Google+ just rocks. I’ve met more smart, creative people on Google+ than you can shake a stick at. There’s a lot of stuff that Google’s gotten right with Google+, and the features just keep coming. It’s open social, wrapped around the whole (online) world. If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend having a look.

Facebook is, well, Facebook. People had been pestering me, to one extent or another, and yet I resisted. So after years of holding out I finally took an account there some months back. Over the Christmas holidays I became a little more aggressive about establishing relationships which, as everyone knows, must be reciprocal. Managing Facebook is, frankly, a pain in the ass. But I have been catching some up with people I forgot I knew. Remember that old platitude, “we are the people our parents warned us about”?

I’ve drawn the line at games and apps on those platforms. They’re just too invasive. The closest I came was with a billiards game on Google+. It looked interesting, like it might be fun while I waited for this process or that to finish, so I ran the installer. The first thing it did immerse me in a competitive world of other players. Statistics,rankings, invitations to play, and more! All I wanted to do was bang some balls around now and then, not make a career out of it! I uninstalled, and so much for that.

I guess I’ve got some stuff to fix.

Sometime after the build, Seagate brought their hybrid drives to market. Hybrids combine a conventional spinning disk and conventional cache with a few gigabytes of SLC NAND memory configured as a small SSD. The system sees the drive as it would any other drive; an Adaptive Memory (Seagate proprietary) algorithm monitors data use and keeps frequently used stuff on the SSD. You’ll find people arguing over whether or not a hybrid drive provides any kind of performance boost. I wrote about my experiences with the Seagate Momentus XT (ST95005620AS) back in June 2010. Today when I build a multiple drive system I routinely spec a hybrid as a boot drive. It’s cheap and it helps.

So about a month ago I ran across a good deal on a fast SSD, a Corsair Force Series GT (CSSD-F240GBGT-BK) and I jumped on it. The specs are just tits: sequential reads and writes of 555 and 525 MB/s respectively. (Sure, that was with a SATA 3 interface and my motherboard only supports SATA 2; I wouldn’t see numbers like that, but still… It even looks great.

Integrating the thing into a working system was a bit of a challenge, mostly because I didn’t want to purchase additional software simply to clone the existing boot drive. I’ve got no trouble paying for software I use; it simply seemed like too much for something to be used but once. So part of the challenge was to find a cost-free alternative.

Strategy and Concerns

The general strategy would be to clone the current two-partition boot drive to the SSD, swap it in and enjoy the performance boost. The SSD partitions would need to be aligned, of course, and somewhere along the way the C partition would need to shrink to fit onto the smaller SSD.

The top concerns came down to security and reliability. Erasing a conventional hard drive is easy: repeatedly write random data to each block. You can’t do that with SSDs. Their blocks have a specific (and comparatively short) lifetime and so on-board wear-leveling routines become important. When data is overwritten, for example, the drive writes the data elsewhere and marks the old blocks for reuse. And unlike conventional drives, it’s not enough to simply write over a block marked for reuse; the entire block must first be erased. The bottom line is you can’t ever know with certainty whether or not a SSD is ever clear of confidential data. Disposing of them securely, then, means total destruction.

As for reliability, a conventional hard drive has to have some pretty serious problems before it becomes impossible to recover at least some data. There’s generally a bit of warning – they get noisy, start throwing errors, or something else that you notice – before they fail completely. Most often an SSD will simply fail. From working to not, just like that. And when that happens there’s not much to be done. This makes the issue of backups a little more thorny. If it contained confidential data at the time of failure you’ve got a hard choice to make: eat the cost and destroy the device, or RMA it back to the manufacturer (losing control of your data).

Considering backups, you can see that monolithic backups aren’t the best solution because they’re outdated as soon as they’re written. Instead, a continuous backup application, one that notices and writes changed files, with versioning, seems prudent.

In my case, this is to be a Windows 7 boot drive and and all confidential user data is already on other storage. The Force Series GT drive has a 2,000,000 hour MTBF, fairly high.

Software

SSDs are fast but they’re relatively small. It’s almost certain that existing boot partitions will be too big to fit and mine is no exception. Windows 7 Disk Manager will allow you to resize partitions if the conditions on those partitions are exactly right. There are commercial programs that will do the job where Windows won’t but my favorite is MiniTool Partition Wizard. I didn’t really want to do that in this instance. The fundamental problem I had with pre-shrinking is that it would involve mucking with a nicely working system. Come trouble, I wanted to simply pop my original drive back in the system, boot and get back to work.

For cloning and shrinking partitions there are several free or almost free applications. I found that most of them have drawbacks of one sort or another. I’ve used Acronis before – Acronis supplies OEM versions of their True Image software to some drive manufacturers, it’s an excellent product. But their free product won’t resize a partition image, bummer. I used EaseUS some years back, too, but a bad run-in once with their “rescue media” – in that case a bootable USB stick. My disks got hosed pretty bad from simply booting the thing and I… wasn’t pleased. Maybe they’ve gotten better, people say good things about ‘em, but I wasn’t confident… Paragon seemed very highly rated but in testing I had too many validation failures with their images. Apparently the current version is worse than the back revs. Whatever, I was still uneasy. I ended up settling on Macrium Reflect from Paramount Software UK Ltd. For no rational reason the name of this product bothered me, sending it to the bottom of the test list. Macrium. The word makes me think of death by fire. I was reluctant to even install it. About the only negative think I’ve got to say about Macrium is that it takes a fair bit of effort to build the ‘rescue disk’ – bootable media to allow you to rebuild a failed boot volume from your backup image(s). The rescue media builder downloads and installs, from a Microsoft site, the Windows Automated Installation Kit. WAIK weighs in at more than 2 GB. The end result is a small ISO from which you can make bootable media of your choice. Except for that final burn – you’re on your own for that – the process is mostly automated; it just takes a while. Probably has to do with licensing or something.

