Save your data - from bells and whistles.

For several years now, lots of computer systems (and motherboards from which to build them) have been supplied with a feature known as RAID support. RAID is (currently) the acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. (The "I" used to be "inexpensive", but that's been changed to reflect the fact that some technobabble purveyors have found that peddling very pricey RAID setups is profitable indeed.)

Losing your computer's data is a bad thing.  Lots of people rely on regular backups to minimize the amount that vanishes when a hard drive (or whole system) gets toasted, but sometimes that's not considered good enough.  A different approach is the multiple-hard-drive solution known as a RAID.  When it works properly, it reduces downtime for recovery from a single drive failure to near zero, and permits you to simply keep working uninterrupted.  (For a full system failure, it's still vulnerable to problems; that's why even a RAID doesn't make real backups unnecessary.)

On the surface, some of the implementations of RAID look like a really good idea, particularly the simple RAID1 version; it appears to just create and maintain a full-time backup of one disk on another identical disk. And if that were the case, it would be laudable indeed.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. The hardware used to create each of the RAID versions causes the data format of the drive(s) to be changed in a manner that makes it difficult or impossible for the drive to be accessed with just an ordinary controller. For RAID version 0, and for versions 2 through 6, the advisability of using the scheme is even worse; they not only change the format, but they don't even store all of the data together; it gets split up and scattered, rendering the process of recovery far more difficult if something serious goes wrong.

An extensive description of the seven principal types of RAID is available over at Wikipedia, but the bottom line is pretty simple; using RAID increases the complexity of your data storage, and almost always makes recovery harder if you have certain types of hardware failure. For some types of RAID, recovering data after a *single* disk failure becomes easier - perhaps even trivially simple - but as you increase complexity, the number of things that can fail goes up, so the chances that there will be a failure of some sort increase with it - and no RAID can save you from the effects of the operating system going nuts due to a virus or a badly written program, and essentially all hardware-based RAIDs will make your data inaccessible if the controller fails.

All things considered, unless you really, really need either full-time continuous backup or the small increase in performance of a "striped set", even RAID1 is probably not a good idea. The possible exception is in using the RAID capabilities that were built into certain versions of Windows itself; a RAID1 setup done that way is generally as safe as a single hard disk, and provides added protection against data loss due to sudden failure of one of the two drives.

The main reason why I'm posting about this is that apparently, some of the system builders have been shipping machines that have their drives set up using RAID0 from the factory, without providing a Windows reinstallation CD to allow the buyer to convert the machine back to conventional drive formatting. Sometimes this is done to allow the system builder to advertise a unit with what appears to be a huge single drive when in fact it is equipped with two smaller ones that just show up in Windows as a single unit because of the RAID setup. When shopping for a new or refurbished system, it appears that it's wise to ask about these issues. If the machine has only one actual physical hard disk, it's not an issue; any RAID requires at least two drives. But if the box has multiple drives, or an unusually large one, it's wise to make sure to ask about how that's been done - and whether there's a Windows reinstallation CD included.

A tale of two take-outs; how not to eat fast food.

It's possible to eat low-carb and still have fast-food meals, but you really have to watch what you eat. Here's one example.

Boston Market, a fast-food chain owned by McDonalds, features rotisserie-grilled chicken and a couple of other meat dishes plus a selection of sides. They have some very low-carb items available - as well as many that aren't. Their chicken is so close to zero carbs as makes no difference, while their meatloaf evidently has considerable added starch. So I did a breakdown of the carb content of two meals using their own website's numbers for the content. (I've subtracted the fiber from the raw carb amounts since fiber can be ignored when watching carbs.)

Meal one: Half a rotisserie chicken with green beans and steamed vegetables, no cornbread.
Chicken: 2 grams carb
Green beans: 4 grams carb
Steamed vegetables: 5 grams carb
Total: 11 grams carb, 760 calories, 38.5 grams fat, 88 grams of protein.

Meal two: Large portion of meatloaf, mashed potatoes with beef gravy, sweet corn, no cornbread.
Meatloaf: 29 grams carb
Mashed potatoes with gravy: 36 grams carb
Sweet corn: 35 grams carb
Total: 100 grams carb, 1195 calories, 61.5 grams fat, 54 grams of protein.

Adding the cornbread (which is included with the meal automatically unless you tell them to leave it off) would boost the carb level on either of these by another 29 unneeded grams. I've left it out of both to be fair.

The meatloaf dinner has nine times the carbs of the chicken dinner in this example - in part because of the choice of side dishes. (It also has more than half again the calories, largely thanks to those very same carbs - and at 760 calories, that chicken dinner has plenty of calories already!) Okay, so what happens if you use the beans and steamed vegetables with the meatloaf? You've still got more than triple the carb that's in the chicken dinner; that's because the meatloaf is loaded with starchy fillers. And if you go the other way, and have the mashed potatoes and corn with the chicken, you get 73 grams of carbs in the meal. Any way you look at it, everything in that meatloaf dinner is bad news, and these aren't even the worst possible selections; get the meatloaf with sweet potato casserole and cinnamon apples, and throw in the cornbread, and you'll have 176 grams of carbs - enough to keep your insulin level elevated for many hours; maybe all night. That's why choosing the right food is essential.

