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Updated... see below.

I was at a concert a while ago and recorded, what I found out later, was a debut performance of a song. As I am friends with the lead singer, I'd like to send her a copy, but there are a couple of "issues".

Part 1: Editing

So, I've got a couple video files that I want to "process". I have no experience with video and only very limited experience with audio file manipulation.

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 25.6 MB introduction:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'intro.mp4':
  Duration: 00:00:18.54, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 11342 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 11378 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 24.08 fps, 24.17 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s (default)

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 1099.8 MB song itself:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'song.mp4':
  Duration: 00:10:39.32, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 14092 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 14000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 95 kb/s (default)

(1) At the outset I had accidentally activated the wrong camera on my mobile phone. I'd like to keep the audio of the singer introducing the song.

(2) The video of the song actually contains TWO songs. I'm only interested in extracting the first song (the first 4m40s) from this video.

(3) Optional, but would be really nice, I'd like to make a "title" with the name of the group, name of the song, date, and location with the intro audio playing in the background.

(4) Ideally, I'd like to catenate the intro from (3) to the video from (2) and create a single file.

I'm running Windows 7 Professional. Have you ever done something like this? What free tools would you recommend?

Part 2: Shipping

I expect the final file to be about 500 MB, give or take. How would you recommend getting the file to her? It is rather large to send as an e-mail attachment. I do not have drop-box or one-cloud or any of the other file-sharing services. I'd like to keep the file private. I can't be the first who wants to do this. What options do I have?

Update(s):

Update 1: 20170101a - Happy New Year!

I've completed step (1) and extracted the audio for the intro to a separate file, intro.mp3, using:

   ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -ab 96k  intro.mp3

Yeah, I know. 96kbps is not the greatest, but it's what was captured in the video, so I'm stuck with it.

Now to extract just the first 4m40s video of the song to a separate file. Looks like this could be done with ffmpeg?

Update 2: 20170101b

With many thanks to fn0rd666, got the "magic" incantation for ffmpeg:

fmpeg -ss 00:00:00.0 -i infile.mp4 -t 285 -codec copy outfile.mp4

Which means: start at the very beginning of the source, read from the file infile.mp4, copy 285 seconds, copy input straight to output (no transcoding), and send the output to the file: outfile.mp4!

Sixteen: The Final Chapter

It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along nobody will remember
that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).

Some of these links go to /., S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. Stories and articles meant to ultimately be published in a printed book have smart quotes, and slashdot isn't smart enough for smart quotes.

As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Random Scribblings
the Paxil Diaries
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015

Articles:
Useful Dead Technologies Redux
The Old Sayings Are Wrong
How to digitize all of your film slides for less than ten dollars
GIMPy Text
The 2016 Hugo convention

Song
My Generation 21st Century
Santa Killed My Dog!

Book reviews
Stephen King, On Writing
Vachel Lindsay, The Golden Book of Springfield
J. D. Lakey, Black Bead

Scince Fiction:
Wierd Planet
The Muse
Cornodium
Dewey's War
The Naked Truth
The Exhibit
Agoraphobia
Trouble on Ceres

Last years' stupid predictions (and more):

Last year I said I wasn't going to predict publication of Voyage to Earth and Other Stories, and I was right, it's nearly done. So this year I do predict that Voyage to Earth and Other Stories will be published. I'm waiting for Sentience to come back from Motherboard, who's been hanging on to it since last February. I may have to e-mail them and cancel the submission if it isn't back by this February.

I'll also hang on to last year's predictions:

Someone will die. Not necessarily anybody I know...
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
You'll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N).
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.
Slashdot still won't have fixed its patented text mangler.
Microsoft will continue sucking.
And a new one: DONALD TRUMP WILL (gasp) BE PRESIDENT IF THE US!!! God help us all! (He can't possibly be worse than George H. Bush or James Buchanan, can he?)

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.

Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.

This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.

They say that Santa's coming,
He comes 'round every year.
He comes he'll meet a shotgun slug
'cause he ain't welcome here.

Five years ago this Christmas
The fatass came around
With jingle bells and ho ho hos
And looking like a clown.

He came in for a landing
As I let out a yawn
My house is pretty little
So he landed on the lawn.

I didn't have the time to yell
As he came in through the fog;
He came in fast and and came down hard
And landed on my dog.

He looked around all furtive like
As I reached for my gun,
Then jumped in sleigh, yelled “giddie up”
And took off on the run.

And so, that fatassed bastard
Better stay away from here
'cause ever since he killed my dog
I have no Christmas cheer.

“Bill! Where’ve you been? I thought you said you were going to spend your vacation here on Mars?”

“Up on Ceres for the last three weeks, give me a beer. Make it one of your lagers. They had a real bad emergency up there, and my boat was the only one close enough and fast enough to do any good. They were to do maintenance while I was vacationing, but postponed it for Ceres. Orion Transport had a ship here on Mars, too, but you know better than anybody that their ships are only a third or less as fast as ours. Hell, you used to be a captain and you’re on the Green-Osbourne board of directors.

“Everyone would have been dead when the Orion boat got there if we didn’t have one of our ships here. They sent it anyway, with even more batteries. They would have needed ‘em.”

John, the bartender and owner, replied “Yeah, I talked to Chuck. He called as soon as it happened. I didn’t know you ran the rescue boat. Sorry about your vacation.”

“Well, it was just postponed and I’m on vacation now. So Chuck called?”

***

Chuck Watson, mayor of the habitat dome on Ceres, was shaking as he put down the phone. It was one of the worst catastrophes possible on an asteroid dome; or in his case, a dwarf planet dome. It would have been even worse up on Mars, with the gigantic domes that had been built on that planet, with all of the people living in them. Of course, on Mars they would have all the supplies they would need, considering how many domes were up there.

But still, there were twenty thousand people down here on Ceres, the mining robot operators and the tradespeople and service people and repair people necessary for normal life, and all of their children. And they had less than twenty minutes to get inside a building, as the dome was leaking air, and leaking badly. The sirens went off in everyone’s pockets and purses immediately after the power went out and the battery-powered emergency lighting lit up.