Finally, I bought a copy of Genie Timeline Pro to provide the day-to-day realtime backup insurance, mentioned earlier, that I wanted.

Preparation for Migration

I started by installing both Gene Timeline Pro and Macrium Reflect and familiarized myself with each. I built the rescue media for each, booted from the media, and restored stuff to a spare drive in order to test. It’s an important step that many omit, but a backup that doesn’t work, for whatever reason, is worse than no backup at all.

I did some additional maintenance and configuration which would affect the C: partition. I disabled indexing and shrunk the page file to 2GB. The box has 8GB RAM and never pages. I suppose I could omit the page file entirely, but a warning is better than a BSOD for failure to page. I got rid of all the temp junk and performed the usual tune-up steps that Windows continues to need from time to time.

Satisfied, I imaged the System Reserved partition and the C: partition of my boot volume, verifying the images afterward. For each partition, which I backed up with separate operations, I used the Advanced Settings in Macrium Reflect to make an Intelligent Sector copy. This means that unused sectors aren’t copied, effectively shrinking the images. Then I installed the SSD via an eSATA port. Yes, this meant it would run even slower than SATA 2 but it saved a trip inside the box.

It was at this step that I noticed the only negative thing about this drive. The SATA cable is a bit of a loose fit. It doesn’t accept a retaining clip, if your cable is so equipped. Ensure there’s no tension on a cable that might dislodge it.

Creating Aligned Partitions

Partition alignment is important on SSDs both for performance and long life. Because of the way they work, most will read and write 4K pages. A very simplistic explanation is that when a partition is not aligned on a 4K boundary, most writes will require two pages rather than one which decreases performance dramatically and wears the memory faster. (There’s more to it than that, really, but you can seek that out on your own. The Web’s a great teacher. Being the curious sort I learned more than I needed to.)  Windows 7, when IPLed, will notice the SSD and build correctly aligned partitions for you. Some commercial disk cloning software will handle it automatically, too. But migrating users are on their own. Incidentally, it’s theoretically possible to adjust partition alignment on the fly, but if you think about the logistics of how this might be done – shifting an entire partition this way or that by some number of 512 byte blocks to a 4K boundary – you’ll realize it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Better to simply get it right in the first place.

Fortunately it’s easy!

Using an elevated command prompt (or, in my case, a PowerShell), use DISKPART. In my case, my existing System Reserved partition was 71 MB and change, and the remainder of the SSD would become my C: partition.

diskpart
list disk
select disk <n> (where <n>is the disk number of the SSD)
create partition primary size=72 align=1024
active (the System Reserved partition needs to be Active)
create partition primary align=1024 (no size specification means use the remaining available space)
exit

You can also use DISKPART to check the alignment. I’ll use mine as an example.

diskpart
list disk
select disk <n> (where <n>is the disk number of the SSD)
list partition
exit

My partition list looks like this.

Partition ### Type             Size    Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1   Primary           70 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2   Primary          223 GB   73 MB

To check the alignment, divide the figure in the Offset column, expressed in kilobytes, by 4. If it divides evenly then it’s aligned. For Partition 1, the System Reserved partition, 1024 / 4 = 256, so it’s good. Partition 2′s Offset is expressed in megabytes so we have to convert to kilobytes first by multiplying it by 1024. So, 73 * 1024 = 74752 and 74752 / 4 = 18688, so it’s good, too.

Whew!

It’s worth noting that what DISKPART didn’t show in the list is the tiny unused space – about 2MB in my case – between Partition 1 and Partition 2 which facilitated alignment.

Someone pointed out to me that partition alignment can be checked without DISKPART. Fire up msinfo32. Expand Components, then expand Storage, then select Disks. Find the drive in question and divide the Partition Starting Offset fields by 4096. If it divides evenly you’re all set!

Migration

I used Macrium Reflect to restore the partition images I created earlier. Rather than allowing the software to create the partitions (which would negate our alignment effort) I pointed it to each target partition in turn. When the restore was finished I shut the system down.

I pulled the SSD from the eSATA port and pulled the existing boot drive from the system. I mounted the SSD in place of the old boot drive. (Windows gets upset when it finds multiple boot drives at startup, so it’s a good idea to have just one.) I took extra care with the data cable.

I powered up and entered the system BIOS, walked through the settings applicable to a drive change, saved and booted.  Things looked good.

Living With the SSD

Wow! Coldstarts are fast. (See below.) So fast that getting through the BIOS has become the perceived bottleneck. Applications start like lightning, especially the first time, before Windows caches them. Shutdowns are snappy, too. (See below.) There’s no shortage of anecdotes and benchmarks on the ‘net and I’m sure you’ve seen them. It’s all delightfully true.

But all wasn’t perfect. After a week or two some new patterns seemed to be emerging.