What you eat is more important than how much.

When eating out, if you avoid the stuff that has the starches and sugars, you really can still go low-carb in many places. However, if you choose the wrong components to go with your low-carb main dish, you can lose the advantage rapidly. Having a salad? Ditch the croutons and the thickened-with-starch dressing; use oil and vinegar instead. Stare those breadsticks back under the napkin. Ask for something else instead of grits or hash browns or toast with breakfast. Disdain the beguiling bran muffin or whole-grain bagel with its 50 grams of non-fiber carbs (many are that high or higher). It won't be long before you won't miss the sweet, and you certainly won't miss the pounds that you'll shed as a result.

Out with the pyramid, in with the plate, still get a lot wrong.

So now instead of the upside-down-and-backwards recommendations of the old Food Pyramid, we get The Plate. What's changed? Not enough. Taking on the Powerpoint-style list that delivers about all that most people will read, here's my breakdown:

Balancing Calories (according to The Plate)
● "Enjoy your food, but eat less."

● "Avoid oversized portions."

Here we go again, perpetuating the old myth that obesity is entirely a matter of gluttony in some degree. That's been thoroughly discredited at this point, but the myth persists because too many powerful people can't afford to admit they've been wrong after having fervently espoused this position for their entire careers. The reality is that there is no need for the vast majority of people to pay one bit of attention to how much they eat IF they eat the right stuff - which won't be achieved by following the USDA guidelines.  What you eat is far more important than how much.

Foods to Increase  (according to The Plate)
● "Make half your plate fruits and vegetables."

This only works if you choose the right vegetables - and ignore the part about fruit altogether. A plate that's half-full of mashed potatoes and cooked apples (particularly when they're slathered with corn syrup or brown sugar) is a terrible thing to include in a meal, but these guidelines could be interpreted to mean that it would be a healthy choice - which it is emphatically not. Starchy vegetables should be passed over in favor of ones that aren't, and fruit should be minimized. Sorry, but that does indeed mean that the baked potato should be at most an occasional indulgence, NOT a staple with multiple meals per week. If you're going to have some fruit, eat no more than a small portion, no more than once a day and choose fruit with a relatively low sugar load, like strawberries. Although what you eat is far more important than how much, the quantity can become very important indeed when you're eating things that contain significant sugars and starches - and all fruits contain sugars.

● "Make at least half your grains whole grains."

Dead wrong; it implies that grains belong on your plate, which they don't - whole or otherwise.  While dishes like tabouleh and brown rice are somewhat less problematic than five-grain whole wheat bread (as just one example of an item erroneously considered "healthy"), anything containing grain is essentially just a reservoir of starch that directly and swiftly converts to glucose in digestion.  You might just as well eat sugar.  If it said "Make sure that no more than one spoonful of what's on your plate is made from grain of any kind", that would be more appropriate.  Better still, completely eliminate grains from your diet in all forms.  What you eat is far more important than how much.

● "Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk."

Bad advice.  If you're going to drink milk at all, there is no reason to avoid the 3.5% butterfat whole variety. Milk still contains significant sugars, however, so it's best left alone - and low-fat milk has ALL of the sugar of whole milk, so if anything, it's worse for you than the regular kind, partially because the low-fat label may make you think that it's OK to drink more of it. Fats in your diet are not the problem. Sugars and starches are the things that you need to avoid; those are what shuts down the ability to use fat as fuel, and they cause more problems than just obesity, diabetes and heart disease.  For someone who has already achieved a low-carb lifestyle otherwise, an occasional small indulgence in this area may be tolerated, but the more that you reduce sugars and starches, the better off you'll be. What you eat is far more important than how much.

Foods to Reduce (according to The Plate)
● "Compare sodium in foods like soup, bread, and frozen meals ― and choose the foods with lower numbers."

Sodium levels have been shown to be pretty much unrelated to sodium intake, both in the research published before and since since the new Plate came out.  Here's better advice than what's with the Plate: Anything that has more than 10 grams of carbohydrates for the whole meal should be left at the store. Bread, in particular, is something to avoid entirely. Yes, that is hard for most people to accept, but it's arguably one of the single most productive lifestyle changes that you can make. Bread is very heavy in carbohydrate content, and the fact that it is made from flour means that it has effects upon blood sugar levels that are nearly identical to those produced by eating an equivalent weight of sugar. Significant carbohydrate consumption of any kind tends to cause water retention, which is where sodium elimination goes haywire; let the body get back to working right, by ditching the carbs, and you can pretty much ignore sodium. What you eat is far more important than how much.

●"Drink water instead of sugary drinks."