Buildings inside domes were designed for this sort of emergency. They were airtight when the windows were closed, which was seldom; temperatures in the domes were comfortable whether one was inside or outside a building. But when alarms went off, windows closed by themselves. The doors to the outside of buildings opened inwards, and most buildings even had airlocks. Commercial buildings had at least one person-sized airlock at their entrances and exits, and a home’s garage served as the house’s airlock. Anyone not home who didn’t have a garage would have to find shelter elsewhere, because there was no getting inside or outside a building without an airlock when the dome’s pressure dropped too low.

Chuck called his old friend Charlie Onehorse, mayor of Dome Australia Two on Mars, hoping there was a Green-Osbourne ship there, and hoping there were enough supplies on Mars. Nobody but G-O had ships that were fast enough to get here in time, and he wasn’t sure they would survive even if one of that company’s ships were on Mars. The message would be a while getting to Mars, even though luckily the two bodies’ orbits were relatively close right now.

“You’re a dumb arse,” the London-born Chuck told himself when he got off the phone, and called another friend living in a different Martian dome, John Knolls. John owned his favorite Martian bar and quite a bit of Green-Osbourne stock, was on G-O’s board of directors, and his wife was the daughter of one of that company’s founders. If there was a ship available, John could get it here. If he didn’t, more people would die. In fact, he was afraid that everybody might die.

Two were killed in the blast, and three were already dying from radiation sickness. Several more people were injured, four of them critically. There had been an accident in the fusion-powered electrical generators; one of the chambers that the fusion took place in exploded. The entire place was now toxic, and many of the survivors probably wouldn’t survive in the long run.

It wasn't, of course, a fusion explosion. A fusion explosion would have leveled the dome and instantly incinerated everyone there. It was a chemical explosion, and it would likely take months to find the accident’s initial cause.

Buildings in domes were always built with a dome leak in mind, and that was the problem in this case. The reactor was built against and as part of a dome wall. It was built intentionally thin behind the generating plant, far less sturdy than the rest of the building’s walls, so if the unlikely chamber explosion ever actually happened, the force and radiation would go outside the dome.

It worked perfectly, except that some of the building’s seams weren’t quite strong enough. Luckily the whole building didn’t give way or everyone outside at the time would have died instantly. But there were cracks around the doors and air was leaking badly.

It was a matter of time now. Air inside buildings would only last so long, and many had no extra oxygen.

***

“Holy crap,” John said when he read Chuck’s phone call from Ceres. He called the main office on Mars, which was in his dome, and ordered that a ship be readied immediately.

“We only have two here, sir. One is due for maintenance, and the other one is stranded in orbit with two badly damaged generators waiting for a shipment of parts from Earth.”

“Reschedule the maintenance on the one that flies and get it and its pilot ready, and I mean now. This is a real emergency.”

He then called his friend Ed Waldo, who was mayor of his dome. He’d need Ed’s help coordinating everything. Maybe Ed would come by his bar later on when he got off from work.

***

Karen Wilkerson was chief engineer at the power station on Ceres, and was watching the board closely before it happened. One of the techs had pointed out some abnormal readings, and when she saw the blue line spike she hit the evacuation alarm immediately, saving a lot of lives. Had she not seen it coming, everyone in the building would have died. Instead, the only casualties were those who didn’t drop everything and leave the building immediately, and one who had fallen down in her rush to escape and had broken her arm.

Now she was in the annex, worrying about her people. She had already called Dome Hall with the disaster alert. Now all there was to do was to wait until the leaks were patched and a supply ship came with batteries, because they wouldn’t be generating any electricity from this generator again and building a new one would take months.

And wait for air, of course. If that ship didn’t get here on time everyone would likely die.

***

Commander Jose Ramos and the Green-Osbourne Security fleet that he was in charge of were in orbit around Mars, as usual, when he saw the pirates. “¡Santo mierde!” he swore in his native Spanish. That was an awful lot of pirates, more than he’d seen together for years. He set course towards them, and when the pirates saw Ramos’ fleet they took off. The G-O Security ships took chase.

A call came in from G-O headquarters. Transport 487-B was missing, and they believed that it was now in the hands of pirates. It had been stranded in orbit around Mars, waiting for parts for generator repairs. When the first transport showed up with its parts, the ship was gone. The repair facility’s crew was missing, hadn’t even radioed, and was presumed dead.

He swore again. Where was that damned Jones? Jones’ ship was supposed to be guarding the orbiting repair facility that held 487-B. He worried about Bob and his crew, praying that they had simply been disabled by a mechanical malfunction before getting there. He cursed himself; he shouldn’t have let Larry leave until Bob got there.

He then cursed himself for stupidity again; there was no way any pirate could beat Bob and his ship and crew. It must have been a mechanical malfunction.

He wondered how many of the facilities’ personnel had been killed. Damn. There were three orbiting facilities, each with a G-O security ship guarding it, except the ship guarding this one was missing. And it was his responsibility; he should never have let Larry leave no matter how long he had been since he’d eaten or slept. This, he swore, would never happen again.

This was bad. Ever since the piracy had started not long after Mars was colonized, all space vessels were armed to some degree, but G-O ships were the best built, most heavily armored and heavily armed. Transport ships owned by Green-Osborne even had EMPs, atomics, and rail guns, and the security fleet was armed and armored even better. An atomic explosion wouldn’t even damage a G-O craft, whether transport or security, unless it detonated closer than two hundred meters away. They were completely impervious to EMP blasts, which took out any electronics on anyone else’s ships.

Now that pirates had a G-O ship...

***

Bill Kelly was sound asleep when the alarm went off on his phone. It was his boss, who told him he had a half an hour to be in the pilot seat ready for takeoff.

He rolled out of bed and swore. Not having time for a shower or breakfast, he hurriedly dressed and rushed to the spaceport.

“Glad you got here so fast, Bill,” his boss told him. “There’s a terrible disaster up on Ceres. Their power generator blew up and caused a huge air leak. We would have called sooner but I knew you’d be sleeping. You need to get those batteries and tanks of solid oxygen and nitrogen to the belt as fast as you can make that ship go. The robots should be done loading in ten or fifteen minutes.”