Every so often, unexpectedly, the system would become unresponsive with the drive use LED full-on solid, for some tens of seconds. Most of the time the system would return to normal operation but depending on what application was doing what at the time, the period of unresponsiveness could sometimes cause a crash. Sometimes the crash would be severe enough to bring on a BSOD. The biggest problem I have with BSODs or other hard crashes is that it causes the mirrored terabyte data drives to resync, and that takes a while. Usually the System Log would show Event ID 11 entries like this associated with the event:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort6.

And once, following a BSOD, the boot drive was invisible to the BIOS at restart! A hard power cycle made it visible again and Whisky booted normally, as though nothing abnormal had ever occurred.

Hard to say for sure, but it seemed as though these oddities were happening with increasing frequency.

Firmware Update

Prowling the ‘net I found others reporting similar problems. What’s more, Corsair was on the case and had a fresh firmware update! The update process, they claimed, was supposed to preserve data. I checked my live backup and made new partition images anyway. The drive firmware update itself went exactly as described, took but seconds and left the data intact. The next boot had Windows installing new (or maybe just reinstalling?) device drivers for the drive, which then called for another boot. All this booting used to be a pain in the ass but when the box boots in seconds you tend to not mind that much.

Benchmark performance after the update was improved, but only marginally – nothing I’d actually notice. The troublesome hangs I mentioned seem to occur on bootup now, when they occur at all. They seem less ‘dangerous’ because they don’t interrupt work in progress at that time. So far, anyway, I just wait out the length boot and log in, followed by a cold shutdown. The next coldstart invariably goes normally, that is, very, very fast.

What’s going on? Maybe some periodic housekeeping going on in the drive? Maybe some housekeeping that was underway when I interrupted with a shutdown? Or maybe it’s that data cable? Remember, I mentioned it’s sort of a loose fit without a retainer clip. Time will tell.

Videos

I goes without saying that SSDs are fast. Many people like to judge that by how fast Windows loads. I threw together a couple of videos to illustrate.

System Startup with SSD
00.00 - Sequence start
01.30 - Power on
04.06 - Hardware initialization
13.20 - Video signal to monitors
15.83 - BIOS
23.93 - Windows Startup
39.83 - Login prompt
44.93 - Password entry complete
54.50 - Ready to work

Power on to Windows startup duration is 22.63 seconds.
Windows startup to login prompt duration is 15.90 seconds.
Password entry to ready-to-work duration is 9.57 seconds.

System Shutdown with SSD

00:00:00 - Sequence start
00:08.32 - Shutdown initiated
00:24.27 - Shutdown complete

Shutdown initiation to power off duration: 15.95 seconds.

My friend Will, just the other day over on Google+, said “Trims atas advise nya.” Oh, wait a minute. That’s spam from some shitstain with an anonymous gmail account. Will actually said “Rick, what do you use it for? On TV people are watching videos, email or looking at pictures on it – nothing very interesting. Is it a glorified internet appliance?”

Well, it’s a funny thing. Tablets have been the Next Big Thing for a while and everyone has been bringing them to market. For most, er, scratch that, for everyone except Apple, success in the tablet space has been varied. For Apple success has been astounding. Eventually, I figured, we’d have to get one to play around with, to see what all the hype was about.

I think it started with a TV commercial. I casually said to Pam, “So maybe you want one of those?” and she said she wouldn’t mind. So a few days later I drank some Kool-Aid…

I’ve gotta admit, the iPad’s an absolute marvel of design and engineering. It feels really good in your hand, looks really great to your eye (both the display and the form-factor), and the UI is slick and responsive. Besides the device there’s not much in the box: a cable and charger cube (which promptly got lost for weeks) and a cute little Apple sticker. I powered it up, answered a few questions, and in a minute or two I was exploring the built-in apps. Apps. I was playin’ with apps. I felt so… trendy. We picked up the Smart Cover a day or two later. It, too, is a product of incredible thought and design. Just as you hold it near, wondering how it attaches, it attaches itself magnetically, in perfect alignment. Forty bucks.

Getting the iPad onto my network was a bit harder. We have two active WiFi networks in the house. Each serves different purpose and both are reasonably secure. (Hold your comments about being neighborly and running an open hotspot; I don’t care and I’ll only ignore you.) So I cleared the way for the iPad and tried and tried to get authenticated. Didn’t work. A search turned up plenty of others with similar problems. I forget exactly which magic incantation did the trick but after a while it was working. And here’s the thing: other than that initial hurdle the iPad connects and makes itself ready to communicate the moment you pick it up. The secret? It keeps a periodic chatter going with the router or access point, all the time. It’s always ready.

Instant-on network performance like that is usually a battery suck but Apple seems to have nailed the power management. Battery life is several weeks to a month.

“Huh? Did you say a month? Don’t you use it?”

Yup, that’s what I said: a month. And, mostly, nope, we don’t really use it all that much. None of us do. Three different people with three widely varying sets of interests and the iPad hasn’t become relevant to any of us. WTF.

What I sought most from such a device was simple (and, I might add, completely satisfied by my old netbook). I wanted to read, mostly stuff from my network where I keep a fair library of subscription material. I wanted to write, notes, posts like this, etc. And I wanted to be able to control different parts of my network, logging into a Linux console, adjusting this or that, maybe a bit of ftp to import or export a file or two, maybe shutting things down during an extended power failure.