This one they got pretty much right. Of course, they didn't tell you that sodas aren't the only sugary drinks; read the label on that bottle of cranberry juice cocktail or orange juice, and the level of sugars will surprise you (or at least, it should). Even worse are the various boutique favorites sold as "smoothies" and the like, which begin with sugar-laden fruit and then expand upon it with agave nectar, or honey, or cane juice.  Please do not be mislead by the folks who say "but it's NATURAL!"; your system can't tell whether sugar came from an apple, a pomegranate, tree sap, an insect's nectar collection, or a refinery; sugars, regardless of their source, are Not Good For You. Even worse, many bottled commercial "juice" contains high fructose corn syrup and/or added sugar disguised as "other fruit juice concentrates". To make matters worse, HFCS itself is sometimes just listed as sugar now, so unless the label says "cane sugar" or "beet sugar" or "sucrose" explicitly, you might be getting HFCS when you aren't expecting it. And although some juice suppliers have started going back to actual sucrose in response to public pressure about HFCS, that's really not much of an improvement. While it's true that high fructose corn syrup with more than 50% fructose is metabolically even worse than sugar (in complicated ways), it's like saying that getting run over by a truck is worse than getting mangled in a car wreck. The real goal is to avoid the damage altogether, and that's not done by choosing the slightly lesser evil.  Simply avoid both, and you're better off by far.




What you eat really is far more important than how much.

The Upside Down and Backwards Food Pyramid

The official US Government website www.mypyramid.gov has the following basic dietary recommendations for all Americans over the age of two years:

What is a "Healthy Diet"?
The Dietary Guidelines describe a healthy diet as one that

• Emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products;
• Includes lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts; and
• Is low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt (sodium), and added sugars.

That, in both my own experience and in light of the actual science that exists, is a crock. The best that can be said for it its that it recommends low added sugars; it gets most of the rest wrong.

Taking it point by point:

Fruits are almost all high in sugars, some much more than others. Sugars are one of the top two problems in the Western diet (not just ours, but everyone's at this point), fructose in particular. The less of these that you can consume in a day, right down to zero, the better off you'll be.

Vegetables are a mixed bag. High-starch things like potatoes are best avoided altogether; low-starch and low-sugar vegetables are not going to cause harm for the most part, but they don't supply you with everything you need, either. Eat what you want of them, but don't rely on them to give you basic nutritional needs.

Whole grains - ones that have NOT been ground up into flour, and still have the bran on the grain, are less damaging than those that have been processed, but not much. Grind whole grains into flour, and they're essentially just as bad as the highly-processed types; whole wheat bread isn't significantly better for you than white bread, and both are highly problematic. Grains - ALL of them - convert in digestion into glucose in large quantities, causing your body's systems to go into fat storage mode (can you say "resulting in obesity?"), as well as stressing the pancreas (eventually resulting in diabetes in many people). The more they've been processed before you eat them (particularly by conversion to flour), the faster they convert to glucose. The more glucose that reaches your bloodstream, the higher the insulin level will rise, and the longer it will take to drop back to normal (that is, non-problematic) levels. Among other things, the elevated insulin levels caused by high glucose loads can accelerate the growth of cancers. Records of indigenous populations across the globe whose diets included very little or no sugar or starch show that they had no cancer problems - until they began consuming sugars and starches with the arrival of Western influences. Grains of ALL types should be avoided, though many people can safely consume small amounts of things like brown rice. Anything made from flour is just Right Out, period; this includes breading on deep-fried foods.

Fat-free or low-fat milk still has all the lactose and other sugars of whole milk, without the nutritional value of the butterfat. (Yes, I said NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF THE BUTTERFAT. Fats are not the problem in obesity and heart disease; that's a myth that has been persistently promoted for a century by people with nothing but loud assertions that had no science behind them.) Small amounts of milk can be tolerable, but it's best to go easy on this if you're over the age of about 14. Milk products, on the other hand, can be a very mixed bag. Most real cheese is actually low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein; read the labels, and if the carb count is less than 10% of the calories, it's probably OK. (Diabetics may need to be even more restrictive and particular about this, of course.) Whole milk is safer than low-fat; only about 30% of the calories in whole milk are derived from carbohydrates, while nonfat milk's calories are 55% from carbs. Of course, both contain exactly the same total amount of carbs, so neither is good in large quantities.

Lean meats, poultry and fish aren't bad for you, but meats with fat are better, as long as you minimize carbohydrate intake. Why? Meats have lots of protein, which you need. Fats, in the absence of carbohydrates, provide fuel for the body perfectly. The few parts of the body that don't use fat will quite happily employ protein-derived fuels instead, and those are readily produced from multiple sources. If you load up on carbs, however, both a lot of those carbs and any fats in your diet will get stored (as fat) instead of used... and then you'll find yourself hungry long before you've burned off what you stored up, because the switch-over to using fats instead of carbs isn't instantaneous when the carbs run out. The switch to using carbs instead of fats, on the other hand, can actually be so fast that the carbs haven't even reached your tissues yet, making you hungrier than when you started eating. Can you say "Vicious cycle"? And that's just one of several that carbs cause.

Beans are another mixed bag. Fresh beans - ones that were harvested green and not dried - tend to be fairly low in starches and sugars; they're OK. Dried beans tend to have lots of starches; not OK. Dried soybeans have another set of issues in the form of harmful substances that aren't found in the raw, green soybeans. Some of those persist in the products made from soybeans, though not in soy sauce and tamari (which are fermented). Overall, dishes made from dried beans and dried bean products are best avoided due to their carbohydrate content, while anything made from dried soybeans is best avoided altogether. (Sadly, this includes tofu and soy milk. Try almond milk instead.)

Eggs are OK, period. If omelets are your thing, knock yourself out.

