Posts in category "Daily Life"

Just Forget

Jeff: I can tell you feel the same
dar: do you still talk to her?
Jeff: no…I actu­al­ly specif­i­cal­ly told her not to talk to me again
Jeff: cause of some creepy stalk­er shit she was doing
dar: haha­ha
Jeff: and she still e‑mails me
dar: damn..
dar: she’s going to kill you in the dark
Jeff: haha­ha­ha­ha­ha­ha­hah­ha­ha­haaaahh
dar: she prob. knows where u live
dar: and watch­es you

In uni­ver­si­ty I met Mike, half-heart­ed­ly doing his biol­o­gy home­work in my cryp­tol­ogy class to hang out with his old high-school friend, the lat­ter of whom was one of my clique. Mike has an odd charis­ma. His out­spo­ken­ness means that he exudes con­fi­dence, and the girls love him for it. I’m nev­er real­ly sure if his mild chau­vin­ism is a seri­ous atti­tude, or just some­thing he projects around oth­er guys to fit in. One of those sex­ist ass­holes the girls can’t seem to resist.

He once con­fessed, “I have this Korean chick fol­low­ing me. You know, the kind you have to kick off your leg like a dog”.

Those girls are only in the movies, I thought to myself. The dorky ones with the glass­es who have impos­si­ble crush­es on the main char­ac­ters, who, in turn, are com­plete­ly blind to the awk­ward advances. The girls who sac­ri­fice their chance at hap­pi­ness, because they love him so much and just want him to be hap­py, mar­tyring them­selves in the minds of teen audi­ences every­where.

But they do exist. Those stub­born girls who still try to keep con­tact after you tell them you nev­er want to speak to them again. The girls who con­tin­ue to check your blog at an aver­age of twice a day, some sick voyeuris­tic fas­ci­na­tion.

Those girls you wished would for­get about you, so you could for­get about them.

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.

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.

Tom And Mel's Wedding

Thumbnail: Boardroom

Thumbnail: Glass of guiness

Thumbnail: Dinner table

Even before the wed­ding began, I had already unfair­ly decid­ed that I was­n’t going to have a good time. Thank god I was wrong. My ini­tial feel­ing was based on the knowl­edge that cer­tain agi­tat­ing peo­ple were going to be there — a very tan­gi­ble reminder of why we moved under cov­er of dark­ness for the last Bancroft farm excur­sion — but there were enough nor­mal peo­ple to dilute any creepi­ness.

The cer­e­mo­ny was short and sweet. The food was the best I’ve had in weeks, although my grad­ual recov­ery from viral gas­troen­teri­tis meant that I could only have half of the por­tions served. The com­pa­ny at the din­ner table was friend­ly and open enough to address every­one sit­ting (Tolstoy wrote well about such a dif­fi­cul­ty in Anna Karenina when he describes “a small table with per­sons present, like the stew­ard and the archi­tect, belong­ing to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent world, strug­gling not to be over­awed by an ele­gance to which they were unac­cus­tomed, and unable to sus­tain a large share in the gen­er­al con­ver­sa­tion”). Aside from an idi­ot­ic anal­o­gy about aspara­gus, the speech­es were gen­er­al­ly well-writ­ten; not too trite, and all the more poignant from the emo­tion with which they were spo­ken.

Aaron was there as my wing­man, ensur­ing a good time. Jenn was there as my date, mak­ing the guys jeal­ous. I even saw Christine, although we nev­er had a chance to talk. Apparently, I missed every time she waved at us, so she may have thought that I was ignor­ing or avoid­ing her, which may be why she flicked my ear as she was walk­ing by my table. I still feel bad enough about miss­ing her last birth­day par­ty.

Until din­ner there was an open bar, with Corona and even Guinness on tap, as well as a straw­ber­ry mar­gari­ta machine that could make them like smooth­ies. After din­ner was the danc­ing, and by the time the we were through a dozen or so songs, it was already late, so we head­ed home.