Producing written material with the virtual keyboard is an exercise in futility. I’m not the best keyboardist in the first place but my meager productivity dropped like a stone. Y’know how they say to use strong passwords for stuff? Let me tell you, the way you need to switch modes for numbers, caps, punctuation, and everything else will have you setting your passwords to ‘asd123′ – and wishing you could skip the digits altogether – in no time flat. Forget writing.

On to reading. Well, this is actually pretty good. The display is nice, like I said. Consuming some written matter – WIRED comes to mind – the content designed for this device is, in some ways, superior to the print experience. You miss out on the tactile enjoyment of well-laid-out pulp – the color, the rich fonts – but the ease of navigation (no continued on page 134) and embedded multimedia could be a valid trade. Sometimes, at least. I mentioned that I have a rather large cache of subscription material – professional publications, books, newsletters, etc. – on a server here. The vast majority is in PDF format of one type or another. Reading any of those makes for a pretty good experience. The iPad will try to add them into the built-in iBooks app, which simply means that they’re downloaded and stored locally for use off-network.

Next up, handling network chores. Nope, can’t do that. Maybe buying a terminal app would fix that, maybe not. I’m not pressing because I have other alternatives. Also, you can’t get files onto or off of the iPad. In fact, the very concept of files on the iPad seems profoundly foreign. I’ll bet a dollar Apple would call that a feature.

Now, Pam’s expectations are markedly different from mine. She’ll play a few games, use Google+ and – gasp – Facebook, and use the Web browser. She’s bought a few apps. Sorry, can’t tell you which ones. Since the iPad is hers, it’s tied to her computer and it synced with her iTunes library painlessly and quickly. I can tell you that the Google+ client, while touted as made for the iPad, is simply an iPhone app that lives in the middle of the screen. Sizing it for the larger screen looks chunky and childish. When I tried, Hangouts didn’t work at all. Sort of too bad, that, as the hardware seems like it’d be perfectly suited to video conferencing. YouTube videos play nicely, but content-rich sites that don’t offer Flash alternatives fail.

I expected Damian to play with the iPad but he doesn’t. Not at all. Some weeks after it had been floating around in such obvious places like the dinner table, he said “Oh? We have an iPad now?” That was that. I don’t think he’s touched it since. That was a little unexpected since I think he’s in the target demographic. Oh well.

I’ve got a few closing random thoughts… The lack of multitasking hurts. The instant-on, instantly-connected Web browser – albeit a weak one like Safari – is a definite win. The lack of Flash can sometimes make a Web site unusable. Not that I’m arguing for that insecure wart on the side that is Flash, but some sites, well, that’s what they do. Sort of the way a site might be built for IE and render poorly on a standards-compliant browser. You can wish for a long time that it weren’t so. The security model kinda blows. I wouldn’t store any confidential stuff on the device. The virtual keyboard encourages the use of weak, easy-to-use passwords because good ones are such a pain to type, yet even routine updates prompt for the Apple account password.

The bottom line? I guess all told I spent something under $800 for the device, a cover and some apps. Worth it? For design, lots of points. For usefulness, very few points. Did I learn some stuff? Undoubtedly. Do I feel trendy? No, I feel like I threw away a wad of cash.

If I knew then what I know now, would I buy an iPad? No.

[edited 29 October to include this unique use for the device.]

I found this on some backup media in a backwater directory with a bunch of other rather unrelated files. I remember the piece but, unfortunately, I haven’t got the faintest clue as to the source. Made me chuckle. Again.

Enjoy.

In each pair of socks, one is male and one is female. Heat (such as the heat of a dryer) sets off the reproductive cycle. In the dryer the socks have sex by rubbing along each other as they are tossed around. The female, once impregnated, sneaks off to give birth, alone, while the male stays behind. The female sock gives birth to a litter of baby metal coat hangers, which promptly consume their mother, leaving behind very little. This detritus is eventually caught by the filter in the dryer, and become what is known as lint. The baby coat hangers, looking for cool, dark places, make their way to your closets, which is why there are always more hangers than the last time you looked. [Note: they are attracted to others of their kind, so that a totally empty closet will usually stay that way, while a closet with a large number of hangers will have the greatest number of new hangers.] Eventually, the hangers turn into moths, which eat your clothes [after all, they have to get the fabric for the socks from *somewhere*]. Having gorged themselves, they descend to the bottom of the closet and extrude a hard outer layer. In this stage they are known as ‘mothballs’ [now you know why!]. Once they have fully developed, they eat through their casing and stand revealed as fully adult socks! To complete the cycle, they go out in search of a mate. The most common place they find their mates is at the bottom of a pile of dirty laundry, a place that is infamous for being a haven for unwashed, single socks. If you don’t believe me, go check.

I was wrestling a double bed spring up the driveway toward the rolloff. He explained that he recycled metal. There was metal to be found all over: everywhere from people like me cleaning up to construction sites and general trash, even simply discarded on the side of the road. He would haul it away and sort it before taking it to the recycler. The less pre-processing that needs to be done the higher the value. Take wire or cable, for example. Strip the plastic insulation from copper wire and get paid for pure copper.

So I gave him the ancient bed spring and gave him a hand throwing it into the bed of his pickup. Predictably, Metal Man asked whether I was discarding any other metal. This is a house that’s destined for sale or demolition, so there definitely was metal to be found. We walked around the property talking about… well, metal.

