Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep *snooze* Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep *snooze* Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep BeepBeep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep *snooze* Beep..

Apparently I’m a problem. Or at least my alarm clock is. See, last christmas, I got a new alarm clock, because my old one’s alarm was too quiet and I wasn’t waking up (I couldn’t decide whether I was just getting used to the sound, or if it was just failing). The new one had two modes, radio and buzzer. I preferred the buzzer, but sadly the volume control wouldn’t work with it, it had only one volume: very high. Since that time I had been using it fine. At first it woke me up all the time, but now I’m getting used to it as well, and sometimes can sleep through it for quite a while. Other times, I hit the snooze in my sleep, so it will cycle until I finally wake up enough to remember doing it.

For years I had lived in this apartment and never really had a problem with other people’s noise. Well, sometimes people in the hallway could get rowdy, and I found the door to be particularly bad at insulating noise, but all the rest seemed fine. Even other people’s smoke detectors sounded like little bleeps in the distance.

However, early this week I came home to a message from my machine from the management about my alarmclock. Apparently several people had complained, that it was going off all day and such, waking people up, and he was reminding me about the problem. Now, I knew it couldn’t be going off all day, it has a 2 hour limiter. I think once or twice I had left it on by accident when I left the apartment really early, but I was still surprised that the sound was carrying. And since this was the first time I had heard about this in the 6 months I had the clock, so I could only have been minded of it.

When I spoke to him directly, it got weirder. Apparently he himself could hear it in his apartment in the mornings, and his place is 2 apartments along the hallway. The sound was carrying that far. And during my rebuttal in the meeting (despite my best efforts, I was starting to get defensive) he said people who complained could be (as he didn’t want to name names) across the hallway, or even apparently on different floors. What an amazing alarm clock, it can wake people up on different floors, but still not me apparently. One bit of the exchange was that someone said they could hear in their bathroom.. I responded “So they’re already awake… yes?”, okay, I wasn’t being very helpful there, but I was getting defensive. I can hear people’s shower water hitting tub in the bathroom too, and the whistle of the pipes, should I be complaining about that?

I decided to speak directly to the people to the left and right of my apartment in the hallway (on the same side). Both of them said that yeah, they did hear the alarm, but never seemed to care about it and said they weren’t the ones who complained. This might have been just them trying to avoid a confrontation, but if it’s true, that means that people further away had an even greater objection to the noise. The powers of this alarm never cease, the irritation has some sort of inverse relationship to distance.

Anyway, as I’m not particularly fond of facing eviction, I decided to try using the radio mode, with it’s volume control set to a lower, hopefully non-objectionable level. I decided to write a little note out explaining that I wasn’t leaving the alarm going all the time, that I was a heavy sleeper, was unaware the noise was carrying and will use a quieter method from now on, and to let me know if problems continue. I made three copies and put them in the mail slots of the three apartments near mine by on the opposite wall of the hallway (as they weren’t home when I tried the human touch). I had already spoken to the people on my wall on the left and right. The manager’s place is the next one on the right and the hallway ends, there is another one further on the left but it was so far I couldn’t imagine it traveling that far. But the door spacing made it possible that the people involved were the three across the hallway, and so were candidates for the note.

I got one thank you note back, saying they appreciate my consideration, but they weren’t among those who complained. I seem to be doing well tracking down those who claim not to have been bothered. Oh well.

One thing the manager mentioned was that the people involved (wouldn’t give me numbers either, but I think it was 2) were getting so angry for so long that they were about to slip a note under my door. Shocking I know. The issue could have been resolved long ago if they had done that, or, god forbid, direct human contact. Staying silent while getting angrier and angrier isn’t really fair to me, as I couldn’t respond to a situation I didn’t know existed.

Admittedly, I didn’t know my neighbours through direct human contact at the time either, but now at least I’ve met a couple of them, if only to apologize for all the beeping.

This has been going through the interwebs for a few days, getting quite a lot of press. Here it is for those vanishing few who read this blog, but not the news or other interweb homepages.

Based on a true story:

So I had yet another birthday, they just keep piling on.

In the morning Ian dropped off my presents, a new desk (some assembly required) and 2 monitor mount arms. I didn’t have time to play with anything at that point since in the afternoon I got together with Alicia who graciously agreed to keep me company on my birthday. We saw a movie and had dinner, and I walked her home. By the time I got back I was far too tired to mess around with the desk, but I did watch some of Alicia’s gift to me, the Get Smart box set. Such nostalgic memories, coming home from school, changing it to one of the 3 channels we could receive, and watching Get Smart and the old batman series. She also got me Punch Out on the wii, but I haven’t tried it yet.

