Cav's Place

I remember the day very clearly. I had just spoken on the phone with someone I had been talking to on-line for a while, then went to the living room and started watching some tennis while pacing around idly. All of a sudden, the broadcast was stopped and replaced with a report about what had just happened, set on a background of live images from New York. And the station in question was in fact somewhat late, holding on to the tennis broadcast until the magnitude of the event couldn’t be denied anymore, so I saw the same images and reports that were already at a later point, some moving on to analyses, pretty much everywhere while switching from one station to another, struggling to grasp the situation as well as possible, as quickly as possible.
What was immediately, instinctively, obvious, without requiring any analyses or official statements, was that I was witnessing a truly major event, and also that it wasn’t “just” an act of terrorism, but one of war. Something huge was taking place, something that would have many implications, so I wanted to have all the information I could, from all the sources I could have access to. However, the Internet wasn’t an option during the day back then and when I picked up the phone and called dad he said he hadn’t even heard of it yet, which I found odd, considering where he worked. So that left me with various TV stations, jumping from one to the other to figure out which had the best broadcast and putting everything together in my mind.
I certainly won’t deny also being rather excited about the whole thing and won’t claim that it was because I was “young and stupid”, being 16 at the time. I was fully aware of the scale of the tragedy and didn’t share the popular “the United States deserved it” mindset either, but it was simply the kind of event that gets your blood pumping, gets you worked up, imagining scenarios, thinking of strategies and trying to figure out implications. Or, of course, at an instinctive level it was simply this: “Why is it that we always break up our history by the wars, not the years of peace? […] Why the war and not the peace? Because it’s exciting, and because on some level people like to see something big fall apart and explode from the inside out.”

In the ten years since then, we have witnessed countless scenarios, conspiracy theories, debates, decisions, law and policy changes, military operations and all sorts of other actions and events that have been, and still are, directly or indirectly related to that day. It was very likely the most recent “day that changed the world” and it may well retain that “title” for quite some time. As such, it provided us with an extraordinary opportunity to implement the right kind of changes, making improvements at every level, from individual to global. Any event of such magnitude does that. Whether the initial impact is positive or negative makes little difference in the end, what matters being that such events force the world to change, throw away some old beliefs and practices and replace them with new ones. They simply create a void that needs to be filled.
So what have we done with that opportunity, with that void? Did we take full advantage of it, overhauling the very foundations of society, getting rid of everything that had stopped working, or had never worked in the first place, and replacing those things with new systems and concepts meant to truly improve the world? No, we most certainly have not. But we didn’t quite make the worst of it either. It’s true that certain elements of society, most notably those in positions of authority, have used this and other such events to further their own agendas, implementing many changes that worsen the overall situation, but the fact is that there’s still a lot of unused momentum and it’s only up to the rest of us to take advantage of it. “Governments deal in matters of convenience, not conscience. If they fall behind, it is up to the rest of us to make up the difference. If we don’t, who will?”

Since it’s been ten years, I see no point in dwelling on pointing accusing fingers to those believed responsible, wondering how was something like this possible. I’m also not going to believe the conspiracy theories claiming that the United States government, or certain elements of it, actually orchestrated this. I will, however, say that many governments and other official figures all over the world have been using it to their full advantage, greatly increasing their control over people through measures supposedly justified by the need to combat terrorism. But they’re not the ones to blame for this, or at least not really.
The current system requires people to truly desire a position of authority before obtaining it, so it’s only natural that the vast majority will desire it for their own ends and try to use it to further their personal agendas at the expense of those they’re supposed to help and protect, and at the expense of the world as a whole. What’s more, most people are very easy to manipulate, largely through fear. They’re not rational beings, instead reacting instinctively to such events, doing, demanding or simply allowing things that bring about such negative changes. In a way, according to the current system, many of the negative changes that have been implemented over the past ten years are actually justified by the actions and desires of this large number of people, taking even more of the blame off the shoulders of the powers that be.

Ten years later, we’re still far from reaching any destination, but the good news is that there is still a lot of unused momentum, especially considering the elimination of certain authoritarian regimes, regardless of the method used to achieve this goal or the real motives behind it. The void created by the events that took place a decade ago hasn’t been completely filled yet, and many of the parts that have been filled can still be changed, as they haven’t fully settled yet. What needs to be done now can and likely will be ugly for a while, but we can still turn this around and make the best of the opportunity provided as long as we remember that nothing can happen in our society unless most people let it happen.
The blame for what has happened during the past ten years can’t be thrown on the attackers, nor can it be left entirely on the shoulders of politicians or other decision makers. Commemorate the victims and the heroes if you want, but most importantly honor them by guaranteeing that their deaths were not in vain. Identify and learn from past and present mistakes in order to create a better future. After all, as reality proves time and time again, “we have to create the future or others will do it for us”.

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.