It was a real eye-opener, learning how Metal Man could take something that, to me, had a value of less than zero – a heavy, worn out window air conditioner for example, and extract real value. By breaking it down to its component parts, there was several pounds of copper, more of steel, etc.

Despite this fouled economy Metal Man makes money. On a good day, he tells me, he can earn a few hundred bucks. Not too shabby. Which is also why I’m not mentioning his name or number. The nature of Metal Man’s business is such that (while he didn’t come right out and say so) I’m absolutely certain he’s flying under the radar, if you catch my drift. His source materials are free and the recyclers pay anonymous cash. He’s part of a cash economy where each of his dollars is worth about a third more than each of mine. No too shabby. And business is good, to the point that he’s got three others he employs part time as needed, mostly for muscle or sorting.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Metal Man. He’s made something from nothing, found a niche and filled it. He’s got an admirable work ethic. He does what he says he will do and shows up when he says he will show up. He doesn’t make excuses or complain. He smiles a lot. All qualities that you see less and less in our gimme-gimme, me-first world.

I’ve got the feeling that no matter what the future holds, Metal Man will be a survivor.

Pam, at this very moment, is likely doing triage on her inbox. Probably a thousand messages there. I know her office is short-staffed this week and that’s probably not helping matters much. She’s made a point of completely unplugging from the goings-on at the office during her time off. An excellent decision, IMHO. For gone are the days when The Company gives a shit for its human resources and it’s merely correct to make the relationship as reciprocal as possible – without compromising one’s own values, of course. It’s easier said than done. And most people don’t even try, often for economic reasons. That’s a discussion for another time.

The kid’s back in school. Today’s the first day of his last year of high school. Besides his backpack and lunch he carries his angst. At that age everyone has their share of angst, maybe more than their share. I hope he can see through it and do well in his classes. He doesn’t understand – yet – that the complexities of life rise exponentially soon after that segment of life moves from present tense to past tense. He’ll look back at these times and remember them with words like ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ and ‘free’. Maybe even a bit of ‘regret’. No, he doesn’t know that yet. He can’t. Angst is a powerful drug.

It’s quiet here. Nothing but the sounds of the intermittent rain, the landscape crew in the distance, the hum of the computer fans. Gone are the noises of… recreation and relaxitude.

My desk has a backlog of crap and not a little bit of clutter. The overflowing tray of stuff for the shredder, same situation with the bin of recyclable material. The list of stuff I should be doing is a mile long. A bit more of this coffee and I’ll be ready.

Sauce unknown. Lost to the ages, I guess. Have fun. Or not.

Eye Halve a Spelling Chequer

I have a spelling checker.
It came with my pea sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it’s weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when I rime.

Each frays come posed up on my screen
eye trussed too bee a joule.
The checker pours o’er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.

Bee fore a veiling checker’s Hour
spelling mite decline,
And if we’re lacks oar have a laps,
We wood bee maid too wine.

Butt now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flair,
Their are no fault’s with in my cite,
Of nun eye am a ware.

Now spelling does knot phase me,
It does knot bring a tier.
My pay purrs awl due glad den
With wrapped word’s fare as hear.

To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaw’s are knot aloud.

Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays,
Such soft wear four pea seas,
And why eye brake in two averse
Buy righting too pleas.

At the next light it became clear that there was a serious problem. The pedal abruptly sunk most of the way to the floor. The idiot light on the dash came on simultaneously: BRAKE. The brakes themselves weren’t very effective at all. I used the engine in low gear – it’s a Jeep, it has a really low low gear – to slow for the light. I shoved the clutch in coasted to a stop. “That wasn’t so bad,” I thought.

The shopping center parking lot on the next block seemed like a good place to look things over. The light changed. I made my way into the mostly empty lot and again coasted to a stop.

A walk-around revealed the problem quick enough: the left rear brake line had ruptured. The puddle of brake fluid grew, revealing the general area of the damage. The nearly empty reservoir confirmed what I already knew.

My insurance company provides roadside assistance and maybe this was a good time to use it. It’d probably take a while, I figured, it usually does. But there was a Wal-Mart in the shopping center. I could buy a can of brake fluid and try for home, maybe 15 miles away. It was a gym day, late afternoon, and waiting for the tow would probably make me miss a workout. But wrecking the Jeep would probably do that, too. I calculated the odds…

I bought the fluid, filled the reservoir and set out for home. No brakes. Well, not quite. I found that when topped off I’d have about 20% brakes for maybe 5 brief applications. Maybe. Panic stops were definitely out of the question.

Between anticipating the need to slow and stop and using the manual transmission and engine braking for speed control the ride home went without incident. Full stops even became easy: slow in low gear and kill the ignition. I didn’t make any new friends in the cars following.

When I got home I used the creeper, rolling underneath for a better look. Finding the exact point of the rupture was easy. The line was corroded and it finally let go. Jeeps are the easiest vehicles in the world to service, one of the reasons I love mine. The brake line is double-wall tubing running the length of the frame, all very accessible. I mentally ticked off the steps. Obtain a replacement brake line, maybe the other side, too. They’d have to come from a dealer, probably special order. Pull and replace the lines. The fittings at the master cylinder, brass, probably, having never been turned for the life of the vehicle, could be troublesome. Likely the same with the fittings at the slave cylinders, but I wasn’t about to pull a wheel just to confirm. Finally, refill and bleed the system. Oh, and those bleeders might prove tough to turn, too… I estimated a half-day of work on my back in the driveway – IF nothing went wrong on the way. It just might be worth sending this job out.

