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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?

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

Prime lenses

January 19, 2009 |

About Photography and Photography

Prime lenses are a total inconvenience. Not being able to zoom is a complete pain in the ass, and having to switch lenses to change the focal length is even worse. I have to carry around multiple lenses to cover a variety of settings, instead of just throwing one zoom on and going for it. They are a real hassle.

If so, then why do I love them so much? It is so much nicer taking photos with my 300 dollar 85mm f/1.8 prime than it is with my 1100 dollar 24-105 f/4 zoom that I almost never even reach for the zoom anymore. The only instance when I throw the zoom on is when I know I’m not going to have time to switch lenses, which itself doesn’t take all that long and can be accomplished with light weight primes one-handed with a little practice. The rest of the time I just leave my two primes, a 28mm and a 85mm, on the body and go from there. I also have the 50mm f/1.8 in my drawer, but I never use it not because it’s inconvenient, but because it feels cheap. I just don’t like it. I’m going to purchase the 50mm f/1.4 in the next few weeks and then retire the f/1.8 version.

I think that what I like most about the primes is that they are solid, sharp as hell, and wonderfully bright through the viewfinder. If you’ve never seen the difference between a lens with an f/4 maximum and a lens with an f/1.8 maximum through a viewfinder, trust me the difference is remarkable. It goes from a dingy, dull image at f/4 to a bright, clean image at f/1.8 which unconsciously gives me a better feeling for the moment happening in front of my lens. It’s just a lot nicer. I feel more connected to my subjects, better equipped to capture the moment as it happens.

The ability not to change focal lengths is freeing from the endless possibilities of a zoom lens. Too much choice is no choice at all. For all the time spent while I’m dicking around zooming in and out trying to get a good composition, the moment has passed. Remove the option to zoom altogether and you find yourself unfettered by choice, able to take the photos presenting themselves to you. Besides, if you really want to get closer, just move your ass. It’s not hard.

Of course, there are times when you need to be run & gun with your photography or for whatever reason you can’t move forward or backward to get the right shot, but for the majority of the time I feel like shooting with primes is just better. That is really true for all the shooting-in-the-dark I do. Every little bit of aperture counts.

As a side note, I took my first daylight photos with the 5d Mk II today, after more than 800 photos in the dark. It does just as nice a job outside in daylight as inside in artificial light.

> Continue reading...Prime lenses

On this rainy Wednesday afternoon…

January 7, 2009 |

Thoughts

I thought I might share with you the finest fight choreography I have ever had the distinct misfortune of seeing.

I know this clip has been floating around for a long time, but, God damn, it is good.

Keep an eye out for ya, Stingray.

Yeah! See ya!

Update – It’s from a movie called Undefeatable. Does anyone have this? Can you please send it to me? Seriously, I would love you forever.

> Continue reading...On this rainy Wednesday afternoon…

Lasers and Ken Nordine.

January 6, 2009 |

Thoughts

Have you ever seen something so perfect that you weren’t sure if you were still alive? As if, perhaps, a small sliver of heaven had come down to you and blessed you with visions of the Divine? The voice of God whispering sweet nothings into your ear? Then you have an idea how I felt when I saw these ads ( ! —I know) featuring not only lasers but Ken Nordine, the sweetest voice to ever grace my ears. Why don’t people make ads like this anymore? Were the late 70s so intense that this sort of thing flew, but we couldn’t possibly handle it now? I think it’s high time to bring lasers back into advertising.

They were made by Robert Abel & Associates, who also had a hand in Tron. Why did this company ever fold? I understand that Robert Abel passed away, but could not this beautiful laser motif have continued into the present day? I think it is quite clear to ANYONE reading this site that I love bright, gaudy design. If anything, these ads make me realize that I don’t have nearly enough lasery goodness on this site. I need grids! I need laser beams! I need more glows! I need explosions! BOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!

Do not fear, fearless readers, the laser style has not died. It’s just gone underground. Here is the proof.

Sweet. More lasers for everyone!

> Continue reading...Lasers and Ken Nordine.

