Annals of cultural transmission
Scene: The dinner table.
Father: What did you do in school today?
Five-year-old: It was too cold to go out for recess, so we saw a movie.
Father: What was it about?
Five-year-old: It was about a snowman who came to life.
Father: So you saw Frosty the Snowman?
Seven-year-old: How did it work? And how did he die?
The autumn mists have come to New England...
…and a land called Honalee has a new permanent resident.
Barukh dayyan ha-emet, and rest in peace, Aunt Mary.
Dept. of “you can’t win for losing”
I’ve been trying to protect myself from the headaches of another massive hard-drive failure by backing up our home systems to Amazon S3, first by using JungleDisk, and more recently by using duplicity. (JungleDisk is a fine program—it’s one of the few pieces of software running on my Linux box that I’ve put down money for, and I’ve never regretted doing so—but the basic version is oriented towards backing up one user’s personal files, and knows nothing of Unix ownership, file permissions, etc.)
The one problem with this approach is that we have about 20 GB of music files on our desktop system, and our DSL connection is only 128 Kbps upstream, so the music stuff is not being backed up as frequently as everything else.
But this past week, we were on vacation in New York, and my wife and I independently hit on this brilliant idea: start One Great Big Backup right before we leave, and it should be done before we get back. (Well … mostly done. I should have worked out the math first. But that was the least of my problems.)
So I set One Great Big Backup to kick off at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning, come back at about 4:30 Friday afternoon (the bus having arrived in Boston an hour and a half late), and discover that our system is even less responsive than it usually is under high load, and the console is printing out disturbing messages regarding the hard drive, containing cheerful messages like this:
SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake Dispr LinkSeq TrStaTrns }
After a panicked reboot and some more panicked fumbling with fsck, I gave up and shut the machine down.
Did I mention that this is the computer that controls our X10 system for turning lights on and off at appropriate times?
Anyway, on Saturday night, I did a more sober assessment of the damage, and determined that:
- One Great Big Backup had not finished and seemed hopelessly corrupt, so the music files had not been backed up.
- The most recent backup of our music to JungleDisk had happened, umm, some time in July of 2008.
- Regular daily backups had been going on as expected, so at least the regular desktop files were safe.
- Googling the cheerful messages from the hard drive turned up advice along the lines of “hard drives are cheap, do you really want to keep using one that’s flaking out on you?”
So today’s adventures included a journey to Micro Center, where we picked up
- a Hitachi 500-GB internal SATA hard drive, on sale
- a Hitachi 640-GB external USB hard drive, on sale
- an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD
When I tried to install the first of these items, a little nub of plastic broke off the end of the SATA cable. Also, the drive came with two machine screws, wheres the drive bay in our desktop machine requires four screws on a drive to keep it in place. Maybe that’s why these things were on sale. Hopefully, the Micro Center folks won’t give us grief about replacing it tomorrow.
The second one seems to be working so far as well as one might expect, although VFAT’s limitations on file names and size make my attempts at recovery and forensics… well, I’ve used about as much creativity as I think I can stand right now.
The third item, though, has worked like a charm: I booted from the CD, plugged in the external drive, mounted the partition that had the music on it, and as far as I can tell, all those files were copied over without a hitch. I would have backed up disk images from the broken drive to the external one as well, but then I ran into VFAT’s 4-GB-per-file limit. See previous comment about creativity.
Warming up for “can Superman beat up the Hulk?”
The Seven-Year-Old asked me if an AT-TE walker is bigger than an Oliphaunt.
Self-promotion dept.
A short story of mine, “Very Truly Yours”, has been published in the (semi-pro) webzine Polu Texni. Seven thousand words is apparently a bit long for the Web, so they broke it into four parts: I II III IV.
After reading the first half of the story, Michael A. Burstein, an actual award-winning professional SF writer, said “the idea behind the story is fascinating… the voice of the first person protagonist is compelling, and… I am now eager for Part III and the resolution”. I hope he is not disappointed.