On Sunday I was off home for a family BBQ. Well, limited family, since virtually all the family members invited couldn’t make it for one reason or another, some even going so far as to accept, later decline, re-accept, and finally bail on the day. Spent a few hours there, and also bought a new videocard for my parents computer since theirs was grinding its way to oblivion. It scares me since we have virtually the same model of computer, so I await the day that mine starts sounding like rattling teeth and angry.

When I got back to the apartment from the BBQ I started assembling the desk. I took an inventory of all the parts, checking them off on the master sheet. I was far more organized with this than any other thing I’ve put together. All the screws were in separate bags, and the instructions were mostly clear as to what bits to assemble with which screws, and as it happened I had the correct amount. The makers also saw fit to include a bag of spares, which had 1 of every type of fastener, which I appreciated though didn’t need. It still took a couple of hours, and a few of the instructions were ambiguous, but I got it together. It’s reasonably solid, though I still feel like my old desk is slightly more solid for some reason. I guess I don’t trust my screw-tightening skills.

Some assembly required, 3 hours

I put together the monitor arm mounts a bit, and finished them off today (since I basically had to attach the monitors as I put them together, which involved shutting down the computer). So today I shut down, and unwired everything to start again. I moved the old desk and table out and did some sweeping (far too much stuff in the way of the closet to get the vacuum out). I put the desk in place and rewired things as best as I could. I took out the dead usb harddrive, and its supporting wires. Also the old computer finally got moved out of the way, and the old subwoofer and speakers it used.

Down to 4 external hard drives

Still endless rat’s maze of wires

The swingarms work well enough, but I find that they force my head to look up, since they raise the height of the monitors a bit, and further the desk is high anyway, making it worse. I’ll have to experiment. I also have some difficulty moving the monitors because there isn’t any clearance behind the desk, so the swing-arm portion of the mount just hits the wall and I can’t move it further. Such is life in a small apartment. Also, one of my monitors still has the stem from the base attached. I can’t see any way of taking it off without breaking the monitor, so for the moment it stays on.

And the computer booted once more

But it’s pretty neat to be able to move them around so freely. They use a weight-tension system, so I just reach out and move things around. And the new desk comes with a swingout table which goes over the spot where I kept my computers, so I didn’t lose any room, but gained more desk, which is very handy. Thanks to brother and parents.

So another year come and gone.
Until next year.

–

Edit: Now you can see the arms in action

Even the swing-table got in on the action

I’m really getting sick of Bell. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sick of Rogers too, it’s just that Bell has gotten my gander up more recently.

So I already disliked the beaver ads, I mean, in Toronto, they seemed to be everywhere at one point, on walls, in bus shelters, on benches, and given that beavers are apparently some sort of canadian mascot, it would be like if they had bald-headed eagles making stupid quips about phone service in the US. And hell, they probably do. The point is that it’s trying to use patriotism to sell phones.

But that was just a lingering irritating in my mind, what annoyed me recently was coming home to my apartment building, and finding damn Bell kiosks staffed by company drones in the lobby. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last, and I can’t even recall if Rogers has done it or not, but in any event, I think it’s wrong. Why should my home, or rather the adjoining corridors to my home, be opened up to people trying to sell me things. I get it all the rest of the time though every form of media, but I don’t think it should be allowed to setup shop on my doorstep, especially the step that is actually on the inside of the door.

I whisk past them, ignoring their pleas to consider their low rates, and head up to my apartment proper. I check the mail, usual junk, oh, a bill from Bell, yay. And what looks to be a personal letter. Stamp, small letter (as opposed to bill) sized, looks like it could be a real correspondence. I open it, muttering “this better not be an ad”… and it damn well was, from Bell. Damn them. They fork through ads in my bills, ads as junk mail, and now they are trying to make it look like real mail. I didn’t even bother trying to read it (nor do I for any junk mail that passes my door), but I did tear it up.

And of course, later that evening, I got a call at around 7:30. For some reason I answered it, though I was pretty sure it was going to be a telemarketer, and I wasn’t disappointed. It was someone representing Bell of course, I stayed on the line for a while in order to determine if it was an ad. I once hung up on what I thought was a telemarketer, when in fact it was about a bill, so I like sticking around just long enough to see if they are trying to sell me something, decline as politely as I’m able and immediately hang up. Which I did on this occasion as well.

I had thrown my home number onto the do-not-call thing, with low expectations. Given the types of telemarketer calls I get, being representatives of companies who already have my personal data and are just trying to sell me more stuff, they would be permitted to continue calling anyway. My only hope is that it will finally silence the messages from Anne from the Moving Company which I can occasionally get several times a week.

