Yearly Archives: 2005

Awakening: Cause

Worry does not emp­ty tomor­row of sor­row — it emp­ties today of strength.

—Corrie ten Boom

It start­ed with a sin­gle pan­ic attack, at work, in the mid­dle of the day.

Heart rac­ing, dif­fi­cul­ty breath­ing, par­a­lyz­ing ter­ror, fear that I was about to die.

If you’ve ever had a bad trip off psilo­cybe, or mag­ic mush­rooms, the effects are very sim­i­lar. Not that I’ve ever had a good one. Half an hour into inges­tion, I start to feel nau­se­at­ed. At the back of my head there’s a creep­ing sense that some­thing is wrong. My hands start to trem­ble, my mind feels like it’s shud­der­ing. Eventually, there’s a com­plete uneasi­ness in the body, both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly. Around that time, the body reacts quick­ly to rid the stom­ach of what­ev­er is caus­ing these symp­toms, and vio­lent­ly ejects them in the form of vom­it­ing. Stems and caps come out as dark brown flecks, and you won­der how eat­ing some­thing so small thing can make you feel so ter­ri­ble.

But with a pan­ic attack, there’s no expla­na­tion. No sense of pre­ven­tion. No float­ing fun­gus in the pool of your toi­let you can point your fin­ger at and say, “I’m nev­er doing THAT again”.

It comes with­out warn­ing, with­out obvi­ous rea­son. All you want is to end the attack. To crawl into a cor­ner and hide. To tear off your stran­gling clothes. To die.

Afterward, you’re not won­der­ing what you’re going to lis­ten to on the way home, or how to get the atten­tion of that cutie in the porce­lain depart­ment, or when you’ll have time to go buy more sham­poo. All you’re think­ing about is when the next one will hap­pen. All you’re left with is a bunch of ques­tions and a sense of insta­bil­i­ty. I have my sus­pi­cions, but I’ve cho­sen not to write about them until I’m cer­tain, some­thing which I believe will come in time. There’s no sim­ple diag­no­sis, no easy answer.

Recently, sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that the word “wheeze” can acti­vate asth­ma attacks in asth­mat­ics. The mind trig­gers an asso­ci­at­ed emo­tion­al response, and the body man­i­fests the reac­tion. It’s the same after a pan­ic attack. Sometimes, peo­ple with pan­ic dis­or­der can bring on an attack just wor­ry­ing or think­ing too much about it.

Not that I have a dis­or­der. The fear of an attack isn’t detri­men­tal enough to stunt me social­ly, and does­n’t pre­vent me from func­tion­ing as what the DSM IV would con­sid­er “nor­mal”. It was only a sin­gle episode, but habit of con­stant self-eval­u­a­tion means that the threat of it hap­pen­ing again is always there. It’s in the back of my mind whether I’m at work, or play­ing games, or cook­ing din­ner. Every minute of every day becomes a strug­gle not to think about it. And when you know you feel like dying dur­ing an attack, you start to won­der whether it’s worth liv­ing at all.

People face this ques­tion when they’re diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal ill­ness­es. Told that they have only have a few years left, they live more in those num­bered days than they do in their entire lives until then.

They awak­en.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

This Little Chip

Thumbnail: BIOS chip

This tiny chip almost had me with­out my com­put­er for at least a week.

It stores the BIOS, or Basic Input / Output System, in flash mem­o­ry on my moth­er­board. The very first thing that hap­pens when a com­put­er is boot­ed is the decom­press­ing of the BIOS into main mem­o­ry, which then ini­tial­izes the com­put­ers hard­ware com­po­nents, includ­ing crit­i­cal devices such as disk dri­ves and I/O ports. This allows a user to recieve feed­back (through video), input com­mands (through a mouse or key­board), and install or run oper­at­ing sys­tems (from a hard dri­ve).

