Back - Sort Of
All right. I had not intended to be more or less off line for so long, but we can lay the blame squarely at the feet of an MBR virus.
The computer has been sick for a couple of months now -- sick because I'd gotten down to below 1 gig on the hard drive, and things had slowed to a snail's pace.
So, I have downloaded and backed up and deleted, and cleaned and cleaned the registry, and reinstalled the Service Pack overlay -- a good idea, by the by, once a year. With all those lines of code in the OS, small bits "erode" on the hard drive over time, and eventually, while the Operating System's redundancies can work around, it slows and slows.
And, it's much faster.
But, then the crash: my identity disappeared, along with all of my email, and my address book, and the other two computers on the network caught the MBR virus -- a particularly nasty little bastard, that, by screwing up the Master Boot Record, convinces the computer that it can't find the C: drive, and you get that happy Blue Screen of Death: "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE." And that seemingly incomprehensible STOP code, which I have, with some trepidation, learned to understand over the years.
Look: I never wanted to get into the guts of computers, but when I and "pard'ner" shot MOYST in 1997 (yes, ten years ago), he offered to put another hard drive in my Pentium 166 computer, and managed to wipe the drive that he was putting the new hard drive in to augment.
That last was the cause of some really creative and mellifluous profanity delivered in a deep basso profundo. But we move on.
A little later, I HIRED a tech to come in and resolve a problem I was having with the interrupt priorities on the sound and video cards (little did we realize at the time that using a 10 gig SCSI RAID drive and a Pentium I to edit a 108 minute feature was impossible). The "professional" techie -- whom I TOLD was NOT to fuck with the hardware or the innards of the computer, but was to ONLY resolve the software problem - waited until I was out of the room, opened the computer, and destroyed the machine. The C: drive data was eventually recovered, but that first computer was DEAD, baby.
And the bastards had the temerity to BILL us for four hours of techie time. They quickly and patronizingly told me there was no charge when I called, the bill clutched in my white knuckles.
Again, the syntax and sophistication of profanity in the English language was advanced incrementally. No acceptance of blame, or anything else. I'm sure that if I were the litigious type I'd have had good cause. But instead, I made a very serious vow: If I was going to continue to work with these infernal machines, I was going to know how to field-strip and clean them. I'd done it with my Ford Econolines over the years (Haynes and Chilton shop manuals, full and correct tool sets, and the weird tools, like the thing you use to pop the plate spring on the brake assembly when re-shoeing). And I was going to do it with computers.
So, I never let my partner -- who'd been sold to me as "Mister Computer" - touch my machine again, nor would anyone else. I got the shop manuals, and learned. My video editing computer, "Frankenstein" was built from scratch.
And, with a Pentium III, I DID finally edit and complete the feature, in 2003. It has remained in cyber-limbo these last couple of years, but that is more the fault of Alberto Gonzales than Bill Gates.
Speaking of which ... when I'd finished the film, and offloaded it, I was fixin' to grab the snippets I'd saved on the 125-gig RAID that I finished the movie with when I made the mistake of installing Windows 2000's Service Pack 4.
And it completely FUCKED my SCSI drivers, and made the drive inaccessible. And when I finally managed to get it back up (again, after advancing the Art of Cursing, Plain and Fancy), there was a Hobbsean choice: either dump the footage and start over, or spend thousands of dollars to recover the data and lose the use of the drive -- which I would have to replace.
I chose to recover the drive and lose the data. I don't regret the choice.
I built a new computer, and found that my new favorite supplier, Pinnacle, had been sold to AVID, and the upgrade to my Liquid Video NLE required Windows XP to install.
Nope. I will NEVER buy another Windows Operating system, and, were I to end up with a computer that has it pre-loaded, I will WIPE the hard-drive, and install Windows 2000 SP4. As soon as practicable, I migrate to LINUX, but for the time being, I have too many graphics programs that only work in this environment, and I'm not cutting off my nose to spite Bill Gates' face.
Well, we're the same age, you know.
And I appreciate the fact that you young people have such disdain for my generation as computer illiterates. My generation felt the same way about Television illiterates. The TV and I showed up in the same year. Cousins older than me remembered a time before TV.
As some people now remember a time before video games. (Or, more correctly, computer games). I played those old games on the BASIC computer in the basement of the TCU science building. You know, the ones that printed out each screen on another accordion fold of a box of computer paper: the same ones that Nolan Bushnell played, and turned him on so much that he invented PONG, and founded ATARI.
And, unlike most of my generation, I never pretended that computers were going away.
