chance to listen to a Cartoon reunion concert at the Arts Festival, and I loved it. I bought a great two-album Cartoon cassette that I literally wore out a few years later. When CD burners came on the scene, I thought about trying to transfer the tape to CD, but I never had all the right pieces to digitize the songs.

Later, though, the Internet saved the day. A Google search for the heck of it one day turned up this Cartoon website. Better yet, the website had CDs for sale of the songs I wanted. I bought both CDs and had my Cartoon fix again. Now I see on the website that they have a third CD for sale. It’s on my list to get in the next few weeks.

Cartoon rocks.

I took Drew up to Fox’s Market in Middletown earlier tonight, and we drove back along the river (it’s the back way from Middletown to my house, down Route 441). As we drove by the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant I pointed it out to Drew. He’d seen it before, but he’s so little he forgets. This time, thought, he asked a lot of questions about it. I tried to answer them as best I could. Do you know that the whole near-accident was compounded by human error? Back in 1979, the computers sensed a problem and began to cool things down immediately. A human operator misread the alert and shut off the cooling. That’s what caused the plant to move to near-meltdown phase. The phone lines in the area were so jammed that no one could get in touch with the control room to tell them to turn the cooling system back on. Finally, they broke through and the operators set everything back properly again. Within a day, the area was out of danger.

I didn’t tell Drew all this, but he seemed to be happy with the answers I gave him. I had to explain why two of the towers smoked and two didn’t (they never restarted the bad reactor–it will be fully dismantled eventually). The funny thing was looking at the houses on the left as we passed the towers on the right. People live literally across the street from TMI. And life goes on.

My house is about six miles from TMI. My school district (my workplace) borders TMI. We have comprehensive plans for an event at TMI that are continually refined. We’ve discussed them in the last few months, and while I don’t feel I can speak about our contingencies, I can say that the leadership of the school district has really planned for almost any eventuality, including instant and complete evacuation of the district. We live and work a stone’s throw from the infamous TMI, and we plan for the possible nightmare scenarios, and then we go back to our daily routine. It’s a bit strange, but most days we don’t even think about it. The possibility is remote, and a situation will probably never happen again, and we’ve made whatever precautions we can, and we all have lives to lead, and frankly life in Etown is pretty good.

And life goes on.

I really hosed the new server tonight for a bit (at least for this weblog directory–not for the main site). I was fooling around with subdomains and access to the weblog was blocked off. I had to go into the .htaccess file to bring the site back.

But hey, that’s how you learn.