The next day I phoned up a place that’s done some work for me in the past. I described the problem. “So the pedal feels spongy and the indicator light is on?” Eddie asked. I laughed. “Dude! The pedal’s on the floor! The corroded double-wall line has a hole and the fluid’s all over the ground. Yeah, the light’s on alright. I need you to replace the line, maybe replacing both of ‘em’s a good idea as long as you’re in there.” “Got Triple-A?” “No, I don’t, Eddie. I’ll drive it in.” There was a long pause. “You know, I can’t advise you to do that,” Eddie began. I think I could almost hear him suppressing a laugh, but it was probably just the cell connection. “Let me get you a tow,” he tried. “Nah, I’m good.”

Later that afternoon I drove it to the shop. No brakes. Pam followed me. I think she was more nervous than I was. Again, there were no incidents. A Beemer had stopped quickly to make a left on a two-lane but I had anticipated it and slowed appropriately. On a bike, if you don’t evaluate lots of possibilities ahead of time you get hurt. The training paid off.

As I dropped the key I reminded Eddie, “Maybe you should put a sign on the dash, y’know, for safety.”

Soon I should hear what the job will cost. If I like what I hear maybe I’ll have him replace the factory exhaust system, which has finally reached its end of life…

It’s okay. The tools that are in place here are tirelessly doing their jobs, preventing the crap from making it into the public eye.

But I don’t have the time to skim that kind of volume to weed out  false positives. I’ve got no choice but to simply delete everything that gets caught, sight unseen. It’s a harsh, but necessary, response.

It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. This’ll pass. It always does.

He wants my guitar, my beloved Splatter Strat, that I bought back in 2004. (I recently wrote about some modifications I made to it – see Supercharging the Stratocaster.) He can’t play, but he wants to. I’ve told him over and over that he can use it any time but he wants it nearby, not where I store it. So every time he sees me eyeing another axe he goads me: “Go on, just buy it!”

He knows.

Well, the other day, just shy of 7 years since I bought the Strat, I bought a limited run Les Paul Studio 60′s Tribute.

Limited run Gibson Les Paul Studio 60s Tribute in Worn Cherry Burst.

Damian’s birthday’s coming up, Pam and I reasoned, and with a month or so before school starts it’s a good time to help him establish a practice schedule… I gave him the Strat with two conditions: I could play it when I wanted and he’d give me first dibs if he considered getting rid of it. We threw in a VOX Pathfinder 15R and a bunch of other goodies. He seemed pleased.

As am I. Oddly, I was originally looking for the Les Paul Studio Faded because of the outstanding reviews – not to mention the price and availability – but when I played the two side by side the choice was clear. Wow, those P-90 pickups were white-hot. Needless to say, it helped that Pam really liked the finish!

It’s taking some getting used to. The first thing I did was change the strings to my favorites and get into the requisite setup. Amazingly, it took almost no tweaking at all! The action’s just a tad higher than I prefer but only the tiniest bit. I think I’m going to try to get used to it. The sound is, well, like a Les Paul.

Oh, and Damian? He’s been practicing some every day. His fingers hurt but I’m pushing him to increase his session duration. He’s listening, which is good.

Eventually he’ll not only look like a rock star, he’ll make noises like one, too.

We found the place easy enough, although I thought it would be closer to downtown. I needed to execute a quick U-turn in a dimly lit gas station because I initially passed the entrance. The guy by the pumps gave us a funny look from under his turban as I rumbled the bike around, as did the LEO in the parking lot across from Roxy. Parking was ample and easy and we carried our lids inside. The place takes reservations but we had none. Didn’t matter, we were a bit early for showtime and took a table for two in front of the stage.

A waitress soon appeared with a couple of coldbeers. I was a little put off when she told me that in order to run a tab they’d need to hold my ID and credit card. Being a privacy/security freak I was ready to fall back to greenbacks. I spoke of my disapproval of their policy as I fingered my wallet. She took my Mastercard, presumably to swipe for my initial order, and quickly reappeared to tell me I could have my tab while not turning over my credentials. Not quite sure why it went that way but it made things easier than dealing with the interruptions of incremental payments as the evening progressed.

If you follow the Roxy link and check out the menu you’ll find that it’s kind of limited. I had the Rockabilly Road-dog Ripper and some fries, a footlong in a bowl of bread, sauerkraut, onions and peppers, etc. The dog overhung the bowl by a good deal and when I lobbed off the end it fell to the floor. (Sorry!) I’m sure I wasn’t the first to do that… Anyway, Roxy’s isn’t the place to go for dinner but the selections fit the venue and atmosphere perfectly – the beers are cold and the snacks are good.

So was the entertainment. Mr. Choad’s Wild Ride was a four-part combination of deliberately cheesy stand-up, exotic dancing, and strength/agility acts. Don’t think The Sands, think Fremont Street. That they’re based in the Lower East Side is perfectly appropriate. The entire show was quite entertaining, very real, a lot of fun.

Afterward I was pleasantly surprised to find that the tab for food and night-full of coldbeers was under forty bucks. Very, very reasonable. Between that, tips, and the $10 cover, this was a seriously inexpensive – and very entertaining – night out.