I should just block email, glue my letter flap down, take my phone off the hook and wear horse blinders, that’ll show em…

Here is yet another list of flash games I’ve come across that I’ve enjoyed. One common thread is that they all have graphics reminiscent of atari or merely pixilated quality.

Story Teller – by Daniel Benmergui. Not so much a game (but the first 4 aren’t really games exactly) but an essay in this genre, which I don’t know how to describe. Basically arrange the universe at each stage to see the various outcomes.

I Wish I were the Moon – again by Daniel Benmergui. The same sort of thing, but more options, and weirdly heartfelt. For blocky characters.

Today I Die – again by Daniel Benmergui. And again the same method of interaction, only 2 endings this time. This one seems more angsty to me, but still nice.

Majesty of Colors – Similar to the ones above but by a different guy. Many endings and more game-like, but thematically similar.

Don’t Look Back – A definite game, apparently based on the Greek story of Orpheus. Except instead of a musical instrument, you have a gun. Altogether a nice flash game showing the futility of love, the inevitability of death, and the non-necessity of amazing graphics to tell a story.

Games are fun.

I saw this years ago on Bravo, and I found it delightfully weird, but I suspect it’s an acquired taste.

So I resolve my soul to free, through blackest magic and dark alchemy

Joey, my parents dog, is now down an eye. He had some sort of blockage that caused the normal pressure in one of the eyes to leap something like 4 times normal, causing a slipped lens (or perhaps due to it). We noticed it when I was taking care of things while my parents went out and I destroyed their computer. All we knew was that he would squint with that eye occasionally, and were hoping it wasn’t going to be an issue. But the area became swelled with infection, and even began affecting the other eye. My mother spent a week at the vet’s where essentially she was told the eye would have to come out. If it didn’t then, it would probably eventually, he was already blind in that eye due to the damage already done. Then she was told that during the operation, there was a 1 in 4000 chance they’d damage the nerves such that he would be completely blind. And that was only if he survived the operation at all since he’d have to go under general anethetic, which always carries risks.

In the end though, as of Friday last week, he was done, sans an eye, still with vision in the other one, and home again, though wearing a lampshade around his neck for two weeks. He still needs to have the other eye monitored, but for the moment it seems the worst is over. He’ll probably bump into things for a while, but he was doing that anyway even with two good eyes.

Joey in 2007.

In other news, I lost an external drive this weekend, I seem to have bad luck with hardware now. I had a 320GB drive that was kind of flaky ever since I got it. I was hoping it would work better on Vista (perhaps with a better driver) but windows would still report disk errors with it in the event log, and lose sight of the drive contents until it was power-cycled (the drive, not the computer). Anyway, I bought a 1TB drive and copied all the stuff over from the flaky drive. I was originally planning to just format it, but I decided to run the windows version of Disk Doctor, having it scan for bad sectors and all. It was taking a long time, so I left it to run overnight. I got up the next day to find that the window was already closed, so I had no idea what the results would have been. I checked the contents of the drive, but it didn’t see anything, so I power cycled it, and it still didn’t have anything. On further inspection, it said the file system was RAW. So trying to fix the drive utterly destroyed it, oh well, I copied the stuff off, so I’ll just format it. Trying that just has a dialog pop up immediately saying the format failed. I’m not sure what else to do, but since it has a history of acting up, I’ll just retire it outright.

It was my Strange drive. I named my volumes (and wrote in ink on the enclosure) for quarks. I didn’t really plan to have many drives, so I thought 6 names would be enough. I currently have Top (1TB), Bottom (500GB), Up (250GB at work right now), Down (250 GB), Charm (500GB), and Strange (320GB and dead). These are all connected to the Vista machine via a USB hub. They sit on a shelving unit next to my desk that I got for expressely for these drives. Alicia was over and saw them for the first time and was shocked at all the storage, heh. I also have an unnamed drive that isn’t connected up that I used to backup my internal drives on the old XP box. The backups were done ad-hoc and quite old, it’s basically emergency backup to have something. I need to figure out a proper backup strategy.

So these past few months have been pretty unpleasant. Computers dying, cameras breaking, and even the family dog going under the knife. Hopefully the fullness of spring will bring nicer things.

Updated: nicer things failed to be brought, as Joey’s other eye went soon after and had to be removed. He’s now blind, but seems to be coping okay.