Bill flew his houseboat to the ship and entered, belted into the pilot seat, and detached from the repair facility. Now he only had to wait for the countdown to leave orbit to begin as the ship drifted slowly away from the repair station.

The captain of the ship guarding the facility came on the radio. “You’re on your own for a while, buddy. Commander Ramos says I need to join the chase against an awful lot of pirates, so keep your eyes open.”

“I take off in five minutes anyway,” Bill said. “I’ll be okay.”

“Well, I’ll check on you shortly.”

***

The pirates split up and ran in different directions. The Green-Osbourne defense fleet split up to chase them, and Commander Ramos went after the biggest one. It might be the stolen transport.

“¿Qué en el infierno?” It was outrunning him! That shouldn’t be possible. Maybe it was an old fission ship that had been converted to fusions. When converting them from fission generators to fusions, the engineers had left the fission generator as a backup to the fusions, which often malfunctioned back then. Apparently the pirates had done a bit of hardware hacking and had made it so that they were using all three generators at once. He shook his head, when the company got that one back it was going to really need a lot of work. They might even have to scrap it.

Not only were Green-Osbourne ships heavily armed and armored, they were also stealthy. But not invisible, not as long as the engines were running, since they left a trail of ions behind. Jose grinned at this; common knowledge was that they were completely invisible. Common knowledge is often incorrect, although they were indeed invisible unless you knew what to look for.

It looked like the pirate was circling back towards Mars. He kept following the trail.

***

Will Welton was relieved. His crew had finally finished sealing off the generator building, putting plates and glue on the doorways and sealing the smaller leaks by the dome wall. But the danger was far from over, as the dome itself had practically no air pressure at all now. Rather than going back to the shop, he went home, thankful that his house had a garage that doubled as an airlock. If it didn’t he would have had to stay in the shop until air arrived. All he could do now was wait for the supply ship to come, and hope his air held out long enough. “I need to get some house plants,” he told himself.

When he got home he took off his helmet and gloves, and shut off the environment suit’s power and valves, but didn’t remove the suit; he didn’t know how long his house’s air would last. There was two hours worth of air left in its tank, and if his house ran out of air he'd need it. He wondered if anyone would live.

***

Bill was barely out of orbit before pirates were after him, and a lot of them, too. And wouldn’t you know it, none of the Green-Osbourne defense fleet was anywhere near Mars where they usually were. Probably still chasing the other pirates, he thought, and here there were more. Well, Ralph had warned him, but he wished Jeff could have stuck around.

There was a lot more piracy now, ever since the trouble on Earth had started. The company’s defense fleet was busier than it had ever been.

Pirates could be pretty clever at times, and may have lured the defense fleet away somehow. They had once infiltrated company maintenance years ago and sabotaged Bill’s ship when it was being worked on. If it hadn’t had been for John, who was a company captain at the time, he’d have been dead.

“God damn it,” he swore out loud. “Not now! Pirates are the last thing I need. People are going to die if I don’t get to Ceres!”

But pirates don’t mind people dying. In fact, they quite often caused it. They seemed to enjoy killing.

He could have simply outrun them, but instead dropped an EMP set to discharge when it was right in the middle of the fleet that was after his boat. That should end the problem, and since it would kill everything electronic, the ships’ life control systems would also be dead. If the salvage fleet didn’t show up in time the pirates would be, too.

He hoped so. An awful lot of his friends had been killed at the hands of pirates. The only good pirate was a dead pirate, but he was okay with bad pirates rotting in prison.

His EMP didn’t disable them all. Bad aim on his part? Half a dozen were still accelerating.

He dropped an atomic. He hated destroying valuable space ships that would get a bonus for him if there was a finder’s fee involved, but it seemed the right thing to do at the time.

The lead ship survived. “Damn, they have one of ours,” he said aloud, wondering how pirates had gotten hold of a virtually invincible G-O ship. He quickly called headquarters informing them that pirates had a company transport, although they were certainly aware of it, he thought. This was real trouble. G-O ships were faster, better armed, and sturdier (and usually larger) than other companies’ ships. Now the pirates had EMPs and atomics!

But Bill knew these ships, and knew them better than most company captains, let alone any pirate. Bill was a nerd who loved not only studying how they worked, but how to make them work better. He’d gotten a third gravity on batteries once, and nobody else had ever managed to. Even though he’d tried to explain to the company engineers how he did it, they still didn’t understand.

He’d outrun that sucker.

It took hours, but he did. He was running on both generators and batteries, which he’d set up when he realized that the pirates had one of his company’s boats. He wondered why he wasn’t pulling ahead of the pirate any faster than he was, especially since it was an old ship after him that he should have been able to outrun easily, even without the extra boost from the batteries. He hoped the extra wattage didn’t harm any of the engines; this was a bit of his own nerdy design, the craft already was overdue for maintenance, and he had to run like this far longer than he thought he’d have to.

When he was far enough ahead of the pirate ship that he could no longer detect it, he went at full thrust for another two hours. Then he disconnected the batteries from the engines and set them charging from the generators as he continued on at the ship’s normal top speed. His boss had told him to go as fast as he could make it go, but he worried about the maintenance issues.

He still hadn't had a shower or breakfast. He remedied that immediately.

***

Mayor Watson paced in his office, cursing himself. Why weren’t there more oxygen generators? They had existed since the late twentieth century when they were used to treat emphysema, long before that disease was cured. There were a few in Dome Ceres, of course, but not many. Not nearly enough for an emergency like this.

There weren’t many plants inside buildings, either, except inside the farm buildings. There were a lot of plants outside, but outdoor plants would do little good now; they’d die quickly without air, and in the cold. They would be a help in a home or business, changing the carbon dioxide people exhaled into oxygen and plant material, and he vowed to get plants in every building. Lots of them. Plants inside buildings would save lives!

And why didn’t he have enough air for this sort of emergency stored away? He swore that there would be enough if something like this ever happened again. He cursed himself again for his lack of foresight.

Well, hindsight would have to do. If He lived. He’d gotten a message from John that a ship full of air and batteries was on its way, but would it get here on time?