Nuts, again, are a mixed bag. Some are high in carbohydrates, some are low; read the labels and avoid the ones that get substantial portions of their calories from carbs. (You can subtract the fiber, however; it doesn't count.) Pecans are much better than cashews, as an example; you can look up the data easily.

Fats are the most persistently vilified part of the diet for no good reason. No study has ever demonstrated a real cause-and-effect relationship between dietary fat (or cholesterol) and fats in the blood or tissues except in the rare cases of people with a basic metabolic defect of some kind. Saturated fat, in fact, is affirmatively needed in the diet, particularly if there's a substantial amount of the much-praised Omega-3 component already present. Trans fats are not a part of the natural diet, however, and there's reason to believe that they can pose problems - avoiding them on the basis of their being artificial is justified by itself.

Salt is another thing that people avoid because of misinformation. The problems that have been blamed on salt can be laid at the feet of carbs more accurately; a high-carbohydrate diet causes water retention, which in turn causes sodium retention. Drop out the carbs, and both the excess water and the excess sodium are quickly eliminated by the body as a matter of course. If you maintain a low carb intake , you can pretty well ignore salt in most cases.

Sugar is best eliminated entirely from the diet, both "added" and "natural". If you want to read an extensive indictment of that substance, try "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes. I have often mused that if the writer of the Biblical book of Genesis had been fully in possession of the facts, the stricture would have been "Do not eat the sweet fruits of any tree or plant, for they will make you ill in your old age." Sugar's problems are many; the two most important in my opinion are that it raises insulin levels (with all of the many ill effects this has over the long term), and it contains fructose which is strongly implicated as one of the causes of the development of the plaques that seem to play a large part in the onset of Alzheimer's.

So how much carbohydrate can you eat and still avoid the problems that come with the level that's commonly in our diet today? If you want all of the benefits of reduced carbohydrates, the answer is "Not much". Under 50 grams per day is a good place to aim for - and that's barely more than you get in one large slice of bread. One can of a typical soft drink has 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrates, nearly all sugar; are you starting to see the challenge here? Be forewarned; once you start reading the labels on prepared foods, you'll discover that entire huge regions of the typical grocery store are pretty much useless to you; the bakery aisle, the soft drinks, most of the frozen prepared foods, all of the breakfast cereals, large parts of the canned goods, and all of the pasta, rice, and dried-bean-based items fall off the menu right away. There really is not a lot that's useful in the center of the store; you end up shopping primarily from the fresh produce, a limited amount of the frozen vegetables, parts of the dairy case, and all of the meats. If this sounds boring, don't worry. After a remarkably short time of carbohydrate avoidance, you'll discover that you just don't get as hungry as fast when you aren't eating carbs. As a result, you'll start concentrating on quality instead of quantity. And you need not give up fast food; a double-meat McDonalds Angus Deluxe minus the bun (with water or unsweetened tea to drink) is very low in carbs, and will provide the kind of meal that will keep you going but won't make you fat. (Okay, you might not be able to finish one with double meat, but that particular item has become my standard order at Mickey D's of late, and it keeps my 160-pound mass in motion for hours without running down or getting hungry.) And as long as you aren't already diabetic, you can probably get away with the occasional bit of backsliding; a couple of slices of pizza, or one hamburger with a bun in a given week is unlikely to move your goals out of reach.

Not convinced? Not my problem. There's plenty of straight information out there, and you're welcome to believe whatever you want to. But if you really do the investigating, you'll find out that the official guidelines are a recipe for misery in the long term, not health and long life. Or you can find out the hard way, when it's too late to do anything about it. It's your choice to make.

"Universal" laptop power supplies - aren't.

If you travel, and use a laptop in business, you've probably made the mistake of leaving the power supply in your hotel room when you went off to the conference or event - or whatever. And, an hour later (or four, if you've got a newer unit), you realized that you were running really low on battery - and had no way to fix it. And that probably gave you the urge to get a spare power supply so that you'd presumably still have one in the bag with the unit.

It's a good plan. If you do it, though, I have to recommend getting one of the types that is made specifically for your model and make, not a universal one. There's a hidden reason why this is important for some laptops, particularly those from Dell. The computer and power supply trade information on many models; if the power supply doesn't identify itself to the laptop as being The Right Kind, the laptop will either refuse to charge the battery, or go into low-power mode (i.e., run dead slow with a dim screen), or both. Yes, you'll be able to run the system - sort of. No, you won't be able to use it as well as you expect.

I discovered this after having picked up a Targus universal power supply a while back. I'd made the mistake noted above - and remembered the small black velvet bag that had lain ignored in the bottom of the side pocket for a year or more. Grinning widely, I pulled it out, selected the appropriate tip (that's another gotcha point; see below), and hooked it up. And the laptop immediately went from normal battery mode (one step down in speed, two steps down in screen brightness from running on AC) to Super Power Saver Mode - screen at minimum brightness, CPU running at the *lowest* speed that the architecture would support - which was about 1/3 of its normal rate. And the battery wouldn't charge. It wasn't a case of insufficient capacity from the Targus side - the voltage and wattage ratings were identical. It was merely the fact that the Dell laptop didn't see a power source that identified itself properly, so it went to worst-case-scenario mode.

Can you say "Next to useless"?

