Cav's Place

This post will be really rushed, both because I haven’t written any other this week and therefore it’s mandatory to have this one up before midnight and because I still have other things to do today as well. It’s the fourth personal one in a row and a fifth one will almost certainly come tomorrow, but luckily I still have room for a few of them, so I’m doing better than at certain points in the past, when I was at the very limit of that rule of mine. That said, let me get right to it.

Last time, I was writing about computer issues and my plans to be very careful but also look into it further this week. I’m glad to be able to say that being careful did work, as that problem didn’t repeat itself yet, and also that I finally got around to looking inside my computer again. Didn’t notice anything that could in any way cause it, such as a cable appearing not to be plugged in quite all the way, but still wasn’t able to untie that bunch of cables and loosen the one going into the new DVD drive. Then again, I never expected to be able to do that and the DVD drive isn’t the issue, so that’s not a problem, though I did hope to somehow exceed my expectations and manage it anyway.
On the other hand, I put in the old HDD and copied everything to it once again, as planned, but then went further than that: I actually installed it properly and left it inside, also making a little script to easily update its contents from now on. It’s not like there was any real reason to leave it out anymore, since the new DVD drive uses a SATA cable, leaving this computer’s only ATA cable free and therefore allowing me to put an ATA HDD into its proper position instead of leaving it dangling under the old DVD drive, as it would have been otherwise.
That took quite a while and once again required removing the video card and then putting it back in, since there’s just no room to do much of anything otherwise, but it allows me to make it so I’ll have a full copy of this HDD’s contents, obviously excepting the installed programs, automatically updated every morning on another HDD. Some things could still go wrong, but they’re far more unlikely now, so I can feel much safer about my data… At least as long as leaving this old HDD in won’t cause any problems, because the computer took a very long time to start the first three times after I put it in, though that should have only happened the first time, and it seems just slightly slower even now. But that’s something to watch and make a decision on in time, not right now.

When I found out I’ll be alone today and planned to do this, I was planning to make today this month’s regular “computer maintenance day” as well, starting with letting it verify one large partition last night and then the rest of the HDD today, since I wouldn’t risk losing any data anymore. However, that didn’t quite work out. At first I simply forgot to tell it to verify last night when I went to the kitchen to eat, and then today there just wasn’t time for it. Doing what I said above, cleaning my room, writing this, eating a little and watching the qualifying for this week’s race already took up several hours and I still have a few things to do, including writing something else, and then I’ll be trying to play some more Risen as well, so that’ll be it for the day.
Tomorrow I’ll have another post to write, somehow, and then probably play some more Risen, mess around with a couple of other things… And I’ll probably be moping around and feeling like shit for a large part of the day anyway, for various reasons that I’ll most likely go through in my next personal post, so I won’t be getting around to doing this then either. But there’s always next week, when this month’s “computer maintenance day” was originally planned anyway. Little reason to rush anymore, now that I can be sure that my data’s safe, right? Besides, while my HDD did have some minor issues of its own ever since I got it, it doesn’t show any other signs of failure, so I’m probably still safe either way.

I did say you’ll get two personal rants this week, didn’t I? Sticking to one personal and one non-personal post per week recently did preserve the “space” I still had for such rants anyway, so I’ll make some use of it now and hope I’ll get out of this mood long enough to make up for it later. But getting out of it now has to do with certain computer issues solving themselves as well, because I’ll be taking it really badly if this proves to be a hardware problem after all.

The issue first appeared, this time around, on July 5. It then happened again on July 12, August 1, August 5, August 29, August 31 and September 2. As you can see, there are some patterns, but they keep worsening. At first the problems came in pairs, but the first one was seven days apart and the second was only four days apart. Then I had, so far, three within about four days and a half. Yesterday’s freeze was the first that happened during the day, all the rest being at night, the first four actually almost at the same time, around 1:30 AM. It was also the first that didn’t start with a crash of Internet Explorer, though you can say it was still related, as it happened when I was creating a new folder directly in the Favorites one in order to quickly organize some things.
If I keep poking around after it gets to that point, it’ll really freeze. I’ll still be able to move my mouse around, but nothing else. If, however, I catch it quickly enough and try to reboot without trying to open or close more than one or two other programs first, it will eventually manage to log off, but not get past the “shutting down” message, so it won’t actually reboot normally, obviously because by that point some programs can’t even be closed by force anymore, for some reason. The only way to fix it is to press the reset button, which seems to cause some settings of the programs that are open at that time to be lost. Specifically, what I have noticed vanishing are Internet Explorer cookies that aren’t permanent, the current Winamp playlist, a few things from BitDefender, namely the fact that the current network profile is generic and the date and time of the last scan and update, the progress on the current BOINC work units and all OpenOffice settings if it also happened to be running at the time.