Thanks to Dawn Albright for publishing me, thanks to Michael for the kind words, and thanks to all the folks at the old Critical Mass writers’ workshop for showing me where previous drafts of the story went wrong.
Sic transit gloria startup
My employer just laid off a bunch of people. I, thank God and Adam Smith, did not get the axe, but there are good engineers (and sales people and so on) who are pounding the pavement now.
I told a friend of mine who was laid off that despite all the bad economic news, the job market is better in IT than it is in the general economy, and better than it was after the first dot-com bubble popped. Please help prove me right; if you have any leads for software jobs in the Boston area, let me know and I will pass them along to the appropriate folks.
Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
I spent last night in my local hospital for a sleep study. The guy who called to pre-register me sounded like he had been up for 48 consecutive hours.
They’ll have the results back to my doctor in two or three weeks. Take your time, guys! Don’t stay up late on my account!
I'd be happy to live anywhere else
Yesterday's Globe had an article (link will probably rot tomorrow) about how Allston, Massachusetts has been honored by inclusion in The Absolutely Worst Places To Live In America. The book—whose author, a Boston College alumnus, can speak of Allston from personal experience—refers to my neighboring neighborhood as “a melting pot of upper-middle-class white kids eager to experience a brief taste of rebellious semiurban squalor” full of “faux Irish pubs, garbage, vomiting in the shrubbery, drunken brawling, late night/early morning car alarms”.
This reminded me of the first two years of my marriage, when we lived in a basement apartment at the corner of Allston and Kelton streets. One morning we woke up to find a pool of vomit on the path leading to our door; judging from the residue along the outer wall and windowsills, it had come from someone living four stories up. Unfortunately, I was unable to rouse the perpetrator by pounding on his back door (at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning), so I left a note of complaint with the landlord, complete with a diagram of the splatter marks. (To be fair, the landlord was letting us have the apartment at below market value, which, considering what market value was back then, was a sorely needed favor.)
I guess if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.
A prayer and a legal declaration for Erev Yom Kippur
Excerpt from Tefillah Zakkah:
Knowing as I do that hardly anyone is a righteous person who has not sinned against another one, either financially or physically, in word or in deed—this makes my heart tremble within me, because Yom Kippur does not atone for interpersonal sins until the offender appeases the victim. Regarding this, my heart is broken within me and my bones shake, because not even death atones. Therefore, I offer prayer before You that You pity me, and give me favor, kindness, and mercy in Your eyes, and in the eyes of all humanity. So I hereby completely forgive anyone who has sinned against me, either physically or financially, or one who gossipped about me, or even lied about me. So too, anyone who harmed me physically or financially. And for every sin that one person can commit against another, except for money that I could collect in a court of law, and except for someone who sins against me and says “I will hurt him and he will forgive me”—except for these, I completely forgive; and let no one be punished on my account. And just as I forgive everyone, so too may You put my favor before everyone else, so that they will completely forgive me.
Born on the 9th of Av
We are pleased to announce the arrival of a new tax deduction. The vital statistics are as follows:
| Date/time of birth | August 3, 2006, 12:25 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time |
| Place of birth | St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts |
| Weight | 8 pounds, 6 ounces, 6 drams, 8 grains |
| Length | 20 inches |
| Head circumference | 1411/64 inches |
| Apgar scores | 8 and 9 |
The bris, God willing, will be at 6:00 p.m. this coming Thursday, August 10, at Congregation Kadimah-Toras Moshe, at 113 Washington St., Brighton MA. A light dinner and mincha/ma`ariv service will follow.
For the ride home from the synagogue, I suggested hanging a “JUST CIRCUMCISED” sign on the back of our minivan, but for some reason my wife vetoed the idea.
There is a Jewish tradition that the Messiah will be born on the 9th of Av, the fast day mourning the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish nation. Unfortunately, since I’m almost certainly not a descendant of King David, my son, despite his birthday, is almost certainly ineligible to be the Messiah.
He didn’t take the news very well.