***

The company defense fleet's commander never lost the ion trail, and eventually came up on the pirate ship, which was drifting through space at a high rate of speed. Either its engines had all burned out, or more likely all three of its generators had malfunctioned; it had been waiting for parts, and the pirates had probably installed old used, sub-par equipment. The other pirate vessels had been traveling along side, apparently trying to get the disabled craft going again. They took off in different directions, maybe five of them; his fleet had taken the rest when he was chasing the pirate Green-Osbourne transport.

He got a message from Bob Jones that he and his crew were safe. It had indeed been a mechanical problem, and he was at one of the repair facilities in orbit around Mars, cursing about the stolen transport. If only... And Ramos was still cursing himself for letting Larry leave before his replacement showed up. He wasn’t going to do that again!

Docking with the crippled purloined transport was easy, and now his commandos were all on duty. He wondered how many pirates would be captured, and how many killed. He gave no thought to G-O casualties, because there never were any. These men and women were very well trained.

He chuckled. When pirates fought with the police on Earth, often the pirates won. But never when they tangled with the G-O security fleet. Earth had better never go to war with Mars!

***

Bill fretted. Engine 129 was showing a small undervoltage in one computer, and a small overvoltage on a different computer. All four computers were supposed to agree. He trudged down the five flights of stairs, worrying and cursing. He was half a day from Ceres, his time, but it would be longer Ceres time because of the time dilation that extreme speed causes. If he lost any more engines... and God forbid that he lose a generator. Everyone on Ceres would die, including Chuck.

Even though two of the four computers disagreeing usually meant a bad electrical connection, he shut number 129 down, as per normal operation. He considered shutting the two next to it down as well, knowing that sometimes this sort of problem spread from engine to engine. One engine wouldn't matter, since he was ahead of schedule, sort of, but three might.

He'd probably broken another speed record and would arrive “early”, if there was such a thing in a situation like this. He'd been doing more than a gravity and a half when the pirate ship was chasing him, which was as high as the indicator would go. The craft’s top speed was supposed to be one point four Gs, and he wondered how much he’d really gotten out of it. Walking up those five flights of stairs in that gravity was a real workout, especially after being on Mars and on low gravity runs.

Unlike most runs, he spent most of his waking time the whole run in the pilot room, the engine room at the bottom of the ship, and traveling between the two. “My legs will look like turkey legs when this run’s over,” he panted as he climbed the stairs.

It was time to turn the ship around and decelerate, and he was glad it wasn't an old boat. The old models almost always had something break when you reversed them for braking. If he lost a generator now, he’d overshoot Ceres.

***

On Ceres it had been two Earthian days since the accident, and things were getting grim. Some people were running out of food, air was getting pretty bad in some buildings, and if the ship ran late a lot of people would die. Maybe everyone.

Will Welton had taken off the suit finally, realizing he couldn’t keep wearing it until air came. He’d put it back on if the air in his house got thick.

Mayor Watson had spent that time mostly pacing in his office, feeling like a caged animal. Most Cererians were probably feeling the same way, he thought.

While he paced, the same thoughts raced through his head, over and over, planning for the aftermath of this mess. Dome Ceres was going to have emergency oxygen, and a lot more inside plants. He envisioned air pipes running into homes from a central emergency air supply that would run parallel to water pipes. He wondered why this hadn't been done before, and wondered what else he could do to make the Cererian Dome safer. All he could do now was hope that ship wasn't late.

***

Jen Carpenter was in the hospital with a broken arm. She had panicked when she had a strange feeling and started running, and was outside before the alarms even sounded. She didn't even know what had spooked her. The first one out of the building, she tripped and fell right when the alarm sounded.

Her arm hurt, but she was glad of her misstep, because hospitals keep lots of oxygen. The folks there would be the last to asphyxiate if that ship was late.

A tear ran down her cheek; she had lost friends in the accident, and probably wouldn’t even get to attend the funerals.

***

Chuck answered his phone. It was his Martian friend Captain Bill Kelly, piloting the rescue ship. He was only a half hour away, planet time! He hadn't expected it to arrive until the next Earth day. Nobody counted Cererian days, since they were so short.

“Thank God!” he said over the phone to Captain Kelly.

Bill laughed in the weirdly fast, high pitch of someone on an approaching ship coming in at high speeds. “Thank pirates. They have one of our ships and I had to do what might have been dangerous to outrun ‘em. I'm pretty sure I broke a speed record. Look, Chuck, suit up and I’ll meet you at the transport dock. Ceres’ gravity is low enough I can land an ion ship on the surface.”

They spoke for another minute or two before hanging up. Bill readied the ship for landing, and Chuck suited up to meet him.

***

Will Welton was worried. Oxygen was getting low and carbon dioxide was getting thick in his house, and he was becoming confused and had a terrible headache. He donned his environment suit, helmet, and gloves, turned on the valves and electronics, and drove to the hospital. Surely they would have enough oxygen.

Confused by the anoxia he had gotten before donning his helmet, he had a hard time finding the hospital and didn’t think of having the vehicle go there. He gave it verbal directions, many of which were wrong, instead of simply saying “take me to the nearest hospital.” His head was pounding, and his mood was swinging like a yo-yo. He finally reached the hospital two hours later, parked in the lot, and collapsed in the emergency room’s airlock.

It was only a minute or two before he was found, as he wasn’t the only one who had started running out of air. Hospital staff were extra busy today!

***

“I sure am glad to see you, mate. Things are getting desperate,” said the British Chuck.

“I hope I got here on time,” Bill replied.

“Barely, but yeah. Once those canisters are finished unloading and opened they’ll melt and boil away quickly in this warmth.” The robots were bringing them in and opening them, and the first ones opened were already appreciably less full. Clouds of vapor were rolling out of the boiling but super-cold liquid in the opened canisters.

Bill looked at the thermometer on his environment suit’s sleeve. Warmth? Oh, well. “So how long will it be until you can get a new generator built?”

“Six months. It would only take two if we could afford speed, but we’re going to need so many batteries our budget is going to be really strained.”

“Why don’t you call John and see if the company will rent this ship to you for a couple of months?”

“I don’t need a ship, I need electricity!”

“What do you think this tub runs on, hydrazine? There are two fusion generators on it, big ones, three stories tall each. We dock ships that have busted generators and charge the broken ship’s backup batteries all the time.