Without a BIOS, none of this would be pos­si­ble. In the past, moth­er­board man­u­fac­tur­ers have made it a has­sle to fool around with the pro­gram burned onto the small chip, because improp­er steps in the repro­gram­ming process could poten­tial­ly ren­der the chip use­less. To update the BIOS, one would have to boot to DOS with a flop­py and run a flash pro­gram off the disk. Modern moth­er­boards now offer the flex­i­bil­i­ty to update through spe­cial soft­ware in Windows, although this process is nowhere near as sta­ble as run­ning through DOS.

Which is some­thing I had to learn the hard way last night.

Recent ran­dom reboot­ings had giv­en me rea­son to start run­ning the lat­est BIOS ver­sion. Unfortunately, I did­n’t have a flop­py dri­ve (I opt­ed not to buy one with my new com­put­er because I haven’t used a flop­py in years), which meant that I was stuck with the Windows flash soft­ware. The soft­ware hap­pened to crash at a very ear­ly part of the flash­ing process, which meant that I did­n’t even have basic boot­up code to get a dri­ve run­ning. At next boot — noth­ing. No BIOS POST beep, no screen sig­nal, no response from the key­board. I quick­ly pur­chased a flop­py dri­ve at the near­est deal­er, scram­bled to find a disk, put a boot sec­tor on it, but to no avail. There was­n’t even enough code burned onto the chip to get pow­er to the flop­py dri­ve.

Normally, when some­thing like this hap­pens, such as the pow­er going out or the flop­py being removed dur­ing a flash, the BIOS gets cor­rupt­ed and the chip is dead. The options are to get the moth­er­board RMA’d, which means send­ing the board back to the man­u­fac­tur­er before they send a new one back, or pur­chas­ing a new BIOS chip with a good BIOS image on it, which means spend­ing more mon­ey and wait­ing for a replace­ment. Both choic­es would take at least a week, if lucky.

Neither option was sat­is­fac­to­ry. I could­n’t wait until who-knows-how-long for some­thing to be sent back to me. Being with­out my com­put­er is like being with­out my com­fort zone, the place where I can lis­ten to music and write, play games to get away, com­mu­ni­cate with the rest of the world, or even work on my busi­ness with Aaron when I feel so inclined. I looked around the net for a faster solu­tion, and dis­cov­ered some­thing called hot flash­ing.

Unfortunately, faster also means riski­er. Hot flash­ing involves swap­ping two BIOS chips while the com­put­er is run­ning. All that’s need­ed is a healthy chip, an iden­ti­cal moth­er­board (which I have at work), a boot disk with appro­pri­ate flash­ing software/image, and nat­u­ral­ly, the cor­rupt­ed chip. A com­put­er is boot­ed to flop­py with a good BIOS chip, and after get­ting to a DOS prompt where a BIOS flash can be per­formed, the cor­rupt­ed chip is swapped and re-flashed. As a per­son who’s already squea­mish about run­ning a com­put­er with just a side pan­el miss­ing (in case water may hap­pen to splash into the case and cause a short, or a for­eign object falls in and jams a fan), this was an extreme­ly daunt­ing process. Playing around with chips while a com­put­er is hot means that there’s the risk of elec­tro­cu­tion, or short cir­cut that could per­ma­nent­ly dam­age the oth­er com­po­nents. Theoretically, after the BIOS is fin­ished run­ning, the board stops sup­ply­ing pow­er to the chip since it’s no longer need­ed.

I decid­ed to my faith in such a the­o­ry. Going on this faith meant that I could pry the chip out with a pair of mod­i­fied paper clips with­out hav­ing to wor­ry too much about caus­ing a short (spe­cial PLCC-sock­et tongs are avail­able, but rare, and would prob­a­bly take just as long to arrive after pur­chase as get­ting a new board). After a few prac­tice pulls, which, I dis­cov­ered, loosens the sock­et and gets pro­gres­sive­ly eas­i­er, I seat­ed the good chip with just enough pres­sure to make the con­nec­tions in the sock­et. After boot­ing suc­cess­ful­ly, I pried the chip off the board and ran the flash.

