BiggAndyy the Magazine

Source: Detroit Free Press

Remember the Mr. Fusion fusion generator from Back to the Future? Well, backyard and basement fusion generators have become a little more common with the addition of an amateur fusion generator build by a 17 year old kid in Rochester Hills.

At 17 I was playing Star Trek RPGs and learning the BASIC computer language. The first Space Shuttle was only a few years old and M*A*S*H was ending it’s 11 year run when I was 17.

Technology and the ability to harness it is growing ever more rapid, and the advancements not heard of 17 years ago are not only possible, but possible for 17 year olds.

Today? I am still trying to master the ancient art of brewery to make a good tasting mash rather than a bitter juice a skunk would not spray.

Kudos to youth.

I have not spent a lot of time investigating the WHY’s and WHAT’s of the problem but in a nutshell a customer with a Sony VIAO Notebook computer was having a terribly long wait at boot time. The machine would literally sit there frozen for 6 minutes at the VIAO background after Windows login.

It did not take a long time to find out that the program running in the background causing this was SPBBCSVC.EXE, a Symantec Antivirus 10.1 program. While the machine was sitting seemingly frozen I was able to pop open a taskmanager and see that SPBBCSVC.EXE was the last PID opened and running. I uninstalled Symantec and rebooted. The machine booted quickly and easily.

I reinstalled Symantec 10.1 (the version we are running here at Pitt) and the 6 minutes startup reappeared. About an hour of digging found the solution. The SPBBCSVC.EXE file is running an AUTOMATIC STARTUP VIRUS SCAN of the hard drive. This is a big hard drive so it takes quite a while to run the scan while the machine just sits there waiting for it to complete. What a crappy default to set by Symantec.

Bottom line, open Symantec Antivirus, open the Startup Scan Option and delete the AUTO-GENERATED QUICKSCAN.

That will fix the problem for you.

The XML-RPC Ping Services list at WordPress sometimes needs sprucing up, as in a reality check. Not all of the services listed there are there anymore. Some are just outright gone, others are refusing updates, and some still work fine but take a LONG time to respond.

That is why it sometimes seems like forever between the moment you press PUBLISH and the time it actually finishes publishing your article. The ping service sites that are not there or taking a long time to respond are gumming the works up.

Here is my list of sites, adopted from the WordPress site, that I have done a reality check on and respond quickly and reliably. BTW: this list is entered in the wp-admin panel at OPTIONS - WRITING - UPDATE SERVICES.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.catapings.com/ping.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

Periodically I do a reality check on this list and remove those entries that seem to have fallen into disuse. It would be a good habit for everyone to get into to maintain a healthy and fun blog experience.

Is anybody out there?

I know I have readers. I get about 2,500 hits per month (not all of them are googlebots). People are clicking on my ads (Thank You everyone who has). FeedBurner reports that I even have subscribers. I notify nearly 40 update services when I publish a new article. I post my articles on all the message forums I frequent throughout the day. I get referrals from delicious, digg, technorati, google, and a host of others.

By most accounts my little blog and the tripe that I write about have a good start.

But where are the spammers???

In the 4 months that I have blogged with WordPress and akismet as the spam blocking software I have had only 119 spam attempts (no false positives and no missed spam attempts). The number of hits a blog has, the actual geographic reach, the number of return visitors, and the number of incoming links from other blogs are all measures of the health of the blog. But so are spam attempts I believe.

Now don’t get me wrong. A website that is getting hammered by spam is a bad thing. The reliability and bandwidth go down and sometimes people who want to get in don’t because the spammers are killing the site. But a healthy blog is going to have a certain number of spam attempts per day I would imagine. If a site is so small and so quiet in the blogosphere that the spammers don’t bother with it… well, we are known by the friends we keep and the enemies we accumulate.

Maybe I just need a cup of coffee.

No, I don’t mean “junk silver” as in Sanford and Son, but junk silver as in non-numismatic silver. What exactly is “non-numismatic” silver? Ordinary coins that aren’t collectible except for their silver content. The 1916 D “Mercury Dime” is an example of a numismatic silver dime. It has collector value beyond the silver content of the coin itself.
In fact, the 16D is the King of the Mercuries since it is the most rare of the circulation strikes for that series. A 1916 D Mercury dime in “junk” condition routinely garners for itself a selling price of nearly $1,000! on internet and auction house auctions. A thousand dollars for a single dime! By the way, treasure hunters, the 1916 D Mercury Dime pictured here was dug by Richard Gaboury in 2005. They CAN be found, but things like this are once in a lifetime finds.

But what exactly about “junk silver”, and what about it is on the rise?

A few years ago, when gold was in the $200 an ounce range and silver was around $7.00 an ounce, silver coins, especially silver dollars and silver half dollars, that were of inferior collector value were often tossed into a box on the coin dealers counter and sold at bullion value.

You see, to make money the coin dealer usually buys coins and coin collections in bulk and must wade through all the common pieces in those collections to find the coins of high numismatic value in terms of rarity (like the 16D above) or are of uncommon condition. All the rest from those piles and piles of coins wind up in the “junk” box, hence we get the broader term “junk silver”.

But “junk silver” is getting to be less and less like “junk” because the spot price of silver has gone up riding along with the escalating price of gold. Junk boxes are less and less populated with silver pieces and more and more “world” coins are taking their place. Not a bad situation for the collector who enjoys coins from all over the world. But for the person looking to purchase coins with intrinsic value, that is, value apart from the denomination stamped on the piece of metal itself, the junk box is a source that is drying up.

Bulk dealers in gold and silver are making inroads into the coin after market, especially today with increased interest in having precious metals already in legal tender form rather than as ingots or bullion. Companies who offer $1,000 face value “junk silver” bags at spot silver price easily replace the coin dealer “junk box” because, let’s face it, junk silver isn’t “junk” anymore.