“My boat was going to be out of action for a while anyway for maintenance, and considering what I did to get here alive and on time it’s really going to need it. Maintenance should be easier with gravity, even as low a gravity as Ceres has. We could send the dozen or so people necessary to do it here. Call John. I'll bet he’d do it for a load of rare earths, and you folks have plenty!”

“Come on, Bill, lets get to my office so I can call him, that’s a great idea!”

“Look, Chuck, I’d love to, but I need to supervise hooking the ship’s generators up to your grid so everybody can charge their batteries. I’ll meet you at the Bull’s Head for a beer later if it’s open.”

“It should be. Every restaurant, pub, and shop on the dome will be busy tonight. Cooped up in their homes running out of air they’re going to want to be out, and only a fool would leave his shop closed. I’ll meet you there.”

***

“Yeah, Chuck called, twice.” “I thought his staff would have.”

“I don’t know, I couldn’t exactly talk to him there. It was email, of course, but I can’t see Chuck not handling something like that himself. So how was your trip? What happened after you got to Ceres?”

“Well, there was nothing out of the ordinary on the way there, just routine. You were a captain once, you know how it goes.” He chuckled. “I’m pretty sure I broke a speed record, though.”

John laughed. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Well, anyway, a couple of hours after I got there you could walk around outside without an environment suit, and half the people there opened their windows because the cold, thin air outside was more breathable than the thick, oxygen-thin and carbon dioxide-saturated air inside.

“The police checked all of the buildings to make sure the occupants were all right, and I met Chuck at the pub when we were done working.

“I was on Ceres for a long time, rode back on the Orion ship after it finally got there, unloaded all the batteries, and loaded a shipment of rare earths for Charlie Onehorse’s dome here on Mars. As slow as Orion’s ships are I was on Ceres a week before he even got there, and it took half a day to unload the batteries and load the ore.

“So how have things been down here on Mars?”

So, I've been sitting here watching the Spam moderations page and the mod-bombs page post-election thinking someone's gonna get butthurt and abuse moderation. It has yet to happen. Kudos to everyone for managing to restrain themselves. You guys make me fucking proud, so I'll leave you with this little bit of humor on an otherwise tense day:

Britain: Brexit is the most shocking thing a country will do this year.

America: Hold my beer...

#NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
; #Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.

/*
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-info
This site contains latest version info etc.,
To be compared to CurrentBuild and UBR registry entries contained in:
        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion
LastAutoAppUpdateSearchSuccessTime in:
        HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate
LastScheduledRetryTime in above.
*/

;Parameters
;MS Win10 release info page https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-info
LatestUpdateURL := "https://winrelinfo.blob.core.windows.net/winrelinfo/en-US.html"

whr := ComObjCreate("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1")
whr.Open("GET", LatestUpdateURL, true)
whr.Send()
whr.WaitForResponse()
releaseinfo := whr.ResponseText

RegRead, ReleaseId, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, ReleaseId
RegRead, CurrentBuild, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, CurrentBuild
RegRead, UBR, HKLM, SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, UBR

needle := "\s*" . ReleaseId . "\s*\s*\s*(" . CurrentBuild . "\." . UBR . ")\s*"

found := RegExMatch(releaseinfo, needle)
if (found) {
        MsgBox % "Your version of Windows 10: " . ReleaseId . "`nOS Build: " . CurrentBuild . "." . UBR . "`nThis is the latest version."
}
Else {
        MsgBox % "There may be updates available! Please turn on Windows Update Service!"
}

;UrlDownloadToFile, %LatestUpdateURL%, %A_ScriptDir%\release-info.html
;FileDelete, %A_ScriptDir%\release-info.html

;First, find CurrentBuild.UBR preceded by ReleaseId, if can't be found alert user!
;Second, check that UBR and CurrentBuild.xxx are the same!
; If same, alert user that they are up to date.
; If different, get KB# (or numbers, this could read the entried until it finds the UBR number) and give user a link so that they may read about the future update. Ask if user would like to update now, remind me later, or not right now
; If user decides to update, turn on windows update service.
; How do we know when to disable that pesky service? After the reboot? Perhaps add a script to the startup folder / registry that will disable windows update on the reboot.

===========================

No, I'm not the script writer. The guy who wrote it gave it to me. Here it is. And, I don't have a Win10 machine to test it on. No attribution - I guess he's AC.

“Say, Ed! How was your trip? Lager?”

        “Hi, John. Yeah, I’ll have a lager. The whole trip was lousy, a journey through hell all the way.”

        “Didn't you fly Green-Osbourne?”

        “Well, yeah.”

        The bartender swore; he was a wealthy man who owned the bar he was tending and quite a bit of Green-Osbourne Transportation Company stock as well. “What went wrong on the trip?”

        “Those stupid talking robots. God but I hate those things.”

        The bartender laughed. “Everybody does.”

        “Why do you have them talking, then?”

        “Advertising and engineering want to point out our superior technology, including AI.”

        “Well, it's too much A and not much I at all. Those things are really stupid.”

        John snickered. He hated talking robots, too, but had been voted down at board meetings. The tendbot he used when it got too busy for a single bartender to easily handle he’d special ordered, with no voice, only screen printouts and beeps. Most people thought talking robots were creepy.

        “Well, look, Ed, they can’t really think. Programmers just use humans’ built-in anthropomorphism and animism. It's a parlor trick, one of our engineers explained it to me once. So what did the stupid thing do?”

        “It was dinner time, the first night of the trip. I'd bought a business class ticket and somehow wound up on a first class flight... Say, did you have something to do with that?”

        John just smiled. “Go on, Ed, what did the stupid robot do?”

        Ed gave John a funny look and continued. “Well, I'd never had pork before. I thought it must be extra tasty, considering how ridiculously expensive it is.”

        “Well, it's environmental regulations.”

        “Huh?”

        “Sure, it's why Earth buys all its ores from space miners. Mining is pretty much illegal on Earth, because poisonous pollution from mining, farming, industry, and transportation nearly ruined the Earth's ability to sustain life a couple of centuries ago. It... Oh wow. Want to get rich, Ed?”

        “Not particularly, why?”