Headbanger’s Ball’s Top 10 of 2008… Sucked.

January 2, 2009 |

About Music and Music

Last week I watched my DVRed episode of Headbanger’s Ball from this weekend which counted down the top 10 videos from 2008. All in all, it was a horrible Top 10 list. So bad in fact that I nearly threw up the cold steak taco and chips I had eaten for dinner. That bad.

I went to the official Headbanger’s Blog to get the track list of the top 10 so I could rant about it here and I discovered that it was actually a top 25 of 2008, but they only showed 10 videos. That changes nothing really because the top 10 still sucks. Here’s the list.

  • 10. Brian “Head” Welch “Flush”
  • 9. Whitechapel “Possession”
  • 8. Slipknot “Psychosocial”
  • 7. Underoath “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
  • 6. The Devil Wears Prada “HTML Rulez D00d”
  • 5. Dream Theater “Forsaken”
  • 4. 3 Inches of Blood “Trial of Champions”
  • 3. Avenged Sevenfold “Unholy Confessions”
  • 2. All That Remains “Two Weeks”
  • 1. Dir En Grey “Dozing Green”

Let’s break this down shall we?

Number 10 – Brian “Head” Welch “Flush”. I only saw the second half of this video and, correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t “Nü-metal” die in 2001? This video is terrible. Oh jeez, you’re chained up? Is that a metaphor for something? Aw, what’s this crazy pixie stix powder the porno looking chicks are licking and pouring all over each other? Is it supposed to represent something?

Well, if all the ham-fisted, inept imagery weren’t enough to convince you that this is a complete piece of trash, then how about this sampling of lyrics?

Life is boring/Same old story/Get drunk, throw up/Sleep all day/Like I’m something/I’m not nothing/I can’t let myself decay

Wow, “Head”. Deep. I love your delicate, sophisticated word play and the imagery you employ while calling to mind the words of master poets like Eliot, Keats, and Byron! This is playground poetry of the highest caliber. I know you’ve found Jesus, but that is no excuse for spouting such inarticulate nonsense at unsuspecting listeners. This was the first time I watched your video and it will also be the last.

Number 9 – Whitechapel “Possession”. I’ve discussed this video on this site before. It was awesome then, and it is awesome now. Next.

Number 8 – Slipknot “Psychosocial”. To be perfectly fair, this video isn’t all that bad. It looks nice for sure. I could do without the song. And the performance parts of the video. And Slipknot. But it looks nice, which is ONE good thing. I take exception to the title which is ALMOST the worst title on the list. Psychosocial? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I suppose that it makes the song sound tough to have the word “psycho” in the title, but I can’t help but think of the Biopsychosocial assessments my girlfriend does when she has new therapy clients. GRRRRR THERAPY IS SO METAL!!!!

Number 7 – Underoath “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”. This video is well executed. I am not a fan of performance in videos, typically, and I’m not a fan of it here. But, the dark fairy tale styling of the animated parts is excellent. The song is totally underwhelming and could easily find itself the topic of another “On Singing In Metal” if there were not two other songs on the MTV list more qualified for that distinct honor.

Number 6 – The Devil Wears Prada “HTML Rulez D00d”. Ok. This is horrible. First, let’s take a look at the band’s name. The Devil Wears Prada? The band is named after a book that’s a vaguely fictional memoir of a woman’s experience in the fashion industry in New York? For real? I’m not even going to get into how bad of a choice I think that is. That’s not even cleverly inane. It’s just stupid.

The song title, “HTML Rulez D00d”? Again, I demand to know what the fuck they were thinking when they thought of this idiotic stinker of a title. Is HyperText Markup Language some hilarious thing with the kids these days that I missed out on? Is the deliberate misspelling of the word “rules” with a z (zed for those outside the US) trying to convey something about the dynamically evolving nature of language? Does using two zeros in “dude” expand on that notion while tying back into the digital nature of the original HTML call out by referencing the l337-speak of computer yore? No? It’s just a stupid fucking title chosen by a bunch of morons? OHhhhhhhh. I get it now.