Now this is hardly something new, but the symptoms are somewhat different this time around. The usual issue, which I started experiencing ever since I bought this computer, had to do with the system slowing down a lot and, if I didn’t catch it in time to solve that problem, eventually freeze in pretty much the same way. However, the last time that happened, which I believe was last December, I somehow managed to reboot normally, though I had to wait a good 20 minutes for that to happen and it was probably the only time I managed that. Now I even waited for one hour and it still wouldn’t reboot normally, but the bigger problem is that I don’t seem to be given a warning or anything to do to prevent it from getting to that point. Or, perhaps, I’m given a different warning and I’m yet to learn what it is and what to do when it happens, which was also the case with this issue early on, meaning that it happened very frequently until I learned what to do about it.
I can’t consider Internet Explorer crashing to be a warning, because there doesn’t seem to be anything to do after that happens, so it’s most likely an effect instead of a cause. Makes sense, after all, since it’s open most of the time and a browser needs to almost constantly write to the system partition, so whenever that becomes impossible, which is my current working hypothesis, this may well be the first thing the user will notice. Granted that I can’t exactly know whether that really is the problem or not, nor whether it has to do only with the system partition or with all of them, but it seems plausible enough for now. Of course, that in itself is also an effect of something else, so what I need to figure out is what that is and how to fix it.

In the past, I tended to consider that there was enough circumstantial evidence pointing to the fact that BitDefender was at fault for at least most of these issues, particularly when they happened around this time of year. That’s because the current version seems to suddenly develop strange bugs around the time the public beta for the next one is released, which is around the time I started experiencing these problems now as well. The only way to fix those problems seems to be to upgrade to the new version, which I usually do as soon as it goes out of beta, but that will then have strange problems of its own for another couple of months, until they finally sort everything out… Until around the same time next year, of course. Which makes it easy to assume it to be the cause from the very beginning. It certainly seems likely, since the way I understand it is that BitDefender creates a sort of virtual file server from which the operating system then requests files, so they could all be scanned if needed. If that system becomes unresponsive or, in case of the system partition, ends up conflicting with the operating system’s security protocols, this is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
Still, being a likely cause doesn’t mean it’s the real one as well, because there are several other possibilities to consider, the most worrying of which being another imminent HDD failure. No strange noises, no blue screens, no missing files that I’m aware of, no significantly increased loading times, so no other symptoms of a HDD failure, but it would hardly be unexpected. In fact, it’d be about time, since I had one in 2007, in November, and another in 2009, in October, so this September would seem to follow. The first was a different model, but this one also seems known for low reliability, despite supposedly being part of a very reliable series, so I have reasons to worry. They had to replace it twice in 2009 because the first replacement they sent me wouldn’t work at all, and then this second one had a few bad sectors from the start. In fact, the number of reported bad sectors jumped from the six that had been there all along to 17 some months ago, though the next scan reduced that to 11, so something unpleasant is going on…
But there’s another possibility as well, and it may even be the most likely one, though I just realized it now. The first time it happened was shortly after I put in the new DVD drive, which required removing some things and putting them back in, as well as pulling quite a lot on the power cables, because something was stuck. Something may have happened then, so I guess I’ll need to open it up again and see if disconnecting and reconnecting everything one more time will do any good. Should also try once again to untie the power cables so they won’t be so twisted around anymore, but I doubt that’ll work. I’m just really worried that I may have somehow messed something up that won’t be quite so easy to fix.

I’m now trying to be very careful and avoid doing things that may cause it to freeze again as much as possible, but also look for potential warning signs in case it will happen again anyway, so I’ll finally be able to figure out exactly what’s going on. I also moved the few files that were just on my desktop to another partition, replacing them with shortcuts, and added both those files and the Risen saves, which are annoyingly placed on the system partition, to the list of files that are automatically backed up to yet another partition every morning. The last time I backed up everything important to the flash drive was last week, but that’s been causing issues as well. Actually, it behaved nicely for the past few months, but last week it again took three tries before the system recognized it.
Next week I really mean to open it up and see if there’s anything to do inside the case, and also put the old HDD in to once again copy everything to it, which I last did two months ago. It should make for a decent safety net in case something is really wrong and it’ll eventually fail, but I sure hope it won’t get there! The HDD is under warranty, but it’d be quite a bother to send it to be replaced yet again, though it’d be somewhat less bad than finding out that I caused some sort of problem that I won’t be able to fix without replacing something…