My conclusions? Recommended stuff, two thumbs up, we’ll absolutely be back to see other acts.

The ride home through the mix of town and country roads was uneventful. It’s a blast meandering through little towns, late on a summer night on a loud bike. From the standpoint of others… well, there’s pretty much no middle ground; people either love it or hate it. Doesn’t matter much to me.

Nothing more than some rather simple diet changes. I didn’t expect it. Here are some random thoughts so far.

Lots more vegetables and beans so I fart more, longer and louder. Excretia emits a slightly different odor, shifted towards vegetables. The first week or so was hardest as I learned to prepare stuff different from our normal fare. Egg whites are ugly as sin in the pan at first (kind of like lancing a boil) but soon become more palatable (which lancing a boil never does). Baby carrots actually DO make a nice snack, and have a very satisfying crunch. I run the dishwasher more often, which is probably because I spend about 50% more time in the kitchen either preparing of cleaning up from meals. You really DO eat less, but more often in order to avoid feeling hungry. The weirdest ‘trick’? The juice of a lemon, drank just before dinner. They told me it’d have the effect of lowering the glycemic index of foods eaten afterward. I dunno, but it seems to do me good.

The first few days I felt hungry, but no more. I attribute that to just getting used to it. I feel pretty good. Plenty of energy at the gym, sleep good, all that. So far, so good.

More as we progress.

Frustrating, hard work, it was. When you’re only lifting maybe ten percent of what you remember and, still, it kills you… well, it takes some perseverance to keep going. Along the way we met with some personal trainers. We use one of those cheap gyms new-style back-to-basics facilities where the trainers are on contract, actively promoting themselves to potential clients. When you come away from one of those meetings and they say something to the effect of “just keep doing what you’re doing, I really can’t help you too much” it sort of validates you.

Fast-forward to today. I’m in much better shape today than when we (re)started. A lot stronger, too. I’ve put on a few pounds in the right places, lost a few in others. But it’s definitely not the same as when I was younger.

So the next thing is diet modification. All this time I’ve just eaten whatever I feel like whenever I feel like it. No fast food – I gave that up years ago following a bad experience with a chicken sandwich – but plenty of processed stuff. Whatever presents itself. I should add that I’m not – and neither is Pam – one of those people motivated by food, whose lives revolve around their meals. I mean, sometimes when we’re busy we actually forget to eat. It gets to the end of the day, maybe two in the morning, and we look at each other, “we should eat something.” We just hadn’t gotten around to it all day long. Which might lead us to a couple of frozen pizzas washed down with beers.

Not the best diet in the world, like I said.

So now we’re taking a stab at doing better. We’ll see if it lets us take this thing to the next level. Can’t hurt. Firstly, cutting the carbs and fat and adding a conscious effort toward more vegetables.

It’s a doubly tough endeavor because the kid won’t eat this stuff. His preferred fare? Bacon. Pastrami. Pizza. Burgers. Chips. Candy. That is, when he eats at all. Otherwise it’s soda by the gallon. Skinny as a rail he is. “My meat needs to kill me,” he says. Ah, youth.

My breakfast today was egg whites and mixed vegetables. Plus a few baby carrots and a spit of orange juice. Oh, and coffee. I drink at least a pot a day of the brew, black, and I don’t care you’re not getting me away from that. Spent the whole morning farting up a storm. (Be glad you’re not here.)

It’s been said that anything you can do for a month can become a habit and I can tell you from experience that it’s true. You can modify anything you care to – if you’ve got the will to do it. I’ll let you know how we progress.

[...] how much run time do you (or should I) expect? Seems to me like I’m getting 10-15 minutes, always running plugged in, and that can’t be helping the battery to take a deeper charge.

My laptops (now old, creaky P4s with conventional hard drives, since we’ve all moved back to fast, powerful desktops) get about an hour or so of work on the network, maybe an hour forty-five backing off the screen brightness with mostly local work. My SSD-equipped netbook OTOH goes for 5-10 hours, depending. Once, on a bus back from DC, I had the netbook running a LAMP server virtualized under VirtualBox, doing Web development to while away the hours. A single charge lasted the whole trip back to Jersey! Oh, yeah, and a seatmate’s iPhone died on the way so I let him plug into a USB port to charge up. (Bonus: I got a bit of ‘net access!) So, battery life can vary greatly.

You’re right about not liking to be constantly charging. But LiIon batteries are kind of predictable once you get to know them.

Don’t subject them to temperature extremes, high ambient heat is especially bad so don’t let ‘em sit in the sun. Don’t let them fully discharge. In practice, your box will shut down before full discharge becomes a problem. But don’t forget to charge a spent one before long-term storage. A battery on the shelf will discharge slowly, a battery in a powered-off laptop will discharge faster. So, to maximize life remove it when it’s not being used for extended periods.

The LiIon chemistry doesn’t wear out (like lead-acid) so much as it develops an ever-increasing internal resistance over time. You’ll notice that a new battery charges fast and lasts a long time. After a while it takes longer to acquire a full charge that doesn’t last quite as long. At end-of-life you can charge it all day and it won’t show full, while delivering only a few minutes of use (if that). The charging circuitry can only push so hard, and as the battery’s internal resistance climbs it has to work harder and harder to deliver fewer electrons. You end up getting some number of useful cycles out of a battery and that’s that. It makes sense, then, to use the battery until depleted, charge it, set it on the shelf for next use. Nobody really uses ‘em that way, though…

Keep ‘em in the laptop, use it on AC? Not ideal, the charge circuitry will keep cycling them near the top of charge, you actually tend to wear out the battery quicker that way – but you won’t notice it until you’re away from AC and actually need that charge. Using your laptop on AC most of the time? Take the battery out. The charge circuitry will notice and stop charging the empty hole, and the whole box will run cooler. ‘Course, you don’t get the benefit of a built-in UPS, but life’s full of trade-offs.