The first attempt was unsuc­cess­ful, and after try­ing to boot with a cor­rupt­ed BIOS, some­thing unex­plain­able hap­pened. The LED on the moth­er­board that shows that there’s a con­nect­ed pow­er sup­ply would­n’t go out. I pulled the pow­er plug, turned off the ATX switch, undid both the 24-pin EATX and 4‑pin 12-volt con­nec­tors, and even pulled out the CMOS bat­tery, but the light refused to turn off. My only guess was that the capac­i­tors still had enough ener­gy stored to keep the light on. After reset­ting the CMOS, and anoth­er hot flash attempt, the com­put­er boot­ed with the cor­rupt­ed chip run­ning the lat­est BIOS. My Windows instal­la­tion was fucked (it would­n’t even boot into safe mode), but after a recov­ery install, every­thing was up and run­ning again.

I was down for less than 24 hours.

Awakening: Introduction

Sharpen a blade too much
  and its edge will soon be lost
Fill a house with gold and jade
  and no one can pro­tect it
Puff your­self with hon­or and pride
  and no one can save you from a fall

—Verse Nine, Tao Te Ching

Every time I start to write, I’m led back to this. It would appear that it’s time to express myself. Perhaps I’m ready. It feels like I’m only scratch­ing the sur­face, try­ing to cov­er aspects of some­thing that I have yet to under­stand. In the show­er I decid­ed to split this into sev­er­al entries of a series, and in my room the lights are all on.

There’s been more insta­bil­i­ty in the last month than in the last three years of my life com­bined. Everything I knew, every­thing I believed in, has been turned upside-down. Although I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pened, the fact of the mat­ter is that there was a long, drawn-out cri­sis. This cri­sis, which appears to have passed, still affects my thoughts, my actions, and my beliefs.

Even though I don’t com­plete­ly have my feet on the ground, it feels like I’m com­fort­able enough to explore what’s hap­pened now. This is not an easy task. A sin­gle, seem­ing­ly innocu­ous thought can end up break­ing the strands of the del­i­cate web I’m tread­ing.

If I can get it all down, I’ll know I’ve gone that far at least.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

Hurricane Katrina Left Me With Nothing

It’s Friday, and Hurricane Katrina, more than 2000 kilo­me­tres away, has thrown cold winds and scat­tered show­ers over parts of Southern Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick. As I step out­side to grill some­thing on the bar­beque, the cats quick­ly run to the screen door. They tem­porar­i­ly for­get that they’re ene­mies, that they nor­mal­ly can’t walk past each oth­er with­out a swipe or a hiss, and sit side-by-side to care­ful­ly smell the damp wind com­ing through.

People name hur­ri­canes after their for­mer lovers. The head­lines are always the same:

After cheat­ing with co-work­er, Hurricane Camille leaves 250 dead from Louisiana to Virginia

$400 mil­lion dol­lars in dam­age and 1145 fatal­i­ties as Hurricane Gordon weaves through the Caribbean and takes half my CD col­lec­tion with him before dis­ap­pear­ing in his Camaro.

The cats know that some­thing has hap­pened. They can tell that this weath­er is com­ing from some­where else, and that many have been affect­ed, the way some dogs know that their own­ers are dat­ing the wrong peo­ple and won’t stop defend­ing them with their lips drawn back in a snarl.

But all the cats can do is sit and sniff.

The Most I Can Say For Now

Between the over­time and the ven­ture meet­ings with Aaron, the rest­less nights and the ear­ly morn­ings, I try to catch my breath. It’s good to be busy, but not when it means I don’t have the time or ener­gy to write. This is the prob­a­bly the most infre­quent pub­lish­ing peri­od I’ve ever been through since the start of this blog. Thoughts devel­op in my head, but I’m not ready to get them down and hit pub­lish yet. Maybe it’s a com­fort thing, maybe it’s a front, maybe I’ve sim­ply lost the desire to doc­u­ment every sin­gle detail of my life.

Through all of this I feel myself regain­ing some sta­bil­i­ty, although I tread light­ly, remain­ing both con­scious and cau­tious. This is the most I can say for now.