        “Someone will. We should build hog domes and farm pigs in them, and sell the pork to Earthians. I’d do it but I’m way too busy, what with Green-Osbourne, the bar, the brewery, and the farm I grow beer ingredients in.”

        “Well, I'll talk to a few folks. It would help Mars’ economy. Fill me up, John,” he said, sliding his glass across the bar. “Uh, what were we talking about?”

        “Pork and robots.”

        “Huh?”

        “Your trip.”

        “Oh, yeah, pork. Why is it so expensive?”

        “Like I said, environmental regulations. They almost made Earth unlivable a couple hundred years ago. Pigs are just too nasty to ranch more than a dozen or so in any one place there.”

        “Well, Earth was damned filthy, that’s for sure. Almost as dirty as it was heavy. Anyway, pork’s way too expensive for me. I wouldn’t even be able to afford pork on Earth, let alone on Mars, so since I had a first class ticket and meals were covered, I wanted to try pork. So I told the servebot I wanted ham and beans.

        “The stupid thing said there was no ‘Hammond bean’ listed in its database. So I said ‘No, you stupid junk pile, ham, and, beans.’ It said ‘The word hamand is not in my database.’ stupid thing.”

        John grinned. “So what did you do?”

        “What could I do? I ordered a barbecued pork steak. It was really good! But the damned robots annoyed me like that the whole trip. The very next morning I felt like a turkey cheese omelette so I ordered one. The stupid robot said ‘There are no Turkish cheeses listed in the database.’ So I said ‘A turkey omelette with cheese.’ So it says ‘there are no Turkish omelette dishes listed in the database.’ Stupid computer.

        “So I said ‘I want a cheese omelette with turkey meat. A turkey omelette has nothing to do with the country called Turkey...’ What’s so damned funny, John?”

        John was laughing uproariously. “Exactly the same thing happened to Destiny when we first came here, only the computer was printing it out instead of talking. Let me guess, it said ‘Parse error, please rephrase’.”

        “Yep, exactly. So I said I wanted an omelette with turkey meat, and it goes ‘There is no meat that has come from that country listed in the database.’ dumb machine! So I says ‘Turkey the bird, damn it!’ it said...”

        “It said ‘Parse error, please rephrase,’ didn’t it?” John interrupted.
        “Sure did. So I asked what meats were available for omelettes. It said pork, chicken, duck, turkey, and beef. So I said ‘A cheese omelette with turkey meat.’ the idiotic thing repeated ‘There is no meat from that country.’ I’ll tell you, John, that damned thing was really making me mad by then. I finally said ‘Damn it, computer, I want a cheese omelette with bird meat.’ it said ‘Please name the bird.’ I told it turkey and finally got my breakfast.”

        “There’s a trick to it,” John said. “Tell it you want a cheese and turkey omelette and it won’t give you any trouble. If you would have asked for navy beans and ham you would have gotten your ham and beans. Like I said, they don’t really think.”

        “No kidding. That must the dumbest computer I ever saw. Well, the tendbot in the commons may have been even more stupid. It didn’t know what a Cardinal was.”

        John groaned. “Ed, that’s strictly the Martian name for that drink. Everybody else calls them Bloody Marys.”

        “Oh. Why do they call them that?”

        “Because that’s what they were called for hundreds of years before anybody ever came here, before they had space travel, even. Before your ancestors ever left earth.”

        “So why do we call then Cardinals then?”

        “Frank Harris was responsible for the name. He was a farmer who came here from Earth and started growing tomatoes, under the ‘Cardinal’ brand.”

        “But why cardinal?”

        “There’s a bright red Earthian bird called a cardinal, so he named the bright red tomatoes after the bird. Bartenders here had never had a Bloody Mary before, because nobody here had tomatoes before Hardy brought them. So when they thought they had invented a tomato drink, they named it after the brand of tomatoes.”

        “How do you know all this stuff?”

        “My wife’s a history buff. She’s been getting me interested in it, too. So what happened after you got to Earth?”

        “Oh, man, it was pure hell, painful torture and terror. You know I've only been off Mars a few times in my life, mostly to Ceres or an asteroid dome out in the belt. But Earth... oh man. It was nothing like I'd ever experienced before. Or even imagined, it was horrible!”

        “First was the weight! That was part of what was wrong with the trip, when the robot was arguing about the turkey cheese omelette it was already getting really heavy. By the time we reached Earth I couldn’t walk at all and had to use an electric chair to get around. How do those people live like that?”

        “Ed, you should have been working out for months before going to Earth, especially since you’ve never had more than Mars gravity.”

        “Well, I did walk.”

        “Walking’s not nearly enough.”

        “No kidding, I couldn’t even stand up there. Had to have a robot help me in and out of bed. It was torture!

        “Why didn't you use a walker?”

        “You have to have gravity close to Earth's to learn how to use one.”

        “Bill Holiday uses one, and he's from Ceres. All the asterites grew up in less gravity than you did and he goes to Earth all the time, it's part of his job.”

        “He would have had to train to use it, those things weigh over a hundred kilos counting the power, and training takes longer than I was going to be on Earth.

        “The horrible weight was bad enough, but it was horribly scary there as well.”

        John grinned. He was an immigrant, who was born in St. Louis and had settled on Mars in late middle age. He hadn't thought of how it must be for a native-born Martian or Asterite on Earth. “Pretty scary, huh? I mean, not having a protective dome.”

        “Well, I've been outside the dome plenty of times, but being outside without an environment suit...” He shivered visibly. “Give me a shot of Scotch.

        “It was night when we got there, and they used what seemed like they use here on Mars to connect the ship to the terminal. On Mars it's so passengers don't have to wear environment suits, but I don't know why they do it on Earth. Probably so us spacers would feel at home.”

        “Well, not really,” John said. “It gets hot and cold there, and it rains. It's so passengers don't have to have coats and umbrellas. They were doing it like that before the first spacer dome was built.”

        “Yeah, I found out about rain and cold the night I got there, and heat the next day. In the entrance way to the terminal there was a flash in a window and a loud boom a second or two later. I thought there had been an explosion.”

        “Thunder.”

