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The Black Laser

What is it with me and hard drives?

February 3, 2009 |

Thoughts

God fucking damn it. Why am I cursed to kill every single hard drive I put something important onto? It doesn’t matter how regularly I use it, how often or rarely it moves, how full or empty I keep it—if I’ve put something on it that I do not have a copy of somewhere else, it will fail at exactly the moment when it shouldn’t. Let’s examine our latest catastrophic drive failure, shall we?

A few months ago I purchased a Drobo and a couple of server-class SATA drives to fill it. All well and good. It seemed to have been working fine under both Windows and the Mac (I have a dual boot on my MacBookPro) until yesterday when it refused to mount and I was blessed with this lovely error message.

drobo-error

Oh no, I thought. This is not going to be good. When a drive goes down, I generally try and repair it with the least invasive method possible—ejecting it and power cycling. You have no idea how often that will do the trick. The next step is to switch the port which the cable is connected to. When those don’t fix the problem, I pull out the big guns, either DiskWarrior or Techtool, depending on what I think the issue is. If I think it’s a hard disk controller issue, then I use TechTool. If I think it’s a directory issue, I use DiskWarrior. This combo has fixed a number of disks I feared lost. So, when the Drobo (which I named Cthulhu) refused to mount, I ran, of course, DiskWarrior on it. After a seemingly interminable repair routine, the drive mounted and everything seemed to be running ok. Usually these things continue to be ok. It is absurd to have a disk array with redundant storage that you need to keep a backup of, but I guess that’s what’s happened here. I might mention here that I e-mailed Drobo for help and have not yet heard back from them 24-hours later. Their knowledgebase was similarly unhelpful.

Today when I got home, I plugged in my laptop as I usually do, but the Drobo did not mount. Fuck. The Drobo’s utility, Drobo Dashboard, reports that not only is my data intact on the drives, but that the drives themselves are just honky dory doin’ fine. Fucking cool, except the directory structure is so fucked that the Mac OS will no longer even see the partition on the drive. At least yesterday it saw the partition even if it failed to mount. The only times I’ve ever seen the hardware for the drive recognized in Disk Utility but not the partition has been when there is actually physical damage to the delicate platters that make up the drive. That is clearly not the case here. The drives themselves are fine; the software is fucked.

So, when the drive didn’t mount, I ran DiskWarrior again. It failed to scan the drive once, so I tried again and when it behaved the same way as before, I canceled it. Then I was greeted with this horrifying message.

picture-36

Holy motherfucking fuck. Are you serious? Ok. This is new. Soooo maybe running DiskWarrior on a disk array with some crazy custom fucking file system bullshit going on in the background wasn’t a GREAT idea. Sue me. What would have done? That’s right—the exact same thing.

Now here I am, angry, confused, a little lonely, and at a total loss. I’ve got all my photos (important), the rough cut of my film (important, but less so), and all of my music (importantish) locked inside a drive array that just doesn’t want to play nice. I am going to go to TekServe tomorrow to buy the cheapest 1.5tb drive I can find and then I am going to run a data recovery program, Data Rescue, on the drive. I first encountered Data Rescue when I experienced my first hard drive catastrophe a few years ago when my 500gb LaCie drive got knocked over while it was performing some write operations. POOF! All of my data gone. Data Rescue was the only program even capable of SEEING the drive after that, but it did one better and actually showed me what was on the drive. Impressive. So I have high hopes that it will be able to rescue the data on Cthulhu that needs rescuing so that I can reformat the fucker and get to using it again, especially after downloading the demo, running the Quick Scan, and it revealing every single file on there. Good! It seems like the data are not corrupt, even if the directory structure has just taken a fierce one right in the ass.

I suspect that the problem is coming from the combination of MacDrive and WinXP. I had a problem almost EXACLTY like this with an old drive, but I was able to recover it because it wasn’t some fancy shmancy array. I think all this started the other night (duh) after Windows crashed and I had to force the shut down. Everything was beautiful until then. Since, things have only progressively descended into the flaming pit of hard drive hell. Fuck.

I will keep you updated on what becomes of this debacle.

> Continue reading...What is it with me and hard drives?

Two French-as-hell videos for this cold Saturday

January 31, 2009 |

Music, Music Videos and Thoughts

This first is a video sent to me ages ago by my brother Charlie. It is a beautifully animated video for the song “Le Café” by the French group Oldelaf. I don’t know anything about the band, but the video is super awesome and unbelievably French.

Here is the video on YouTube with subtitles. Oldelaf – le Café (english subtitles)

The other video is a short animated film by Paris-based studio Passion Paris which I encountered on BoingBoing. It deals with the impending end of the world in 2012. Scary stuff. Also beautifully animated and possessing of a biting sense of humor.

Enjoy!

> Continue reading...Two French-as-hell videos for this cold Saturday

Richard Halloran Owns Home Computer

January 30, 2009 |

Thoughts

This news story from 1981 is a fascinating piece of the past’s future, and eerily prescient regarding the eventually demise of print media and availability of online versions. And check the rotary phone he dials placing the receiver on the cups of the modem. Pretty cool.

Two hours to download the online edition? How much data could a text-only version of a local newspaper like the SF Chronicle actually contain? A few hundred kilobytes at the high end? I make you load that much in utterly unimportant image data every single time you look at The Black Laser and I bet you never even bat an eye. It’s amazing how far the technology has come since then, a mere 28 years. It really forces on you the fact that we have no idea what technology will be like 28 years from now. I fully expect replicants by 2019, and that’s only a decade. 28 years is 2.8 times as long! Maybe they’ll have Nexus 16.8s!