But yeah, I understand the contempt, the generational gulf that separates the digital generation from the old analog humans. Hell, I remember learning how to type computer punch cards for my FORTRAN IV course in '74. Computers today bear so little resemblance to computers then that they hardly seem worthy of the same name.
Anyway, I built Big Blue in 2005, and networked the computers, etc. etc. and I can't believe that once we thought we could shoot a video feature on a Sony VX1000 with its primitive 32k sampling and edit it in Spark in Windows 95.
Seems almost as long ago as punching cards to run FORTRAN IV programs (you filled out a job request form, wrapped it around the cards, choked a rubber band around it, and threw it in the bin. The next day, IF you were lucky, the printout and your card stack were waiting. Usually, the cards were sitting, lonely save for an "error" code in your job request form.).
Long story short: I've taken a month to retool, defrag, backup, move, delete, clean, defrag, etc. etc. with all computers.
Columns run through my mind, alternating with strings of obscenities as delicately constructed as Austrian pastries. But I don't write them. Instead, I fix.
Yes. (See Theodore Sturgeon's short story "Bright Segment.") I fix.
Besides, you haven't needed anyone to note the media manipulations (upstaging the Congress with the "surge" brouhaha), the insane rationalizations about the war, or any of the rest. I said it was wrong before the fact. During the fact and after the fact. I've noted at length the manner in which we are propagandized and lied to by the alleged guardians of our freedom, the "media."
Howie and the Gang have been silent (although the Sam Adams Alliance is a-fixin' to birth their promised webpage). The "CitizenFOIA" bunch have failed to follow through with "Freedom of Information" data mining project, and the mainstream media dropped Howie like a hot potato to instead fawn after Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - editorial fantasies always being preferable to reporting facts, evidently.
No: there's been nothing to do except to clean my computers and watch the Grand Guignol tragicomedy continue to unfold.
There's a really bright comet circling the sun.
The sabers are being rattled again.
The monkeys of the Right have fresh targets of hatred to fling their feces at.
The Democratic Left continues to spend more time eating their own than fighting the Limbaugh Loonies.
And George W. Bush, idiot bastard son (see Zappa), draft dodger, usurper and mass murderer continues to be the most frightening moron on the face of planet Earth.
So there's been no great need for commentary.
But ... take a look at Sandlapper's excellent piece on Betsy DeVos and "All Children Matter" at http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/11/234443/202
I'll be talking about that in future.
Meantime, the siren song of the microchips calls to me, and the crew has failed to secure me to the mast.
Courage.
.
The computer has been sick for a couple of months now -- sick because I'd gotten down to below 1 gig on the hard drive, and things had slowed to a snail's pace.
So, I have downloaded and backed up and deleted, and cleaned and cleaned the registry, and reinstalled the Service Pack overlay -- a good idea, by the by, once a year. With all those lines of code in the OS, small bits "erode" on the hard drive over time, and eventually, while the Operating System's redundancies can work around, it slows and slows.
And, it's much faster.
But, then the crash: my identity disappeared, along with all of my email, and my address book, and the other two computers on the network caught the MBR virus -- a particularly nasty little bastard, that, by screwing up the Master Boot Record, convinces the computer that it can't find the C: drive, and you get that happy Blue Screen of Death: "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE." And that seemingly incomprehensible STOP code, which I have, with some trepidation, learned to understand over the years.
Look: I never wanted to get into the guts of computers, but when I and "pard'ner" shot MOYST in 1997 (yes, ten years ago), he offered to put another hard drive in my Pentium 166 computer, and managed to wipe the drive that he was putting the new hard drive in to augment.
That last was the cause of some really creative and mellifluous profanity delivered in a deep basso profundo. But we move on.
A little later, I HIRED a tech to come in and resolve a problem I was having with the interrupt priorities on the sound and video cards (little did we realize at the time that using a 10 gig SCSI RAID drive and a Pentium I to edit a 108 minute feature was impossible). The "professional" techie -- whom I TOLD was NOT to fuck with the hardware or the innards of the computer, but was to ONLY resolve the software problem - waited until I was out of the room, opened the computer, and destroyed the machine. The C: drive data was eventually recovered, but that first computer was DEAD, baby.
And the bastards had the temerity to BILL us for four hours of techie time. They quickly and patronizingly told me there was no charge when I called, the bill clutched in my white knuckles.
Again, the syntax and sophistication of profanity in the English language was advanced incrementally. No acceptance of blame, or anything else. I'm sure that if I were the litigious type I'd have had good cause. But instead, I made a very serious vow: If I was going to continue to work with these infernal machines, I was going to know how to field-strip and clean them. I'd done it with my Ford Econolines over the years (Haynes and Chilton shop manuals, full and correct tool sets, and the weird tools, like the thing you use to pop the plate spring on the brake assembly when re-shoeing). And I was going to do it with computers.