For Vera’s birthday, we went to Medieval Times, which is something I’ve wanted to go to for a long while, though I hadn’t thought of it for years. Though of course the first trick was to get down there, which was further away than I first thought. I’m not particularly adept at getting around via busses and streetcars as I’m not particularly aware of them or the routes. So I got a general gist of where the place was, which was beyond the exhibition area and I figured I could find it from the ground.

I headed to Union and there were all sorts of helpful signs saying “This way to Exhibition streetcar” and the last stop was called Exhibition loop, it was hard to get it wrong, and in a twist, I didn’t. Though once I arrived, I wasn’t sure where to go. I thought the roof of the place was multicoloured and that I’d be able to spot it, but it’s actually just red. I was mistaken due to seeing the roof from google maps across VPN into work, which I had set to a low colour, and it was zoomed out, so all of that made it look different than it was. And besides, I couldn’t really spot it from the ground anyway. I was hoping for “This was to Medival Times” but found none. I did find some map kiosks around, but none of them told me where I was on it, so I only had a vague idea where I was given the giant building I was next to, but couldn’t decide on a bearing, and ended up going the complete wrong way. I had maybe 15 minutes left until the meeting time, so I figured I wouldn’t make it, but as I was walking back, Chez and Alicia drove up, having spotted me. Even heading in the right direction, I still would have had problems finding it.

So we arrived, and went into the ticket line, but it was kind of baffling. They asked us for a confirmation number, which we had, and then asked if we had tickets, which we didn’t (or rather, Vera had the tickets). I was confused why they would ask those questions in that order, and even when we got the tickets from Vera when she arrived, and waited for others to turn up, we still didn’t know what the point of the tickets was, but it was later discovered that the tickets had to be redeemed for table marker things. We were Green 18, and eventually were seated, and we were dead last to arrive, the show started almost immediately after.

The stadium is divided into 6 segments, each a different colour, Red, Blue, Yellow, Red and Yellow, Black and White, and Green. There are also the six knights with those colours, and we were to cheer for ours and boo the others. We were seated in the very back row possible in the Green section, but it was still a good side to be on since it was the side of the stadium with the entrance for the horses, and above that the King and Queen high table, so we got to see more than some people closer to the front but on the far side of the stadium.

It was very dark in the back row, and our serving wench (which is how she introduced herself) overfilled some of our glasses. The meal was served in stages over the middle section of the show. The start of the show had some plot, but at the heart of the mealtime the show was mostly entertainment in the form I anti-euphamistically call horse torturing. Well, they had the horses running canters in circles and had them do different runs and walks, including the Spanish walk which was pretty dramatic looking. The meal itself started with Tomato Bisque, then a half roast chicken, a spare rib, half a seasoned baked potato, garlic bread and an apple pastry. All were eaten with the hands, and for us, in the dark. I have lots of food aversions, but I enjoyed the meal, the chicken was greasy and I didn’t like the leg bits much, but there was good breast meat. The spare rib was fatty at times but I enjoyed it, and all the rest was good.

As the plot developed, it turned out that our guy, the Green Knight, was the antagonist of the show, and the badass. Some of our group lamented that fact, but I liked it, as our knight was really the only one with personality. The rest were just Knights of the Realm, but our guy had an agenda and was memorable. I mean, we knew he had to be defeated in the end, but it was still fun shouting out “You Go Green” and “Down with the king”, I regret nothing. The show lasted around 2 hours, and my voice was struggling near the end. We were also witness to a proposal made just before the show, and we were generally of the opinion that we would not have done that ourselves.

After the show we went to Demetre’s, closeby to my apartment, and were given another show by our waiter who wowed us with his memory skills. We all ordered, but out of order in terms of going one way or the other around the table, and all ordered different things, and the waiter wasn’t writing anything down. Someone piped up at the end “You’re not going to remember this, are you?” and he took that challenge, and recited all of our orders instantly. We applauded. I walked home after that and cracked into some Macadamia nuts that Alicia got me from Hawaii. She also got me a pen with wood elements and it has my name engraved on it, along with Hawaiian form, Kawana. As it is one of the few pens in my apartment that actually works, I’ll be using it, and when it fails, I’ll put it on my bookshelf of memories.

Celebrating the first blog post in a while not computer-related.