Anyway, after an afternoon of Running Dead Slow, I made doubly sure not to repeat that error the following day, and made a mental note to pick up a spare of the right kind of power supply ASAP. If you've priced the ones from the laptop manufacturers, you know that they are Not Cheap. We have a Goodwill Computer Store in my town, so some of them can be had for $17.95 there; they used to sell them for a lot less, until the word got out. Many can also be had in generic-label form from sellers on eBay and elsewhere for prices that range from $12 to $45 - all of which are cheaper than the MSRP I've seen for the "Universal" units from either Targus or Kensington. I haven't found a webpage that lists the laptops that are picky, so as far as I know, the only way to be sure that a given "universal" power supply will work with your system is try it - or buy a power supply that's known to be dedicated to your unit.

One last note - if you have a laptop that's known not to be picky about its power source, it's still essential to take the unit with you when shopping for a replacement. All of the "universal" units require an adapter plug to hook them up, and there are so many variations in the designs of the power plugs (even within a single laptop manufacturer's line) that it's pretty much hopeless to expect that you can select the right one from a list. You really do need to plug it in and make sure it works with YOUR laptop before you buy it. And don't be surprised if they charge you an extra $10 on top of the $70 list price of the power brick in the process; that's a fairly typical price for spare tips, and the one you need is probably not going to be included in the kit that comes with the unit - if they make one at all.

Cincinnati's Neglected Potter's Field

From 1849 until 1981, a graveyard for the indigent (and sometimes for the expeditious burial of those who perished from contagious diseases) was operated in what is now officially a part of Rapid Run Park in Cincinnati, Ohio. The graves are not all recorded; prior to 1896, no written records were kept. Although it is known that there was a veteran's section in which numerous Civil War veterans are believed interred, there is nothing to identify that area or those in it today. For the most part, there is nothing to identify the cemetery itself; the only formal marker is a small sign and a smaller plaque at the southwest corner of the 25-acre plot. Occasionally, someone still places a wreath at the foot of the sign, but there is no formal entrance evident, and nothing to guide someone who might be searching for the last resting place of an ancestor or other long-deceased relative.

When the cemetery was closed, a dispute arose over ownership between the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (with each denying it was theirs), which was finally settled with the decision that Cincinnati held the deed. Neither the city nor the county makes any formal reference to this cemetery in their lists of such facilities in the area today. Having no interest in expending already-scarce funds on the maintenance of the facility, its custody was handed over to the city's Parks Department - and maintenance effectively ended with the decision to "maintain the facility in a natural state". The city's Parks Department map of Rapid Run Park ignores the fact that its northern reaches encompass this historic locale.

Bit by bit, in this manner, pieces of our past get lost. For my part, even though my family lived just three houses away from Potter's Field when I was born, I had no idea that it was present until I returned to the city for my oldest brother's memorial service this year, and decided to see what the former neighborhood looked like today. I had no real memory of it beyond what I had seen in old photos; I was just three years old when we moved to Florida. My remaining brother remembered it, however, and was able to provide numerous details about the nature of the place. Although I can understand the fiscal issues, I find it disquieting that such a site is being so deliberately forgotten, as though no one whose remains lay there matters enough for any effort to be expended at all.

It is often said that a telling comparison between our national predecessor and our current nation is that the British consider one hundred miles to be a long way, while Americans consider one hundred years to be a long time - but neither group agrees about this with the other. Perhaps a more cogent observation is that the British regard history as something that belongs to them, and needs to be preserved, while Americans regard history as a boring subject to be forgotten as soon as the exam has been passed. Certainly in the case of the history of Cincinnati's Potter's Field, that history is being deliberately allowed to slip away - or worse.

Addendum: Although Google maps seems aware that there was a "Potters Field" (apostrophe omission theirs) in this area, they've got entirely the wrong plot of land so designated - and thus far, as of 21 May 2011, all attempts to get them to fix the error have met with failure. It would be less annoying were it not for the fact that what they've mislabeled as Potters Field is actually a group of Jewish cemeteries that are still in operation and actively maintained. Why they haven't fixed the mistake is not apparent.

UPDATE:  Google Maps still doesn't have a marker that shows where this cemetery is really located, but as of December 2013, at least they are no longer mislabeling the nearby active Jewish cemeteries as being Potter's Fields.  

Refurbished, eh? And just what does that mean, really?

If you look in the dictionary, "refurbished" means "polished" or "cleaned up". Lots of things are sold in both conventional stores and on the Net under as "Refurbished" (sometimes even "Factory refurbished"), often with a manufacturer's warranty, and often at what looks like a really attractive price. If the manufacturer is standing behind it, what's the risk? After all, most things either fail right away or they last until it's already time to upgrade to the newer version anyway, right?

Well, if you've bought a few things like this, you'll already be familiar with the reality.

A few cases in point:

- My daughter bought a refurbished Dell D600 laptop from a large, well-respected local computer store; wisely, she also bought the one-year extended warranty. It started becoming somewhat unreliable at about 11 months after purchase - but she was in the middle of prep for finals, and couldn't do without it just then, so she coaxed it along until the term was over. The next day, it went belly-up. The original warranty had done likewise two days prior - but the extended warranty was just starting, so everything's peachy, right? Sort of - the repair took over a month. Nearly a year later, as the end of the extended warranty approached, she decided to sidestep the possibility of a second panic-time failure, and bought a brand-new laptop to replace the D600. Almost two years of service for the price she paid would have been OK for a unit with half again the performance and without the month of absence from availability while being repaired; it was a so-so bargain as it stood, however.

