I had an interesting vacation in Cuba. I think the best part about it was the Cuban people - they were warm and friendly and did not resent the special treatment tourists get at all. It was not what I was expecting. We'd definitely go back.

The fact that Cuba is a communist country was quite well hidden from view. Aside from the fact that Cubans are restricted from visiting the island where my resort was located, I did not see much evidence of socialism. There were no statues of Castro, no giant posters. This was not like Saddam Hussein and Iraq, or Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines... the people of Cuba are not forced to worship their leader. They had no trouble discussing politics openly, and were not afraid of “secret police” or any other totalitarian authority.

Anyways, it's 9 degrees and raining here in Toronto. Man, what a let down. I had hoped that in the week I was gone, things would have become more spring-like here. Oh well.

My wife and I are already planning our next sunny getaway - maybe even in the next month or so. Unfortunately, our social calendar is full the next two or three weekends, and so it's hard to find a free week.

As a Canadian, I'm going to do something next week that very few Americans have ever had the chance to do. I'm going to visit Cuba.

I'll admit, my trip to Cuba scares me more than any of my other trips to foreign countries. I have so many preconceptions about the place. Many of them may be misconceptions, but I am sure some of them are true.

My brother in law told me a story about his trip there. He and his family brought a couple of baseball gloves and a baseball, with the intention of giving it to some worthy Cuban child. It kind of brings a tear to your eye, thinking about how happy some child is going to be going home with a couple of baseball gloves and a baseball. Well, my brother in law ended up giving it to the bartender at his hotel, so that he can get access to the better alcohol they hide behind the bar. Oh, so that's how Cuba works...

Frommer's has an amazing web site - if you're planning a trip abroad, it's well worth a read. Geez, I still can't believe a company like that would put all that information up on the Internet for free.

From Frommer's Cuba:

One of the most disconcerting aspects of contemporary Cuba is the government's creation of exclusive "foreigner-only" tourism zones where Cuban nationals aren't welcome. Effectively, there are two Cubas, a reality that reeks of something akin to tourism apartheid, as many observers have noted. One Cuba is the gritty and sometimes grim country where things don't always work and consumer goods are hard to come by. The other Cuba is tailor-made for tourists at beach resorts and tourist-friendly draws like Habana Vieja.

This is one of my main objections to travelling to Cuba. It has limited access to certain resources - electricity, clean water, medicine, etc. And the Cuban government has adopted a policy that tourists get priority access to those resources. I'm going to adopt a policy of being a big tipper while there, since I will be carrying this guilt with me.

I don't wholly support the American embargo against tiny Cuba, because really, who has it hurt? Castro? He's living in luxury, believe me. It's hurt the people of Cuba. Don't get me wrong, the best thing that could happen to Cuba is if Castro is overthrown or dies. But still, this country is stuck in the 1950's in terms of technology and it seems downright mean to deny them access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we all enjoy.

I went to a birthday party yesterday, and guess what movie was playing on the TV? The Passion of the Christ. The party host downloaded it off the Internet. The room was full of devoted Catholics, almost in tears at seeing the last hours of Jesus. Mel Gibson did a masterful job.

Sadly, not many people appreciated it when I mentioned the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Someone should call Alanis Morissette. That's what I call ironic.

Dear Blogger,

I have to be honest with you my friend, you're really starting to get on my nerves.

The thing is, I don't understand why you're treating me like this. What have I done wrong? I thought we had a good thing going over the past couple of years.

In case you don't remember me, I signed up with you almost two years ago for your free blogging tools. Man, those were good times. I had four blogs going at once, do you remember?

Things were going so well, I signed up for your Pro service. I had never purchased a subscription on the Internet before - you were my first. Ah yes, the Pro service gave me so many more features with big promises of more to come.

And then you married Google. I didn't mind, Blogger, really. I loved Google too. You, me, and Google - what a team we all were together!

But lately, you have been cold and distant. You cancelled the Pro service (but you did send me a free sweatshirt). There have been no more new blogging features in the past 12 months. I've been waiting for things like categories, comments, referrer tracking, and trackbacks. But you've really fallen behind in that area.

But what really proves you don't love me any more is how you've disabled my blog's RSS feeds on a few ocassions. You promised those of us who were previously subscribed to the Pro service that our existing RSS feeds would be unaffected. But the quality of your RSS service has decreased significantly.

I'm not even talking about the fact that you don't offer RSS feeds to any of your free users. Although I disagree with the tactic, you are free to run your business as you see fit.