So, I never let my partner -- who'd been sold to me as "Mister Computer" - touch my machine again, nor would anyone else. I got the shop manuals, and learned. My video editing computer, "Frankenstein" was built from scratch.
And, with a Pentium III, I DID finally edit and complete the feature, in 2003. It has remained in cyber-limbo these last couple of years, but that is more the fault of Alberto Gonzales than Bill Gates.
Speaking of which ... when I'd finished the film, and offloaded it, I was fixin' to grab the snippets I'd saved on the 125-gig RAID that I finished the movie with when I made the mistake of installing Windows 2000's Service Pack 4.
And it completely FUCKED my SCSI drivers, and made the drive inaccessible. And when I finally managed to get it back up (again, after advancing the Art of Cursing, Plain and Fancy), there was a Hobbsean choice: either dump the footage and start over, or spend thousands of dollars to recover the data and lose the use of the drive -- which I would have to replace.
I chose to recover the drive and lose the data. I don't regret the choice.
I built a new computer, and found that my new favorite supplier, Pinnacle, had been sold to AVID, and the upgrade to my Liquid Video NLE required Windows XP to install.
Nope. I will NEVER buy another Windows Operating system, and, were I to end up with a computer that has it pre-loaded, I will WIPE the hard-drive, and install Windows 2000 SP4. As soon as practicable, I migrate to LINUX, but for the time being, I have too many graphics programs that only work in this environment, and I'm not cutting off my nose to spite Bill Gates' face.
Well, we're the same age, you know.
And I appreciate the fact that you young people have such disdain for my generation as computer illiterates. My generation felt the same way about Television illiterates. The TV and I showed up in the same year. Cousins older than me remembered a time before TV.
As some people now remember a time before video games. (Or, more correctly, computer games). I played those old games on the BASIC computer in the basement of the TCU science building. You know, the ones that printed out each screen on another accordion fold of a box of computer paper: the same ones that Nolan Bushnell played, and turned him on so much that he invented PONG, and founded ATARI.
And, unlike most of my generation, I never pretended that computers were going away.
But yeah, I understand the contempt, the generational gulf that separates the digital generation from the old analog humans. Hell, I remember learning how to type computer punch cards for my FORTRAN IV course in '74. Computers today bear so little resemblance to computers then that they hardly seem worthy of the same name.
Anyway, I built Big Blue in 2005, and networked the computers, etc. etc. and I can't believe that once we thought we could shoot a video feature on a Sony VX1000 with its primitive 32k sampling and edit it in Spark in Windows 95.
Seems almost as long ago as punching cards to run FORTRAN IV programs (you filled out a job request form, wrapped it around the cards, choked a rubber band around it, and threw it in the bin. The next day, IF you were lucky, the printout and your card stack were waiting. Usually, the cards were sitting, lonely save for an "error" code in your job request form.).
Long story short: I've taken a month to retool, defrag, backup, move, delete, clean, defrag, etc. etc. with all computers.
Columns run through my mind, alternating with strings of obscenities as delicately constructed as Austrian pastries. But I don't write them. Instead, I fix.
Yes. (See Theodore Sturgeon's short story "Bright Segment.") I fix.
Besides, you haven't needed anyone to note the media manipulations (upstaging the Congress with the "surge" brouhaha), the insane rationalizations about the war, or any of the rest. I said it was wrong before the fact. During the fact and after the fact. I've noted at length the manner in which we are propagandized and lied to by the alleged guardians of our freedom, the "media."
Howie and the Gang have been silent (although the Sam Adams Alliance is a-fixin' to birth their promised webpage). The "CitizenFOIA" bunch have failed to follow through with "Freedom of Information" data mining project, and the mainstream media dropped Howie like a hot potato to instead fawn after Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - editorial fantasies always being preferable to reporting facts, evidently.
No: there's been nothing to do except to clean my computers and watch the Grand Guignol tragicomedy continue to unfold.
There's a really bright comet circling the sun.
The sabers are being rattled again.
The monkeys of the Right have fresh targets of hatred to fling their feces at.
The Democratic Left continues to spend more time eating their own than fighting the Limbaugh Loonies.
And George W. Bush, idiot bastard son (see Zappa), draft dodger, usurper and mass murderer continues to be the most frightening moron on the face of planet Earth.
So there's been no great need for commentary.
But ... take a look at Sandlapper's excellent piece on Betsy DeVos and "All Children Matter" at http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/11/234443/202
I'll be talking about that in future.
Meantime, the siren song of the microchips calls to me, and the crew has failed to secure me to the mast.
Courage.
.
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