        “Yeah, and it was really loud! I almost jumped out of my skin. Anyway, we rented a car and I told it to take us to our hotel for check-in, and the first lightning flash scared the hell out of me. It looked like a crack in the sky and made me feel like all the air would escape, and then the thunder. I've never heard anything so loud!”

        “You should hear a chemical rocket with a heavy load taking off!”

        “I have, down here on Mars, and it's nowhere near as loud as thunder.”

        John laughed. “Ed, there's hardly any air outside the dome. Haven't you noticed how much quieter it is outside the dome?”

        “There's nothing out there to make noise.”

        “Well, if there was it wouldn't be loud.”

        “I guess. Anyway, parking at the hotel was outside, but the car dropped us off under an awning before it parked itself. Lightning flashed again, and it really gave me the willies. Then it thundered, even louder than it had before. It was so loud you could feel the sound. It was really scary!” He finished his beer and slid his glass to the other side of the bar. “Fill 'er up, John!”

        John poured another beer for Ed as Ed continued his traveling horror story. “Man, all that water pouring out of the sky. It was really strange, and even the water was scary and I don’t know why. And it was cold. Must have been under twenty.”

        “It gets well below zero some places.”

        “How do they live like that?” he repeated. “I was all right as long as I was inside, except that first night when it stormed. I hated that storm! I sure am glad we don’t have anything like that on Mars!

        “There was a bar in the hotel, thankfully, so I didn’t have to go out until the next morning. But the storm scared the hell out of me.”

        “So how did your meeting go?”

        “Well, I had to take the car there, meaning I had to be outside. It was fine in the dark, like a room with no lights turned on, but walking outside without an environment suit when you could see the sky really freaked me out. I finally told myself it was just a big blue dome.”

        “Did it work?”

        “Not really. It was really hard rolling around out there in my electric chair, and it was really hot outside! I never sweated before, and I hate it.

        “But worse than that was bugs. Some of them bite. Some of the bugs they called ‘butterflies’ the Earthians thought were pretty. I thought they were creepy and scary.

        “And barking dogs. I never saw a dog before, and John, those things are scary as hell, just downright terrifying. And there are a whole lot of them there.”

        “Okay, how did the meeting go?”

        “Lousy. Between the weight and the storm I didn’t sleep well. And the weight, the bugs, the dogs, the outside, the heat, the storm, all of it had me so rattled I couldn’t think straight, and we didn’t get the contract, DA2 did. At least it was a friend’s dome.

        “Give me another shot, John. Man, but I’m glad to be back home here on Mars. Earth sucks. Now I know what people mean by ‘hell on Earth’. Earth is hell!”

        John grinned again. “So... I take it you’re not going back?”

The entire universe was turned inside out and upside down and completely backwards today, and I must have been the only one to see it. It all started with an innocent looking email.

        I get a lot of emails like this one, except that the note’s subject line looked like a headline from the National Enquirer, or maybe The Onion. It read “Archaeologists Find Twenty Five Million Year Old iPhone.” Misaddressed, maybe? But it was a press release for an art exhibit.

        A few minutes after I set the mail aside is when it hit me; the fellow who sent the email had mentioned that he’d seen my work before and knew I’d written about art and wanted me to see his exhibit. I had written a story, one story, ten years earlier, and the paper hadn’t published it.

        I printed it out and went to see Frank, my boss.

        “What’s up, Stan?” he asked.

        “I just got the strangest email” I said, handing him the printout. He read it.

        “So what’s so weird, Stan? You must get these every day!”

        “What’s weird is that yeah, I’m working on that story about the city museum, but I haven’t even finished researching it and barely have an outline, and I only wrote one other art thing, and it was never published!”

        “Huh, that is weird. Why don’t you go down and check the place out?”

        “You know, Frank, I think I will. Maybe I’ll get a fun story out of it.”

        It was here in town, 568 Broadway, up in the eleventh floor. It was only about a fifteen minutes ride on the subway, and I rode the elevator up.

        It looked like an Apple store, only it was as weird as the email. For instance, it had strange iPhone accessories, like a case with a built-in hourglass. It was like an Apple store in some twisted alternate dimension.

        I had expected to see Evan Yee, the artist behind the installation, but nobody was there at all. Also weird. I took a few photos and left, disappointed that I had gotten no story out of it.

        I went to the elevator, and there was no elevator. Instead, there was a door leading outside, at street level. I wondered if I was going crazy, and remembered the time my mother said she had a “senior moment”. Maybe I was just getting old, but I was only forty five.

        I reached for my phone as I walked outside, thinking that maybe I’d get some sort of inspiration from the pictures, but it was gone. Damn, that phone cost six hundred dollars! I was glad I’d noticed so soon, and turned around to go in – and it was an Apple store. Between losing my phone and my disorientation when I left the exhibit, I hadn’t noticed that there hadn’t been anyone outside.

        By now I was sure I was going crazy. I went in anyway, and there was my phone, laying on one of the counters. I picked it up, looked around, and the place looked nothing like it had before I’d left, although it still looked like a weird, twisted, dystopian Apple store.

        I left again, and the street and sidewalk were bright green. I just stood there a minute, kind of dazed, I guess. By then I was pretty sure I’d gone stark raving mad. Maybe I was having a stroke? I reached in my pocket to call for an ambulance, and my phone was gone. I could have sworn I’d stuck it in my pocket.

        I went back in, and it wasn’t an Apple store any more, just an empty room with my phone laying on the floor. I picked it up and tried to call 911, but there was no signal. I went outside again to get a signal; lots of buildings suck for phones, and it was now night; it had been morning when I’d gone in.

        And there were two moons. Everything else was normal, but there were two moons in the sky and there were no people.

        And my phone was missing again! Next phone I buy is going to be a cheap one. I went back inside, and it was an Apple store again, this time like any other Apple store. Again there was no one there, and again my phone was on the counter. And again, I could get no signal. I firmly gripped it in my fist and walked outside...

        And confronted a monster! A giant animal, really huge, bigger than an elephant with huge teeth and claws and feathers. I screamed and ran back inside... a cave.

        And I’d dropped my phone outside in my fright. Not that it seemed to work any more, anyway. Or that it mattered, since I had clearly gone insane.