What I am talking about has affected me directly over the last two or three months. A couple of months ago, several of my Blogger RSS feeds stopped working one day. When I logged in to my Blogger account, I noticed my site preferences had been changed to Atom. Now I hadn't changed them, so I assume you accidentally overwrote my previous settings. Now here we are again this morning, and one of my Blogger RSS feeds has stopped working. How am I going to keep any regular subscribers if my RSS feed is sometimes unavailable?

Is this a sign of things to come? Are you going to slowly break my RSS feed until I relent and use Atom? Atom is not even a stable spec yet. Why are you forcing me to use it? Blogger, why hath thou forsaken me?

If I don't hear back from you, I will know that you don't really care about me. That's OK. I've found dasBlog to help me get over you. But I really wish we could remain friends.

Best regards,
Scott

Wow, has it really been almost two weeks since my last entry?

Believe it or not, a lot has happened in my life during that time. Sadly, it's nothing I can really talk about. Yet. I will probably have a whole bunch to say when this issue has been resolved. The ending hasn't been written yet, but hopefully the story will have a happy one.

The one thing I don't mind mentioning here is the importance of a good support system, in the form of my wife and friends.

My wife in particular has been dispensing some really good advice lately. I don't know when it happened, but at some point between the time when I met her and today she has figured out how my brain works and knows how to fix it when it's a bit off.

I sit here today faced between two tough choices, A and B. I don't particularly like either of those choices and I don't know why. My wife comes along, and suddenly I understand why I don't like either option, and suggests a third option (C) that is the best bet. That's what I call a true partner in life.

And I have never in my adult life spent so much time talking to friends. I love it.

At home, I have a perfectly good laptop that is sitting unused. This is because about two months ago the battery stopped recharging. Click here for a brief history of that saga.

Yesterday, the motherboard I purchased off of eBay arrived. Last night, I eagerly installed it. You know, I was really afraid while I was taking it apart that it would be impossible to put back together. In the end, it wasn't that hard. (Except I have two extra screws left over and I don't know where they go. Oops.)

So after I put all of the parts back in, made sure everything was secure. Plugged the laptop back into the wall, and attempted to power up.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Put the battery in, it boots up fine but the battery doesn't recharge. Take the battery out, and no power.

So it turned out to not be the motherboard. What else can it be? The two other suspects are the power cord, and the battery. The power cord costs less than $10. I've ordered one off of eBay, and it will take another week or two for that to arrive. New laptop batteries run around $100, and I would have to think twice before trying that option.

Well, now I have an extra perfectly good motherboard. What I'm going to do is take the new one out and put the old one back in, and sell the one I just received yesterday on eBay. Maybe I'll take that money and put it towards a battery if it comes to that.

There is a lesson in here somewhere. I should have tried replacing the $5 part first, and then replaced the $70 part if that didn't work, EVEN IF the $70 part was the most likely culprit. I am so used to doing things in order from most likely to least likely, I forget to take cost into the equation.

Update: The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 7000, circa 1998, in case other people are searching the web for information on the possible causes of this problem.

I am getting a lot of people coming to this site, looking for help with “Startup procedure cannot be found in MSDART.DLL” errors. Obviously, information on this type of error is something that people are often looking for. Here is a link to my original post on the issue.

MSDART.DLL contains the Microsoft Data Access “OLE DB Runtime Routines”. MDAC 2.7 SP1 has a version number of 2.71.9031.4 for this file. Not sure about MDAC 2.8 which is now out.

When I did my original Internet search for information on this error, I found several recommended solutions:

1. Try the MDAC Component Checker. This free Microsoft utility will check your system to make sure data access is installed and configured correctly. This tool has only ever told me everything is fine, however, so I don't know how helpful it will be if things are not fine.

2. Rename MSDART.DLL to MSDART32.DLL. If you're encountering this error during a Windows Install, like I was, this might not be easy to do.

3. Just keep clicking OK until the error goes away. Some people report clicking the OK button 200 times or so in order to make it disappear. In my own personal experience, I clicked OK about 20 times before I gave up.

4. Hold down the Control key and keep clicking OK until the error goes away. I don't know what holding the Control key is supposed to do, but some people suggest this anyways.

5. Just wait. I found that the Windows install finished on its own, once I left the computer alone for a few hours. Don't ask me how it did this, but perhaps there is a timeout of some sort.

6. Use the system against itself. Hit Shift+F10 to bring up a Command Prompt. Type taskmgr.exe to bring up Windows Task Manager. Kill the messagebox from there.

I hope these suggestions and links help. As always, understand that there are a lot of possible problems and a lot of possible solutions for any error message, and so what worked for me may not work for you.