A few months ago, when I posted another personal rant on a Thursday, the result was two personal rants posted that week and nothing else. Well, unless something will really change in a good way over the next couple of days, that seems the most likely scenario for this week as well. Quite frustrating, in fact, seeing as I obviously have a few posts swimming through my mind, as is usually the case, but I just can’t get myself to write about them. Usual scenario, just perhaps a little worse than on an average week.
Yes, Risen does have something to do with it, as I seem to have really gotten into it and really don’t want to waste the moment and end up giving up again, but that’s hardly enough to explain all of it. For example, even though I played for at least some six hours on Tuesday, I only put in a couple of hours yesterday, all of it at night, so it certainly didn’t prevent me from writing something during the whole rest of the day. And today I started playing shortly after waking up, but then stopped after a couple of hours just to write this… But “this” is just a personal rant, largely about why I can’t write about anything else.
Hell, I can’t even write an e-mail to my representative in the Chamber of Deputies. There is now a campaign against modifying the mining law in ways that are quite clearly tailored specifically to favor the Rosia Montana mining project, so I certainly wanted to be a part of it, but it’s not working. Can’t seem to be able to use e-mail for anything in any way important anymore. But that’s another story…
Getting back to the blog, one of the things I really want to write about has to do with the fact that last week I finally got around to watching Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, which is the latest in the series, and I had plenty of comments to make. But something like this ties in really well with the fact that I’ve been saying for years that I really should get around to writing about my view of an ideal world, perhaps starting with the part about a necessary new economic system, and that’s obviously not happening. Have to hope that this post will get written in the near future though, even if those others still won’t be, but not right now…

Writing this, or in fact not writing anything but this, just got my mood down even more. Don’t even feel like getting back to Risen now, so I guess I’ll just be moping around and feeling like shit for a while longer. Then maybe I’ll get sleepy and go back to bed, since I woke up after getting less than five hours of sleep this morning and decided I might as well get up then and make up the difference later during the day. Seems to work better that way, especially during such periods.

The plan for this week’s personal Sunday post was to make it include the plans for next week, or maybe for longer than that, because I’m once again starting to gather topics that I really want to write about and mean to actually do it more and more, even if I’ll need to take them one by one and slowly. But after sort of breaking down last night, that’s not going to happen. Not planning much of anything anymore, other than probably to keep playing Risen…
Speaking of that game, it can sure pull you in if you give it a chance, in good Piranha Bytes style. And when you add the fact that the combat is also manageable now, it does make for a nice experience… Until you notice that the game expects you to know its inner workings before even running into their effects, otherwise risking to miss out on a lot and make the journey harder for yourself. That is, of course, also typical for Piranha Bytes, but remains just as annoying, particularly when you want to explore and enjoy the game for yourself instead of reading guides first and then following them carefully. But I do intend to give it a really good chance, so let’s see how far that’ll take me.
Otherwise, nothing much is going on and, as I said, that’ll continue next week as well. Truth be told, last night I didn’t as much break down as simply returned to my more or less usual state after being somewhat less worried and stressed out over the past couple of weeks. Wondering what will happen with my writing as a result of this, but I guess I’ll see soon enough. Not that it’ll make much of a difference either way. At this point, meeting the first goal by the end of the year is as certain as it is that it’ll be impossible to meet the second, so any potential variations will have all too little immediate effect.

After getting no new information whatsoever yesterday and considering that I’m now keeping an eye on the developments in Libya, I see that I should have written this last week as originally planned. But better late than never, so I’ll just get back to my original plan of following up the previous post with one that’ll offer more details about the interactions, similarities and differences between the Romanian Ecologist Party (PER), the Green Party (PV) and the new Greens’ Movement – Agrarian Democrats (MVDA), which I’ll still insist on calling only the Greens’ Movement (MV). I’ll also add my current understanding of how MV has chosen to get itself officially registered and my opinion of that.

There could be much to say about the mergers and alliances attempted or at least discussed by PER before the first one with PV, in 2008, but it’s very difficult to get to the bottom of it all and quite frankly pointless to even try, considering the complete mess inside that party. I’ll only say that there were talks of being absorbed by the New Generation Party – Christian Democratic (PNGCD) in 2007, in a deal that seems to have been negotiated almost secretly by PER’s president at the time. That sparked quite a storm inside the party and led to strong calls for reform, after which the party’s new direction seemed to be to support the Social Democratic Party (PSD) until yet another reform, started towards the end of 2010, resulted in yet another change of position, the party now clearly rejecting any sort of collaboration with any of the parties currently represented in the parliament in general and PSD in particular.
By contrast, with the exception of a misguided attempt of making use of inertia by enlisting the former mayor of one of Bucharest’s sectors in the 2008 local elections after he had been kicked out by his party due to very poor performance, you’d have difficulty finding any such events in PV’s admittedly short history that aren’t related to either PER or MV. This stance is one they maintain now as well, fully rejecting any collaboration with any major party in general and, alongside PER, releasing harsh replies to PSD’s attempts to once again attract the support of green or ecologist parties.

