Thinking aloud

I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970’s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the audience, it was more an attempt to fulfill a personal obsession. 

Newman is a musical genius the world seems to remember only for Short People, a song so unrepresentative of Newman’s work that its enduring popularity must be an unending annoyance for him. (Just today, the guys in the office were talking about loading up iPods…they talked about Led Zeppelin, Heart and Eric Clapton. Short People came up, too. What a shame.)

Anyway, Newman records albums so infrequently that it’s a major event in my life when a new one is released. If Newman is pissed off that the current justices on Supreme Court will outlive him (as he sings in the blistering A Few Words in Defense of Our Country), I am none too happy with Newman himself for not trying harder to satiate the few fans he has. He claims in a video documentary that he has 80,000 fans — down from 200,000 — and none of us are attractive looking.

I remain awestruck by Newman’s early work, especially 12 Songs, Sail Away and Good Old Boys. The recordings from the 80s and 90s, topped off by Bad Love didn’t seem as sharp or as even to me as the early albums. Now, the question I am thinking about is whether the new album finds Newman back in form. The short answer is, I don’t yet know.

But there’s no rush. Given that we might have as long as a decade to evaluate it, what’s the hurry? I mean, I’d love to have more Newman music to consider, so Randy, how about a new album in two or three years? After all, you said on your website that this only took eight to 10 weeks to write and another eight to 10 to record.

So, it’s not me I am worried about. It’s the rest of you who didn’t find Newman in your formative years. You guys, in your 30s and 40s, you’ve got several decades of savoring this music to catch up on. Unless you get started right away — savoring an album a decade — you’ll never get to Harps and Angels.

I’m more worried about your inability to catch up with the rest of us than about the fact that I’ll probably be dead before the next Newman album.

With all the news lately about the fundamental flaws in DNS and the fact that my digital life is on my laptop, I decided to take a few hours today to reconfigure my router to use OpenDNS and to encrypt the whole drive in my laptop using TrueCrypt.

After months of listening to Leo and Steve tell me how great these services were, I was feeling like someone who refuses to get the religion he’s supposed to if I didn’t try ‘em out.

Changing your router to use OpenDNS is plain, dead, dumb simple: you simply change two IP addresses in your router’s configuration. The OpenDNS IP addresses are on every page of their website. Can’t miss it. Total time to implement: 10 minutes.

The decision to use TrueCrypt was a little more involved: I run Vista Ultimate which offers BitLocker whole-disk encryption. So you’d naturally assume that the built-in encryption would be better. But after hearing that Steve Gibson’s Windows XP machine was actually faster after using TrueCrypt, I decided to try this amazing open source product. TrueCrypt doesn’t feel like open source…it’s exceptionally well documented and has the fit-and-finish of a commercial product.

Total time to setup for whole disk encryption on my ThinkPad T60p with an Hitachi Travelstar 200GB 7200rpm drive? 15 minutes, including the burning of a backup CD-ROM. Encryption itself took three hours.

I did have one problem, which was easily solved. I couldn’t hibernate the machine (which Vista isn’t really happy to do anymore anyway, but which is sort of the ultimate test for a whole-disk encryption program) until I deleted the previous hibernation file and allowed Vista to recreate it on the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume.

I didn’t see this in a couple of searches online, so hopefully if anyone searches for “TrueCrypt Vista hibernation file” they’ll find this post and give it a try.

Now, I can’t even “feel” the encryption…my laptop performs as before. My Vista performance base score was 4.3 before and after the whole disk was encrypted.

In short, for a computer user today, the tools to significantly increase your personal security are easy-to-use, free and astonishingly good.