Life Less Literary

How fucking prescient am I?

D:\ is not accessible.

The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

AAARRRGHHH!!!!!!

Ah well, there goes every photo I ever took since I got my digital camera, and a few more beside. There goes all the websites I ever built. There goes everything.

On the bright side, my new fan has blue LEDs in it. How cool is that?

Seriously though, I think this may not be the end of the world because (a) my computer is acting so screwy, I seriously hope it may change its mind again after a few more reboots, or a serious dis- and re-mantling, or a quick rattle of the sledgehammer, or something. Also, I have the old RAID mirror, which at least contains all this stuff up until a few months ago. Still… AAARGH.

And when I say acting screwy, I mean like:

• The on/off switch has more-or-less stopped working, although when I’m fiddling around inside the box I can usually, unintentionally, get the machine to switch on by touching an IDE cable.
• The last few reboots the monitor wasn’t getting any signal from the graphics card. Then suddenly it did.
• The DVD writer only writes things when it feels like it, on its terms (and it recently went offline, and then came back as “new hardware”).
• As already mentioned, hard disks are dropping like flies.
• One of the hard-disk cooler fans has developed noisy bearings. I hate noisy fans (my new fan is super-silent. Oh, and it has blue LEDs, did I mention that? Yet they still only charged me the price of a normal LED-less 35dB fan).
• I don’t know, just fucking everything, alright? You want more? You want suffering? Well fuck you!

So, I may be reading too much into this, but I think the message is (1) get a new computer and (2) get a proper backup strategy. Sadly, I am too poor for (1) and too fucking useless for (2). So what do I do? I’ll tell you what I do, I run into the street and cry “why me, God, why me”.

Also on the plus side, I just watched a DVD of Lost in La Mancha. And I think I’ve got problems?

Somebody please send me a free computer. A G5 would be really nice, but I’m not fussy. Just make sure it’s chocka with hard disks. And memory, I like memory.

Over the past nine months or so, I’ve suffered three hard disk failures (another one went for good this morning). Prior to that, I’ve been computing for over ten years without a single failure. What has brought all this on? Are hard disks getting flakier? Am I just making heavier use of them? Is it because I built my own system this time around (about two years ago) and did a crap job of it? Is it because, for various reasons, I never switch my PC off these days? Is my system running too hot?

Well, at least with this latest failure (and I think the one before that), the latter reason seems likely. When I opened up the box to see what was wrong, I was amazed to find the edges of the hard disk units hotter than the centre of the sun (quite a lot hotter). I replaced my motherboard about six months ago (because prior to that, for about a year I had been suffering occasional reboots and other strange errors, which I diagnosed as being probably caused by a faulty IDE controller). Unfortunately, when I got the new motherboard out of the box I discovered it only had one three-pin power connector for a fan (my old board had two). I hooked up one fan (at least, I’m fairly sure I did…) and made a mental note to buy myself a power splitter as soon as I had a chance. Which, of course, I never did. And subsequently, it seems that I have accidentally or deliberately unplugged the sole remaining fan and forgotten to plug it back in. So my system was running, complete with about five hard disks and a couple of CD/DVD drives, with just the CPU and power supply fans to cool it (plus a couple of small fans on individual hard drive caddies), no air intake/outlet fans for the case. Hence, unsurprisingly, things got hot. I thought I had some kinda detector on the BIOS which was supposed to warn me when this kinda thing is going to happen, but either it wasn’t working properly or the part of the case where the detector is situated never got hot enough. It did seem to be in particular the part of the case where the hard disks were all crammed together (which is well away from the motherboard) that was sizzling.

So, I headed down to PC World to try and make an emergency power-splitter purchase. They didn’t have any, so instead I bought a fan which comes with an adapter to run off a disk-drive power plug (and I think they undercharged me: at least something good happened today). Came home and plugged it all in. I had a slim hope that, once the system had cooled down, the disk drive might come back online. No such luck.

Amazingly, I have so far been fortunate in what I’ve lost during these crashes. The first disk to go was a RAID mirror of my data drive, so nothing gone there. The second was my “junk” drive which, although it contained one or two things which I didn’t have elsewhere (like archives of old applications, and a couple of DVD movies waiting to burn) had nothing vital on it. The third was my MP3 drive which, although I lost a few files through bad sectors or mis-indexed blocks before it went for good, I managed to back up onto another drive once I saw which way it was headed. But I’m sure my “luck” can’t hold out. I really must burn some DVDs of my last three years digital photography, or else I’m really going to regret it.

On Thursday, I finally did something very brave. I chucked out the TV (actually, don’t tell Rowan this, but the TV is still in the loft - I wanted to find the remote control before I finally sell it/pass it on to the Oxfam shop). This was largely inspired by Rowan’s outburst of arguing and screaming fits on Thursday morning as I tried to get her to school, following a late and argumentative night that she spent watching the godawful “Celebrity Awards” on ITV.

So far, I’m really really glad I did it. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I feel that TV consumes far too much of our lives (to be honest, more Gill & the kids lives than mine, so I guess that’s rather mean of me, but all the same I know that when I watch it I get sucked in and addicted). I was also slightly prompted by recalling the Ray Bradbury story The Pedestrian a couple of days back and, after doing a quick Google for it, finding this page. I remember the story as being more about laziness in general, but reflecting on it I can now see that it was prompted by the insidious evil of TV.

Anyway, results so far have been very good. Rowan, predictably, kept breaking into weepy fits on Thursday night: I can understand and expected this, I guess she feels like she’s been bereaved, but I also think (hope) she’ll get over it. Her best complaint so far has been “now I can’t be in our band at school because I can’t watch CBeebies and make up joke songs based on all the programs’ theme tunes”. Lola took it a lot more calmly (yeah, get ‘em while they’re young). The conversation with her went something like this:

D: I’m getting rid of the TV.
L: But don’t do that. I like watching TV.
D: We’ll do other fun things instead.
L: Oh. OK.

She’s complained again a couple of times since (and I have to admit that the two programs I will miss most will probably be Big Cook Little Cook and Balamory. Oh, and Formula One) but she’s largely not bothered. We still have the projector and DVD player, so on special pre-arranged nights we can have movie time and schedule our own entertainment rather than be force-fed whatever crap the TV companies come up with. And since Thursday, we have done lots of going to the park, reading stories, making things, talking to one another, eating together, and generally all the things that are cool about being a family.

Every once in a while, I get caught up in an online discussion which makes wasting half of ones life discussing things online all worthwhile. The kebab-powered spaceship thread on the Empty Space forum was just such a conversation. And now, over on the Krautrock messageboard, the topic of conversation has weaved its way from technicolour musicals, via Deep Purple/Chas’n'Dave crossover music (with a quick stop for rabbit from Sainsbury’s) to who is the gayest Krautrock band: Kraftwerk, Can or Cluster (with a special Kids-TV mention for Gong).