- From the same store, not long after the D600 was purchased, I picked up a refurb IBM desktop as a platform to update into from my old Windows 2000 system. The first one was wonky right out of the box; boot time could be as much as six or seven minutes, and often it would just hang during boot and go nowhere. The system went back to the store for exchange, and we fired up a second one right there to make sure it would boot into Windows - and then we tried a third. That one's still going, four years later. Neither box showed any sign of having been previously opened and then returned, either, so these were "bad as received from the supplier" units.

- From Sony's website, I picked up a manufacturer-refurb compact CD player at what looked like a really nice price. Like most "refurb" items, it was indistinguishable from new. It worked for about two-thirds of the warranty period, and then the display quit showing anything. I could still make it play using the wired remote, but the on-cover controls and display just didn't work at all. I shipped it back, and they shipped me a replacement which worked properly for just long enough to get a week past the end of the warranty, and then it developed the same problem. With little to lose, I dismantled the unit and cleaned the contacts on the ribbon cable that connected to the display and switches - and it worked for another couple of months. I asked a store salesman at one of the local electronics places about whether he'd heard of any problems with that style of unit; he said "Do you see any of them on our display? There's a reason - and we usually try to stock everything from Sony that we can get." I now suspect that the reason these were being sold cheap as "refurbished" was that they knew there was a problem with that ribbon cable's connector, and they wanted to dump them with a reduced warranty to cut their losses.

- From eBay, I fairly recently picked up a manufacturer-refurb FujiFilm S2800HD camera; I already had an S1500, and was happy with it, but I wanted the extra resolution and increased zoom capability of the S2800. On receipt, there were two problems. First, it was not supplied with a lens cap - which, to be fair, wasn't promised, but since nothing but the original one fits and works properly, that's a significant omission which was not noticed in the description because one tends to think of the lens cap as being a part of the camera by default. Getting the cap took two weeks; not fun. Then, cap in hand at last, I finally installed the batteries and slipped in a memory card - and on the first test shot, it became obvious that the unit had a futzed-up CCD. (The CCD is the thing in the camera that actually converts light to electrical signals, which the camera's other electronic parts can read to create the digital image file.) I called Fuji, got instructions on how to return it, did so, and here I sit, almost a month later, still with no camera. They say that they just finally got the camera into the repair department this week - about three weeks after they received it. The forecast time to repair is two weeks from when it gets to this point. Add the probable week in transit coming back, and the camera will have far less than 30 days of its 90-day factory warranty remaining when I finally get it. I am not thrilled about this, as you can probably tell. (But wait, that's no all!  The unit had to be sent back TWICE MORE before it finally arrived in fully working condition.  On the first trip, it came back with the autofocus not working, and after they supposedly fixed *that*, the zoom lost about half its range - and caused the camera to shut down.  The third time that it returned from repair, it was fully operational.  It took nearly six months altogether.)

What these experiences add up to, in my opinion, is this:

Manufacturers and resellers both are quite willing to take large lots of only partially tested (or even perhaps untested but "believed working") gear, clean it up so that it looks pretty, put it in a fresh box, and sell it as "refurbished". They also seem willing to take known-troublesome models and dispose of the stock via this route; after all, the shorter warranty means that the unit's got a better chance of lasting long enough to be somebody else's problem given the short warranty provided.

What does this mean to the consumer? Basically, "Refurb" should be viewed as synonymous with "untested, possibly broken, possibly troublesome, and possibly with undisclosed defects that will cause it to fail before the end of the warranty that would have been applied to the corresponding new product."

I certainly won't be buying anything with that label again. And I'm not sure that "recertified" is much better, so I plan to avoid those studiously as well. If you decide to take the plunge - I'd advise that you hedge your bets as best you can.

Wondering what those strange folders on the C: drive are about?

You may have seen them; they have names like 75ed976fhr5429t5m2 or other largely-numeric gibberish. They usually have folders inside them with names like "i386" and "amd", or a long list of numeric names. And they share one annoying characteristic: You can't delete them.

Where did they come from? Microsoft. They were the temporary folders created to hold files that were being installed as part of a Windows Automatic Update. (The "Microsoft .NET" packages are particularly infamous for this, but others can do it as well, I've found.) Once the relevant updates have been applied, and the system has been restarted, those folders are entirely useless; they are supposed to be deleted automatically - but sometimes they aren't. And when you try to delete the folders manually, you get an error message telling you that you aren't allowed to delete the first file in the list inside. The same goes for the rest of the files.

So how can you get rid of them?

Here's the slickest and easiest fix I've found.

1. If your system has multiple user accounts, log in as the Adminstrator (or a user that has the same privileges). If you don't know what I'm talking about here, then you can skip directly to the next step.

2. Right-click on the folder that needs to be deleted. Select "Sharing" from the menu. Click on the boxes for "Share this on the network" and "Allow others to change my files" to place check marks in both of them. Apply the changes.

You can now delete the entire folder. (It will complain that somebody else might be using the files, but obviously this is not a warning that you need to worry about in this instance.)