        But I couldn’t just sit in the cave. I waited a long time to make sure the monster was gone, then peeked outside. No monsters, and no phone. I went back in, I don’t know why, and there was my phone laying on a large rock. I put it in my pocket, and noticed the cave had changed. It was huge before, now little more than an indentation in the rock face.

        I went back out, and it looked like New York in the early twentieth century, except there were no people. I hadn’t seen a soul since I’d started this ordeal, except for the monster.

        And my phone was gone again. I turned around, and the Apple store’s sign read “Bell Telephone”. I went inside and there was a bank of antique switchboards, all unmanned. My phone was laying on one.

        I put it back in my pocket and walked back out. I don’t think I’ve ever been as worried and scared in my life, especially when I’d seen the huge, weird looking animal. This time the streets and signs of civilization were gone, and a group of wigwams was there where New York City had been before.

        I was shaking. I sat down on a log, put my face in my hands and cried like a baby. I felt like one, lost like no lost child had ever been lost before.

        Cried out, I sat and tried to think of a way out of the mess I’d somehow gotten myself into. The only thing I could think of was going back into the wigwam.

        There was a room filled with some very strange looking machinery, machinery I’d never seen before and had an idea that no one else had either. And there were people there this time! Two women, a blonde and a brunette, both wearing extremely strange looking clothing, intently poring over a complex-looking gizmo that looked like it was from some science fiction movie, and didn’t notice my entry. I stood there speechless.

        “We almost had him!” one of the women exclaimed. “In the right dimension and we almost had him in the right time. It would have taken only one more minute. If he’d just sat still a little longer!”

        “I can’t find when he is now. This thing is being extra finicky today,” the other woman remarked.

        “Excuse me,” I said, “But would someone please call 911? I think I’ve had a stroke or something.”

        They both whirled around at the same time. The blonde said “Oh, no, he’s now!”

        The brunette said “It will be all right, sir. Please, take your phone and wait in the hallway until it rings. There’s a comfortable chair out there.”

        “What’s going on?” I asked.

        The blonde said “I’m sorry, we can’t say anything more without fouling things up even worse than they already are. Please, your world will be normal in a few minutes, just listen for your phone.”

        “Uh, okay, I guess,” I said, and took my phone outside and sat down.

        Maybe fifteen minutes later I heard my ring tone, and it was coming from inside the office. I looked in my pocket and my phone was gone again.

        I wondered if someone at work could have spiked my coffee with some hallucinogen, but no... nobody at the office would have done such a thing. I sighed, wondering what strangeness I was going to see next, and went in.

        I was back at the art exhibit, and again, no one was there. I picked up the phone to answer it, but all that came out of it were some strange noises. I hung up, and I was getting a signal again! I called my boss.

        “Where have you been?” Frank asked.

        “I got lost. I may have had a stroke or something, I’m going to the doctor to get checked out. I’ll call when I’m done to let you know.”

        “Well, I hope you’re all right. I’ll talk to you later.”

        “Bye.”

        I walked hesitantly out into the hallway, and the chair and door to the outside the building were gone, with the elevators taking its place. I pushed the button, and when the car came I stepped in gingerly wondering what would happen when I got outside.

        Outside the building everything seemed normal again, with the throngs of people and noise of vehicular traffic. I hailed a cab and took the taxi to the hospital, where they took my vitals and did a brain scan and some psychological tests. The doctor said everything looked normal, but my blood pressure was a little high and I should make an appointment with my regular doctor.

        I took the subway back to the office. As I waited for the elevator, Doris, an editor, walked up—and she had red hair. Oh, no, I thought. “Your hair!” I said, scared again.

        “Like it?” she said. “I was tired of being a blonde so I dyed it last night.”

        I could have hugged her. We took the elevator up and I went to see Frank.

        “Frank, do you mind having someone else check out that exhibit? I don’t think I could give them a fair revue.”

        Frank said I looked really pale and should go home, so I went home early. I couldn’t get this weird day out of my mind, so I just wrote it down.

        Of course, I’m not putting this in the paper. Maybe I’ll send it to a science fiction magazine under an assumed name, because there’s no way anyone could believe it wasn’t fiction.

        But I’m getting a new phone tomorrow.

So, my network has done some strange things over the years. We're all familiar with Cat5 cabling. You plug the RJ45 connecter into two machines, and they are supposed to communicate. Way back, you had to have a crossover cable to make some couplings work, but that's pretty much ancient history now. The machines generally sense whether there is a crossover present now, and compensate.

But, recently, a laptop was plugged into the network with some random cable laying around. They all look pretty much the same, and no one can say where any particular cord came from. Most of those six foot yellow cables are relatively new, and come with almost any machine or card you buy nowadays. But, there are the putrid green ones, the gray ones, black, brown. Do the colors mean anything? Hell, I don't know. But, the laptop was plugged into my gigabyte network, and things just crawled.

So, I did some reading. Cat5 has been around for a long time. They predate any effort on my part to do any networking. The Cat5 specification has undergone changes several times now, because the old standards are just not fast enough.

Obviously, we are into the gigabyte range of speeds now. But, take an ancient ethernet cable, plut it into a typical hub, and the hub automatically changes the speed of ALL THE CONNECTIONS to that slower speed.

Thus, plugging the laptop into the hub with that ancient cable dragged my entire network down to less than 10/100 speeds. Files were transferring at about 4 M/s on my gigabyte network.

So, after some (minimal) research, I decided to just upgrade everything. Shopped around a little, and decided on Newegg's lower cost offerings. Ordered a dozen 6 footers, a couple 12, 25, 30, and 50 foot cables, thought a little more, and ordered a couple more. Got a big box of cables in last week, all of them purple.

One cable at a time, I replaced every single Cat5 cable in the house. And, there are some short cables lying near the router and the hub, awaiting the odd people who show up, and want to plug into the network. (of course only odd people show up at my house, what did you expect?)

Now - what to do with that mess of old cables?

I'm thinking about divvying them out among people that I don't like very much. Let one or more of them try to figure out why his/her network is suddenly crawling at less than ten meg. I can tell them that I only upgraded to Cat6 because the cables are a pretty purple color. They'll believe stupid stuff like that.