Posts in category "Photos"

Transitway Six

Thumbnail: Transitway

On days like this, it’s bet­ter to wear light cloth­ing, and throw on a hood­ed wind­break­er. The rain out­side is just a driz­zle, so it’s com­fort­ably cool. Pay no atten­tion to the hydraulic hiss of the wind­shield wipers, or you won’t be able to help hear­ing them through the qui­et parts of every song. Window seats are prime. There are few­er dis­trac­tions from peo­ple walk­ing down the aisle.

The 95 goes from one end of the city to the oth­er, straight through the heart of Ottawa. Every stop is a mem­o­ry. Old haunts. Past lives.

Here was your first apart­ment. Sometimes you’d find Christie wait­ing for you here on the bench­es between class­es. How long ago those days seem, how imma­ture and rel­a­tive­ly inno­cent. The next two stops are on the edge of the uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus, four years of scat­tered tru­an­cy. Two stops lat­er is where you use to buy a medi­um caramel cor­ret­to every morn­ing after an exhaust­ing night with Louise. Your old gov­ern­ment office is anoth­er two on. The con­crete build­ing looks so for­eign now, and you won­der if the same peo­ple are still inside. Another few stops is your last apart­ment, before buy­ing the house, the end of bus rides home every day.

Music nev­er meant so much.

You pass by con­struc­tion sites, fin­ished build­ings, see the evo­lu­tion of the city.

Every stop can be traced to a dif­fer­ent point, a dif­fer­ent girl­friend, a dif­fer­ent path in your life.

Six years of expe­ri­ence, six years of shift­ing, ever-chang­ing ani­ma.

Six years passed.

Six years lived.

Six years grown.

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.

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.

New Computer '05

I final­ly got my com­put­er, and have the week­end to spend set­ting every­thing up.

Let’s talk geek.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Dual-Core) 4400+

Thumbnail: Large CPU heatsink

The sex­i­est stock heatsink I’ve ever seen. Notice the dense fins, and the sym­met­ri­cal cop­per heat pipes. I did­n’t dare take it off the cpu for a pic­ture. One time, after I pulled the heatsink off a P4, I noticed that the proces­sor was stuck to the bot­tom while the proces­sor lock was still in place. The ther­mal paste had caked and turned to glue. The edges of the cpu were chipped and a few pins were bent, but I care­ful­ly put them back in place and it still worked.

This one is an AMD though. It’s clocked at 2.2 GHz, with two megs of lev­el 2 cache (one per core). Even though it can almost be con­sid­ered unrea­son­ably expen­sive, I went with a dual-core proces­sor because I want­ed some­thing that could han­dle both sin­gle-thread­ed and mul­ti-thread­ed apps. All the reviews I read said that the Pentium Extreme Edition chips were slight­ly bet­ter for the lat­ter but much worse for the for­mer, so this marks my first for­ay into the use of an Advanced Micro Devices proces­sor, at work or at home.

Continue read­ing “New Computer ‘05”…