So my old XP computer is doing a major fade. Over the weekend I had Norton File Protection encounter a problem and crash, well hurrah. The main drive was down to 3 gigs, and the computer seemed sluggish, so I moved or deleted stuff that freed up 36 gigs, but Norton was being a pain in the ass and holding on to all of it for it’s undelete. I really hated the protected recycle bin, but it saved me once so I was always hesitant to turn it off. I tried to empty the protected files, and it just froze up explorer. So then I tried turning it off from the Norton config screen, and trying to get there froze up norton, ah crap. I tried to manually restart the service, but it didn’t seem to like that either, so I resolved to reboot. As it shut down and then again while it was loading, I thought it was taking a very long time. And then when it was up again, it still felt sluggish, even after waiting for the inevitable startup crap to finish up. Process explorer showed that the Interrupts pseudo-task was doing little spikes here and there, 1% here, and then maybe a minute later, jump up to 20% for a second, then back down to nothing again for a while. I immediately felt uneasy… something was up, I knew it didn’t normally do that. But I left it for a bit thinking maybe I missed it before.

During the week, it occurred to me why windows might be slow and why interrupts would be running. Something I had read about a few years ago somehow bubbled to the top, PIO transfer mode. See, device data transfer is too annoying for a CPU to usually get involved, it’s too slow, so it gets tossed off to dedicated handlers to do it behind the CPU’s back, and it’s called DMA. There are increasing levels for DMA, higher is better, and faster. Normally these are set to take the best mode available for the device and the cabling. Now, the thing I had read about was how Windows could be mean to you if you had a scratched CD or a flaky hard drive. As the operating system encounters errors from the device for those reasons (especially bad for a simple scratched CD or DVD), it steps down through the access methods until it hits the lowest level, PIO, where the CPU does the heavy lifting. Now, that’s nice and all, especially with a flaky device, keeps it alive. But windows keeps (or perhaps kept, not sure if this changed) the value forever. So one bad CD and ruin your drive essentially, by dumming it down to PIO. It can be changed, but not really easily, you can’t just tell it to be good again, you need to jump through a couple hoops.

Unfortunately, my hard drive was set to this PIO mode, so it was slow as a river of bricks. Now, I started looking up how to reset it to its former glory, but checking the event log showed me why it was dropped to PIO at all.

Warning:An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.
Error:The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

What? What the hell now… are you kidding? Oh dear god no…. more digital fire. And searching for these terms is no help, I found tonnes of people all asking each other if they knew what it meant, and usually the symptoms were accompanied by freezing or occasional failure to boot. Yeah, it looked bad, and the options here were no good at all. The drive could be failing… the drive controller could be failing… the motherboard could be failing. About the only non-disastrous cause was perhaps the IDE cable was screwed up. But given the age of the drive, I think it really could be dying outright. Even the secondary hard disk in the computer was getting reports of errors and a status of Healthy (At Risk) from the Disc Management snap-in, so both were heading downhill. I did entertain myself a bit trying to see if maybe it was that drive that was set to PIO and was causing all the fuss, but according to XP, Device 0 on IDE chain 0 was set to PIO, while all the others were set to high DMA levels. And even at PIO, more errors were being added to the log. There was never a problem that windows directly reported, so I guess the drive eventually responded. But I was waiting for it to just bluescreen on me at any minute, so I spent hours into the night copying, very very slowly, everything I could think of from the two internal drives to my external drives. Trouble is that stuff is everywhere, and I had to hunt around a bit.

Now I think I’ve copied everything I can, so I’ve shut down the dear old XP box. I’ll only start it again if I remember something I needed to salvage, or when I start to tinker with it. I’ll try to figure out what’s wrong with it, I mean, there seem to be several things, since when it did the hard fails with bluescreens before, I was checking the event logs a lot and hadn’t seen the hard drive related errors then, so this appears to be relatively new.

The other other thing that’s done this is one of the external drives I have, where occasionally it just dies, windows claims it can’t see anything on it, 0 bytes, but the drive is there. Also can’t safely remove it despite nothing having an open handle to it, but cycling the hard drive power makes it come back, and apparently, with no ill effect. I think I’ll need to replace that one too, but I put low priority stuff on it anyway. I was nearly going to buy a NAS recently too, with dual 1-TB drives for it, on Raid-1, but I can’t justify the expense to myself right now, proping up the economy be damned. I looked up Drobo first actually, it sounded like a neat device at the time, but it is hella expensive, no discs with it, and only recently got Network-connectivity at huge expense, so I don’t think I can go for that one either.

When my parents computer exploded when I touched it, and when we surmised (though it has not yet been confirmed) that it was due to a hard drive failure, I thought to myself, I haven’t really had a hard drive fail. Well, I had one that occasionally threw out CRC warnings, but it lasted a good long time and I replaced it with another one for capacity reasons. But I hadn’t had a big one. I thought I was due, but not this soon. I suppose I’m lucky in that I had the chance to back stuff up.

Anyone got some DAT’s they don’t need anymore… and a backup server to write to them?