I've seen other, much more cumbersome solutions, but this is the easiest one to use in most cases.

Low-carb in a fairly large nutshell...

This was originally composed as a response to someone's question in an email, but I thought it might as well get posted for general consumption.

Carbs in the diet - nearly all of them - cause elevated levels of insulin in your blood, even when the carbs are consumed in what would seem like small quantities. A single slice of bread spikes the insulin level in the blood for as much as several hours at a time. Recognizing the importance of this insulin spike is the fundamental key to understanding the problems that cause overweight, diabetes, and many other things.

Any carbs that convert to glucose in the digestive tract (which is most of them) contribute to the problem. Bread, potatoes, honey and table sugar all have nearly identical effects on insulin levels, as do many other things, including "whole grain" breads, rice, granola, and even dried beans. Certain carbs, like fructose, don't elevate insulin, but fructose has its own ill effects. For a while, it was believed that a diet that was high in "fiber" would ameliorate the effects of the carbs, but the research that was done in an attempt to demonstrate this ended up proving that fiber, while inoffensive, is also powerless to make a positive difference in the face of high levels of the problem carbs. (Fiber, basically, is a form of carb that the body doesn't convert to glucose or fructose, and which doesn't cause problems at all as a result.)

So with carb consumption comes elevated insulin. Oddly enough, insulin in the blood tends to make you hungry; that effect is a big part of the reason why the old saying "hunger is the best sauce" fits so well; as you start to eat carbs, your hunger actually increases because of the rising insulin. This can become a vicious cycle very easily; you eat something with carbs in it, the blood sugar rises, the insulin rises, the sugar level declines - but the insulin level doesn't fall for a while yet; now you're really hungry even though it hasn't been very long since you ate. (You've heard of the "sugar crash"? This is the simplified version of the biochemistry behind it.) So you eat again - probably including more carbs, because they're everywhere. Spike - crash - spike - crash. Getting the idea that this might not be healthy? You'd be right - and as the guy in the infomercials would say, that's not all...

An elevated level of insulin in the blood makes your system unable to use fats as fuel; it puts the muscles and most other fuel-using parts of the body into "burn only sugar, and not fat" mode, and at the same time it puts the fat cells into "grab all the fat that comes by and stash it" mode. And because the liver will try its best to help speed this along by converting that sugar to fat (in the form of triglycerides), the elevated insulin can cause a lot of fat accumulation. If you don't eat again for quite a while, that stored fat can get used up pretty much right away, if everything is normal. After all, when insulin is very low or absent, fats are continuously released from storage for use as fuel. But when insulin is present in the quantities that are common in most of the US population for most of any 24 hour cycle, that doesn't get a chance to happen; for most or all of the day, fats are only stored, and sugars get converted to fats - and stored. This is the basic reason that people get fat on a typical American diet; even long after they go to bed at night, the insulin level doesn't drop back to the point where they can use what they've been storing. But that's not the worst...

Chronic elevated insulin (a condition that is now pandemic in much of the world, and worse in the US than in most other nations) eventually results in hyperinsulinemia, a condition in which the insulin level is elevated well above normal whenever any carbs are present in the diet; if continued too long, eventually the body's ability to cope with that insulin - and respond to it - fails, resulting in diabetes. The whole process can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years, sometimes longer, depending upon the individual. (Some people may never develop it, but that doesn't mean that they won't show the ill effects of a carb-laden diet.) And sure enough, the diabetes epidemic in the US got worse starting about 10 years after the FDA and USDA published their high-carb-based nutritional recommendations in the early to mid '70s, which really launched the era of the high-carb low-fat mania.

So carbs cause insulin to get raised; what drops it? Well, excess insulin in the blood is removed by a substance called Insulin Degrading Enzyme. But in hyperinsulinemia, the production of the enzyme just can't keep up with the need to clear the excess insulin from the bloodstream. Even in people who haven't developed hyperinsulinemia, it's easy for the level of the enzyme to be just barely adequate to clear the excess insulin, if they're eating a lot of carbs. That's bad, because ordinarily, the excess amounts of that enzyme will switch roles and act to "clean up" various things, like the deposits that are believed to contribute to the formation of the plaques found in Alzheimer's patients. Like most things in the body (insulin included), that enzyme serves multiple purposes - and it's needed for all of them. When the supply gets used up by an overloaded demand in one area, the rest get neglected. Things get unbalanced. That's bad.

So, long-term high levels of insulin lead to hyperinsulinemia, and that clobbers the body's clean-up enzyme that would be doing a lot more than cope with the insulin if it could. And hyperinsulinemia leads to diabetes. Presumably you know about the plethora of ills that go with diabetes; nerve damage in the extremities, obesity, heart disease, atherosclerosis and more. Worth avoiding, wouldn't you say?

For quite a while, diabetics were advised to substitute fructose for the regular sugar in their diet. But that turns out to have been a bad idea. Fructose (which is one of the two sugars that are produced when table sugar breaks down) has been strongly implicated as a major contributor to (if not the principle cause of) elevated levels of bad cholesterol, which further contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In the diet, it stresses the liver, where it is converted into triglycerides. It is also directly suspected as a contributing factor in the buildup of the plaques which are present in Alzheimer's patients, through the formation of what is known as advanced glycation end-products. (That's part of what the insulin-degrading enzyme is needed to help clean up - another vicious cycle.)