Which brings us to the first alliance between PV and PER, for the 2008 parliamentary elections. Such a development seemed highly unlikely even in 2007, when PV had a very hostile attitude towards PER, but it seemed as if both parties were about to try to sweep their differences aside in an attempt to finally bring green back into the parliament. The whole thing seemed rather rushed, the two parties stating that they intended to merge soon after the elections but didn’t before simply because there wasn’t enough time. Strangely enough, the name of the alliance was the same name they were planning to use for the future party, the Green Ecologist Party (PVE). Still wondering how that name was approved, since it wasn’t an actual party.
It didn’t count for much, however, as all they managed to gain was only 0.27% of votes for the Chamber of Deputies and 0.7% for the Senate, obviously not obtaining a single seat. As a result, the merger that was supposed to take place in early 2009 was forgotten, the two parties once again going their separate ways… Which led to an even worse defeat, neither party being able to even gather the required amount of signatures to field any candidates in the 2009 European Parliament elections!

For the 2009 presidential elections, both parties seemed to have recovered somewhat, at least to the point of being able to field candidates. PV in fact did much better than before, enlisting Remus Cernea specifically in order for him to be their presidential candidate and he in turn brought many other people to the party and started a process that would develop it far more than it had been before. They obviously had no chance to get anywhere near the major parties, but they at least gained some public attention once again, and in fact PV gained a whole lot more attention than it ever had before.
But the debates that took place before the elections once again revealed the differences between the two parties and made the previous attempted merger seem even stranger. PV seemed more than willing to try again, in fact Remus Cernea repeatedly stating that one of the key points on his agenda was to unite all the green and ecologist parties in Romania in a single one, but PER obviously wanted nothing more to do with such a plan. That was at least in part due to the fact that PV is a member of the European Greens while PER is not and quite obviously never had any intent of adhering to that doctrine. In fact the very dismissive replies given by PER’s presidential candidate when he happened to be asked about it seemed to quite clearly translate into something like “why would we want to have anything to do with those fools”.

Not long after the elections, the relationship between Remus Cernea and the more established part of PV’s leadership deteriorated, many being increasingly bothered by his open and enthusiastic support for issues such as the separation of church and state, LGBT rights and, perhaps most of all, a significant part of the Magyar minority’s demands. That culminated with him finally resigning from the party just as they were about to kick him out. Plenty of others, most of which had joined PV after him and specifically because they supported these other ideas as well, followed him and together they quickly started working on founding a new party. This is something that I have written about before, so I won’t go into any more detail here.
After the initial “Snow White” media stunt, the new party’s real name was revealed and the gathering of signatures was officially started right at the end of 2010, with them initially estimating that the party was going to be legally registered at some point between July and October, 2011. At the same time, they were busy developing the network of local branches that any serious party needs, aided by the fact that some of PV’s defected to them. Since then, one particular local branch seems to have risen above the rest, being particularly active and apparently even successful in its current projects.

The disarray PV was left in towards the end of 2010 was nothing compared to PER’s situation at the time, however. Both parties had to start a process of reform, forced by the defections, but PER almost disintegrated, with most of its local branches splitting away, many of them joining PV instead. Yet both parties elected new leaders and seem to have since recovered. Interestingly, PV’s new executive president is the former frontman of the humor group Vacanta Mare, who went into politics after the group finally disbanded and, after giving up on his aspirations of founding a new party once he realized how extremely difficult it is to do so in Romania, first joined PER. He left after a few months, along with the many others who defected at the time, very unhappy with how he had been treated and deeply dissatisfied with the kind of people he had found inside that party.
One result of these reforms was that talks of a merger between PV and PER started once again. In fact the first notions of it started appearing almost immediately after Remus Cernea left PV, though for the next few months PV returned to being critical towards PER. And they had every reason to be, with PER having stances completely unsuitable for a party with this doctrine, the most notable of which being their public support for the Rosia Montana mining project. After all, there is a reason PER has never been a member of the European Greens, and in fact the European Greens have in the past made it quite clear that it isn’t following the green doctrine.
Still, about one month ago PV announced that they have signed a protocol with the purpose of merging PV and PER into PVE, so maintaining the name used during their previous merger attempt, by the end of the year. However, they have clearly stated their conditions, which include the new leadership of PER publicly distancing itself from the party’s previous statements regarding the Rosia Montana mining project and officially opposing it from now on, as well as fully complying with the Charter of the European Greens, including on issues regarding the rights of minorities. As such, considering PER’s previous record and the socially conservative attitude it has always seemed to have, I still find the merger unlikely, and my opinion seems to be confirmed by PER’s recent statements, stressing that the merger hasn’t happened yet and there’s still a lot of work to do if it is to ever happen at all.

