Mon Mar 23 08:02 EST 1998
Weekend Update: March 21-22

This weekend, the entire Crawford Clan, and two relatives from the
Scheuermann side, reassembled at our home for Charity's Junior Voice
Recital.  I was sternly warned to behave myself and I did pretty well,
despite envisioning the Three Stooges episode where Moe tosses an
olive into the mouth of some guy who is just about to sing.  I had
difficulty restraining myself during the first song where she sang
about "Endless pleasure, endless love" and so I leaned over to Joy and
said, "She's singing our song!"

Charity had four sets of songs, and the first set went just fine, but
after that I didn't understand a word she sang.  (She sang in German,
French, and Italian, but as they say, it was all Greek to me.)  The
audience, including myself, responded warmly after each set; a triumph
for my niece.

"A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing."  I demonstrated that
this weekend by working on my sister-in-law's computer.  They needed a
monitor for their system so they could set up email and get connected
with the Crawford Clan.  Through the magic of internet networking and
the generosity of the McConnells, I was able to get a monitor, and
another (486) system box to boot (also known by Steve McConnell and
myself as a boat anchor).  I figured I'd pirate the parts from one
machine and put them in the other for a combined better boat anchor.

I pulled the 2x CD-rom out of one box and connected it to the other.
Nothing happened because I needed to tell the computer that it had
another drive hooked to it.  Instead, I reloaded an older version of
DOS, wiping out my sister-in-law's data on the disk.  Fortunately, she
told me that there wasn't anything on the disk worth saving.

I next format drive C:, ready to start from scratch.  Well, it seems
that I also fiddled with the BIOS somehow in the interim.  I'd tried
booting the system with a boot disk in drive A: but the BIOS said
"Read from C: first" which of course was empty!!  The end of the story
is that I **stumbled** onto the solution by disconnecting the C:
drive, which enabled the computer to read from A: to a point at which
I reconnected the drive and resumed reading from A:.

[Special thanks go to the aging Uncle John Parker (who will be 50 in
April) for setting up the home theater while I ground my teeth into
powder over the computer system.  Also to his wife, Faith, for the
extra padding for the hide-a-bed sofa.]

The saddest part of the whole computer thing was that it consumed far
too much of the time I had hoped to spend with the family.

Honest to goodness, we love having them up and hate to see them go,
but we did leave the task of recovering order until Monday.  Have a
great week, folks!

Mark
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