So fructose is a bad actor, and table sugar is 50% fructose. But it's not the only source for most people in the US; it is present in higher-than-table-sugar levels in high fructose corn syrup, which is a government-subsidized substance used in nearly all non-diet soft drinks, most mass-produced baked goods, most pancake and waffle syrup, and even things like ketchup and relish. Outside of table sugar, HFCS and honey, fructose is fairly rare in a diet that does not include those three sources; it is found only in small quantities in most raw fruits, but the presence of significant glucose along with the fructose makes the majority of fruits (and nearly all juices) problematic in any event. (I have mused that if Genesis had been written by someone in possession of all the facts, the stricture would have been "Do not eat fruits of any kind, for they will make you ill in old age.")

In the absence of carbs, the body's ability to deal with large amounts of fat in the diet is prodigious for most people. Fat clearly is what we handle best and easiest as caloric fuel, with protein being second - and protein is essential. Carbs, however, are absolutely not essential at all, as long as there's enough fat and protein available. And most people simply will not over-eat when their diet is composed entirely of non-carb foods with adequate fat. The insulin response that drives their hunger vanishes, and they'll eat only what they need.

By the way, saturated fat is NOT a problem. No study has ever proven that elevated consumption of saturated fat causes elevated levels of triglycerides or bad cholesterol. The non-natural stuff known as "trans fat", however, most certainly is a problem in both areas.

This really just scratches the surface; the body of knowledge that condemns carbs has been accumulating in various disconnected fields of biology and branches of medicine and chemistry for a century or more, but most of the research results have remained uncollected and uncorrelated until recently. One of the people who connected the dots is Gary Taubes, an author I have mentioned before. Many people had pieces of the puzzle, but because the fields where the research was done have grown so specialized, few of them had the rest of the picture...and while it's true that certain people have been aware of the truth about the gross effects of carbs and fats in the diet, their observations haven't been taken seriously by the medical establishment most of the time, often because they were mere clinicians who had been getting results, not respected researchers who had hundred-million-dollar grants funding their investigations. For over 50 years, the research money has been directed solely into trying to prove that fats and overeating are the problem behind obesity, largely as a result of the efforts of a few highly-placed "authorities" who gained stature after World War II without any real research to back up their conviction and their assertion that overeating and overconsumption of fats were the exclusive causes of obesity and other health issues. And, of course, it doesn't help that much of the nutritional "research" has been funded by companies like General Mills, whose revenue derives almost entirely from the sale of grain-based foods; is it any surprise that the studies seldom have been structured in a way that could implicate carbs via their results? I don't think so.

So, what to do?

Four words not mentioned before: Meat is your friend. While it's possible to eat a largely-vegetable diet that includes enough protein and fat, it's much easier to eat healthy when meat is the primary ingredient in the diet - and don't trim those steaks so close. For vegetarians, guacamole is your friend, but it's not enough by itself. (And if you eat meat, you can now revel in the fact that the cheaper ground beef has more fat in it.)

My typical breakfast: Three eggs with 4 ounces of sausage and three strips of bacon, fried in the bacon grease. All told, that's over 100 grams of fat. By the old USDA standards, I'm getting an overload of fat and cholesterol for the day in just that one meal. Lunch and dinner look similar, though they actually tend to be smaller a lot of the time because with no carbs to drive the hunger, I'm not ravenous when I sit down to eat. By the "conventional wisdom" of the '80s, that kind of diet is horribly unhealthy, and I should look like a grounded blimp. Funny thing; my blood pressure and my weight are both down relative to where they were when I was eating lots of carbs. And everyone I know who has followed this path reports the same results; one of them simply says "Bread is deadly. Don't eat anything white." (Not 100% reliable; jicama is very low-carb, and white - and tasty.)

Just remember; if you want the benefits to last, going low-carb isn't a diet, it's a permanent lifestyle. Don't think of it as a way to lose weight, think of it as a way to lose health problems.

BSOD is no fun.

This is mostly be way of reinforcing something for myself; after sitting mostly unused for 6 months, I fired up one of the XP laptops (an older Dell D600) only to discover that it was jumping to a Blue Screen Of Death after just a minute or two of operation. The exact error message was complaining of the infamous IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL condition, and the c4 parameter was consistent at 0x80502207 continually. Disabling various hardware, swapping the memory from a different (trouble-free, identical) system, and reseating various connectors had no effect; the problem followed the hard drive into the other laptop as well, which pretty well nailed it down as a software issue.

Since there hadn't been any recent new software installs made (though upgrades may have happened silently), I concluded that the easiest likely path to a fix was using the Repair feature on the Windows install disc; fortunately, I had one of those for this machine. Running it, however, did not completely solve the issue, but it rendered the problem somewhat more tractable. After a bit of headscratching, I uninstalled the known-to-often-be-problematic Adobe Flash plugin, and the problem vanished completely. I don't know if the Flash version present was one of the troublesome recent versions that Firefox immediately warns against if they are detected when the FF installer fetches the update, but that seems likely.

Anyway, now I've got it written down where I can find the note next time. And so can you. I hope it helps.