Let it not be thought I have something against inane song titles. I do not. But at least a band like Curl Up and Die had the sense to use asinine song titles to great effect with winners like, “Doctor Doom. A Man Of Science, Doesn’t Believe In Jesus, Why The Fuck Do You”, or Drowningman’s “Yeah, You’re Pretty But Do You Think You’ll Really Get Away With It?” There is a difference between stupid and irreverent that The Devil Wears Prada (again, that name, horrible) just don’t seem to get.

Ok, now that I’ve bagged on their obvious lack of decision making prowess, let’s approach the song, shall we? It’s totally generic, metalcore garbage, complete with god-awful whiny singing. Why do people think this shit is good? The singing in this song makes me want to stab knives into my ears and thereby deprive myself of the world of sound for the rest of my mortal existence. It’s really terrible. I have already written at length about how I feel about shitty singing in metal songs, so I’m not going to do it again, but god damn this song is terrible. It is still not the worst singing on this list though.

Number 5 – Dream Theater “Forsaken”. Dream Theater is classic metal band. I mean, really, there basically wouldn’t be prog metal without Dream Theater, so, like them or not, you can’t deny that they have been an important force in shaping the metal landscape. This video though is not that good. It’s not bad, exactly, but it sure isn’t good. It’s just cheesy. This whole rotoscoped animation thing they have going screams cheese, like the first Heavy Metal movie. Or the second one. Or the magazine. I think the video itself is well made, but I question the taste that went into it. All in all, not bad if you’re 13 and play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.

Number 4 – Three Inches of Blood “Trial of Champions”. I’m into Three Inches of Blood. They’re an all right band. I dig the whole “pirate power metal” thing they do. This video fucking blows big ones, however. This is the perfect example of how having absolutely no budget can ruin a music video. Whether it’s the super “edgy” band against black background performance footage, the “acting” by the “actors”, or the complete lack of set design and decent cinematography during the non-band sequences, this video looks like crap. Note to the colorist: desaturating and pumping up the blues do not make badly shot footage look good. It makes badly shot footage look blue.

Number 3 – Avenged Sevenfold “Unholy Confessions”. Why is an Avenged Sevenfold video of a track off their 2003 record Waking The Fallen in the top 10 of 2008? Really, I couldn’t tell you. That doesn’t stop this video or band from being complete trash. I am going to hold my thoughts on Avenged Sevenfold for a future entry in “On Singing In Metal”. Let’s leave it at acknowledging this is one of the worst bands on the scene today and the worst abuser of bad singing in metal songs on this list.

Number 2 – All That Remains “Two Weeks”. This shit is so boring it puts me to sleep faster than that Isis show I went to see at The Bowery Ballroom where I nearly fell asleep over the balcony.

Number 1 – Dir En Grey “Dozing Green”. The Japanese have given us many gifts over the years: Godzilla, Robotech, Akira, Kwaidan, Kurosawa films. But did they give us the best metal video of 2008? Fuck no. Yeah, the projections on the screens are cool, but not groundbreaking. But that’s about everything that’s not just totally plain in this video. Ok, some animation, some scans of weird manga, some other crap—none of it good. Oh look! There are maggots and a chinook and some comics and the film burning and a sunset! WOW. WHAT STUNNING VISUALISTS THESE JAPANESE ARE. My mind is so blown, like oh my god.

I am totally offended that this was picked as the best video of 2008. No, not offended, ashamed. I am ashamed of America for picking this miserable top 10 list when there have been many other, BETTER videos this year.

To be fair to the people at MTV responsible for Headbanger’s Ball, their staff picks for the top 10 are significantly better than the fan picks. You can see both lists of 25 here: Headbangers Viewers, HBB Blog Pick Best Videos of 2008.

Major props for putting a video that I am in at number 6. Fuck yeah, The Sword is awesome.

Look out for another post where I list at least 5 videos from this year that should have been in the top 10 that weren’t.

> Continue reading...Headbanger’s Ball’s Top 10 of 2008… Sucked.

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