While this was going on, MV has continued its efforts to get itself legally registered, but seems to have come to the conclusion that it was impossible, or at least far more trouble than it was worth. As such, they have at some point somehow approached the People’s Agrarian Party (PPA), which is a very minor party that as far as I know never had any representatives anywhere, and started negotiations to essentially take over that party. The negotiations were successful and PPA voted last month to change its name into MVDA, preserving a honorary founding president title for its current president but otherwise appointing MV’s leaders as its own. The name change still needs to be approved in court, however.
Now you could say that it doesn’t matter too much how they start as long as they do it, and in fact that’s what they’re saying, but this is something that I’m deeply bothered by, partly because they have essentially started their journey with a defeat but mainly because everything happened in complete secrecy, nothing whatsoever being announced about this until the process was completed, apparently about a month after the end of the negotiations. Once something like this happens, you need to keep asking yourself from that moment forward what else is being hidden from you. And when this comes from a party that supposedly stresses the values of an open society, it’s all the more troubling.
Considering that the rural areas are of great importance, particularly for environmental reasons, it’s likely a good idea for MV, which is a party known almost exclusively in the urban areas and with little to no expertise in rural problems, to join forces with a party like PPA, which is known almost exclusively in rural areas and which seems to have some experience of dealing with problems specific to the individuals who live there. However, MV should have first at least attempted to get themselves registered and, if successful, subsequently absorb PPA. If their registration would have been rejected, as it was probably somewhat likely to happen, they could have picked this path, sure, but only if they would have made the negotiations public from the very first moment! As it is, this is inexcusable! Granted that it’s not quite as inexcusable as their openly stated desire to ally themselves with PSD for next year’s elections, which makes me say that unless they change their mind by then I won’t vote for them no matter what and will do my best to dissuade others from doing so as well, but it’s still a huge red flag.

In the end, this leaves us with these three parties, which may or may not become two by the end of the year. When it comes to environmental issues, I still can’t say that I know what exactly PER stands for, but PV and MV seem to have extremely similar ideologies and even projects. The differences become more significant when it comes to the other issues, however. PER and PV seem to agree on firmly opposing the Magyar minority’s demands for additional rights, not to mention the calls for autonomy, while MV’s stance is that it supports their “cultural autonomy” and “serious, rational debates” regarding any other demands. And when it comes to issues like the separation of church and state and the rights of any other minorities of any kind, the three parties seem to have completely different viewpoints, with MV fully and actively supporting and pressing for all of these issues, PER seeming socially conservative and likely to oppose such concepts when they happen to come up and PV seeming to have more of a “wait and see” approach.
Remus Cernea stated that PV’s leadership is actually very socially conservative and the party won’t support such issues at all if it comes right down to it, and in fact I heard that MV planned to send some sort of evidence of this to the European Greens, but nothing along those lines seems to have happened. After MV will get legally registered they are likely to try to join the European Greens as well, so something may happen then, but the truth is that I’m not so sure Remus is entirely right. Of course, he should know better, but my personal impression is that, while some of its leaders most likely actually are socially conservative, PV as a whole isn’t as much opposing the issues themselves as saying that the public outcry generated by openly supporting such concepts in Romania at this point in time would be so strong that it’d make it impossible for the party to do anything about the environment either, and that needs to be their top priority. Which is an assessment that I must unfortunately agree with, considering the huge approval rating still enjoyed by the Romanian Orthodox Church (BOR) and the fact that the tremendous majority of Romanians openly state that they discriminate against LGBT people, among other things… Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why I say solutions to important problems can’t come from politics.

And there you have it. This ended up way longer than the last post, and obviously longer than planned, but I did go into far more detail and eventually managed to say pretty much everything I meant to say. Again, if you have verifiable corrections to make, do make them, because I have relied a lot on memory and there’s some guesswork added in as well.