Finally, a safety tip. LiIon chemistry is inherently quite unstable. Without the active circuitry within the battery itself it’s prone to problems like thermal runaway – a nice term for explosions or catching fire. If you drop one, best to stand there looking dopey watching it for a few minutes. Look for signs of stress – heat, bulging, etc. – before putting it away. Is a dropped phone going to explode every time? Not by a long shot. But you never know. Sony, HP, Dell, virtually all of the big players have had massive battery recalls. There’s been plenty of property damage and injuries, but only the most spectacular ones make the news.

I haven’t actually timed it, but it seems awfully, awfully short.

Conserve. Use the power-saving power profile. Dim the screen’s backlight. Use a simple blank screen saver. Set short sleep and hibernate trigger times. Routinely sleep or hibernate the box when taking phone calls, hitting the can, making coffee, etc. Run fewer simultaneous applications and trim background processes. Save processor-intensive work for when you’ve got AC. You can probably double your runtime, with practice. Most people can.

Finally, keep the system’s monitoring and charging subsystems ‘in tune’ by calibrating according to the manufacturer’s guidelines, taking your usage patterns into consideration. Usually, calibration amounts to using the battery until it’s depleted followed by giving it a full, uninterrupted charge. That way the system has a better idea of the battery’s condition at any given time and can more effectively manage the charging circuitry. It’s that internal resistance increasing over time thing again.

Every so often, as time permitted, I would haul the thing out and play with it a little. This morning was one of those times.

Since I’ve been rather unsuccessful with the thing so far I figured to try swapping logic boards on the drive. I’ve got a spare, of sorts; it’s on a drive that’s part of the RAID mirror in my primary desktop. Software RAID, that is, on a Windows 7 system.

It’d be a simple matter to pull the drive, failing the RAID. Then the plan was to install the known-good logic board onto the failed drive, cable it up to the ESATA port and (possibly) do the wipe. Recovery would be just as easy. Replace the logic board and re-install the RAID drive. Then recover/resync the mirror and that would be that.

Before I got started I figured a backup would be prudent. The RAID mirror is where I do all my work. The better part of a terabyte was soon copied to a spare drive.

The drive pull took but a moment. Gotta love those big, roomy cases! I booted to find that the array had NOT failed; instead it went missing altogether! Oops. No concern, though, right?Microsoft documentation says that breaking a mirror results in two drives containing the data, just no more mirror. My exercise should have merely simulated a drive failure. When I re-installed the drive it should be fine.

Okay, so I did the logic board swap and futzed with that a bit, still feeling a bit uneasy about the mirror. Didn’t get anywhere for my trouble. It looks like the failed drive is just that – a failed drive. (More about that later.)

I put the known-good logic board back on the mirror drive, shoved it into the case, cabled it up and booted. Uh oh. Still no mirror. One of the two formerly mirrored drives appeared uninitialized while the other was foreign. I imported the foreign disk, which then got its old drive letter back.The data appeared to be intact but (I guess) since the companion volume remained uninitialized it still reported itself as having “failed redundancy.” I couldn’t break the mirror, nor could I remove the mirror. It looked like it was in some kind of limbo. I tried to reactivate the volume and had a nice little “WTF” moment: “the plex is missing” mocked the resulting error message.

I’m running out of time, there’s stuff I need to be doing and it’s certainly not this.

I initialized the uninitialized drive, made it dynamic and formatted it. Then I copied the data from the drive whose plex – whatever the hell that is – was missing onto the newly formatted volume. Continuing, I wiped the plex-less drive. Would it now offer itself up as a candidate to accept a mirror? Yes, it would. So I did just that and it took a while – longer than all the file copying – to resync.

Now, I’ve had good luck with Windows’ software RAID mirrors before but this exercise worried me a little. Should I have broken the mirror instead of simply yanking the drive? What if it had failed electrically? Or if I knocked a cable loose doing some unrelated maintenance? Or someone stole the drive? What happens when a drive fails under certain circumstances? Have I just been lucky all along, where the failures I’ve experienced have just been the right kind of failures that were recoverable? Ponder, ponder.

I guess I need to set up a testbed VM and experiment. Meanwhile, I have my panic copy and the same mirror arrangement I had this morning, no lossage.

Oh, and the old drive that I was trying to wipe? Glad you asked. It’s still on the shelf. There’s confidential data on there, if one were to recover it. I haven’t been able to get to it in order to properly cleanse it. I don’t trust Seagate; not that Seagate’s evil or anything. It’s just that, well, the responsibility’s mine and I don’t take that lightly. Terabyte drives are only worth about $75 retail these days and I got a couple of good years out of the thing.

What would YOU do with a drive full of confidential but unreachable data? Can you suggest any tools that I might use to get at the drive to wipe it without needing to access it with Windows or Linux, the two predominant OSs we run here?