> Continue reading...Richard Halloran Owns Home Computer

Julian & Clive

January 28, 2009 |

Fiction and Writing

Julian pushes the supermarket brand hotdogs around the grill growing impatient at the fact that they are not yet ready to eat.  He wishes they would spit and sizzle and flare up the way they do in the hotdog commercials, but they languish on the not-nearly-hot-enough-to-cook-anything grate.  Once there was grass around his cousin Lester’s forlorn little grill, but the battle against the grease and ash from these summer cookouts has been lost, revealing the dry dirt beneath.  Julian turns a hot dog over to check if it somehow had achieved doneness while he had stopped paying it attention for a moment—it had not.  He throws the barbeque tongs on the table beside the grill and contemplates the cooler filled with beer before recalling Dawn sitting directly behind him, feeding their toddler applesauce.  She doesn’t like when he drinks and fear of her has kept Julian sober many nights he’d rather have drunk away.  

> Continue reading...Julian & Clive

An example of what I love about Cormac McCarthy

January 28, 2009 |

About Writing and Writing

My first experience with Cormac McCarthy was when I was 16 or 17 and my older brother’s friend Doug Lowney came over and read a passage to me from Blood Meridian. Since 16 year olds are idiots, and I was an idiot, I couldn’t really comprehend what he was reading to me. All I knew was that there was raping and scalping and killing and shit. I imagined a blue-grey morning and Vikings doing the slaughter, which was, as it turns out, exactly wrong. But the point is that it piqued my interest. I later purchased a copy of Blood Meridian which I successfully finished reading on my second or third try during my sophomore year of college. It’s a difficult book, what can I say? Since then I’ve read Suttree, No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—I am a full blown Cormac McCarthy nut. I even have a two year old Oprah saved on my DVR at home that has an interview with him.

After finishing You Shall Know Our Velocity, I figured it was time for something a little more…gritty? I pulled his first book, The Orchard Keeper, off my shelf and within 40 pages came across a passage that reminded me of what I really love about McCarthy’s writing. It’s primal, it’s fierce, it’s forceful. The prose leaps out at you like a mountain lion, waiting for you to come around the corner of the trail so that it can tear your throat open and drink your blood. It is so good that I just have to share.

Whether he fell forward or whether the man pulled them over he did not know. They were lying in the road, the man with his face in the dirt and Sylder on top of him, motionless for the moment as resting lovers. Something in Sylder’s shoulder traveled obliquely down to his lungs with each breath to cut off the air. He still had one hand locked in the man’s neck and now he inched himself forward and whispered into his ear.

Why don’t you say something now, bastard? Ain’t you got some more talk to spiel for us?

He was jerking at the man’s head but the man had both hands over it and seemed lost in speculation upon the pebbles of the road. Sylder let his hand relax and wander through the folds of the neck until they arrived at the throat. The man took that for a few minutes, then suddenly twisted sideways, spat in Sylder’s face, and tried to wrench himself free. Sylder rolled with him and had him flat backward in the road and astride him, still the one arm swinging from his broken shoulder like a piece of rope. He crept forward and placed one leg behind the man’s head, elevating it slightly, looking like some hulking nurse administering to the wounded. He pushed the head back into the crook of his leg, straightened his arm, and bore down upon the man’s neck with all his weight and strength. The boneless-looking face twitched a few times but other than that showed no change of expression, only the same rubbery look of fear, speechless and uncomprehending, which Sylder felt was not his doing either but the everyday look of the man. And the jaw kept coming down not on any detectable hinges but like a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter uncongealing and collapsing in slow folds over the web of his hand. It occurred to him then that the man was trying to bite him and this struck him as somehow so ludicrous that a snort of laughter wheezed in his nose. Finally the man’s hands came up to rest on his arm, the puffy fingers trailing over his own hand and wrist reminded him of baby possums he hand seen once, blind and pink.

Sylder held him like that for a long time. Like squeezing a boil, he thought. After a while the man did try to say something but no words came, only a bubbling sound. Sylder was watching him in a sort of mesmerized fascination, noting blink of eye, loll of tongue. Then he eased his grip and the man’s eyes widened.

For Christ’s sake, he gasped. Jesus Christ, just turn me loose.

Sylder put his face to the man’s and in a low voice said, You better call on somebody closer than that. Then he saw his shoulder, saw the man looking at it. He dug his thumb into the man’s windpipe and felt it collapse like a dried tule. The man got his hand up and began with his eyes closed to beat Sylder around the face and chest. Sylder closed his eyes too and buried his face in his shoulder to protect it. The flailings grew violent, slowed, finally stopped altogether. When Sylder opened his eyes again the man was staring at him owlishly, the little tongue tipped just past the open lips. He relaxed his hand and the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider. He tried to open it again but could not. He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right.

> Continue reading...An example of what I love about Cormac McCarthy

Zombie Zombie + John Carpenter = Awesome

January 27, 2009 |

Music and Music Videos

Zombie Zombie is a horror-inspired French electro duo. Listening to a few of their tracks, it’s obvious that old school horror soundtracks are a primary creative source for them. So it is no surprise that someone made this fucking awesome video recreating John Carpenter’s The Thing with MOTHERFUCKING GI JOES.

They have a record called A Land for Renegades that came out last year. I need it so bad. Analog zombie disco? I NEED IT SO BAD. God, it’s like God reached into my brain and pulled out everything I love and made it into two motherfucking French guys. What the fuck?!

Here’s their trailer. The performance in it reminds me of this live Kraftwerk performance of “Ruckzuck” on German TV in 1970, but with an obviously more modern, darker, more aggressive air. Calling on the Masters of Electronic Music like that, unwittingly no doubt, bodes well.

Too awesome.

seal_of_approval

> Continue reading...Zombie Zombie + John Carpenter = Awesome