This is a 2005 AT-AT model from AMT. I picked it up on a total lark at a comic convention while I was two steps from the door. I learned an important lesson with this model about using linseed oil as a base. It didn’t really seem to work for me. Instead, it ruined the model, and a substantial portion of paint work – as in, all – and I had to soak all the pieces in Simple Green for two weeks to strip all the paint off and then start from scratch. That was a super fun lesson.
Anyway, I’m reasonably pleased with the way it turned out. I’d like to learn how to craft terrain – I could imagine giving it a kind of diorama feel with some snow underfoot. I thought the grass outside proved a kind of cool instrument of scale, so I spent awhile crawling around in the yard with my camera. In a perfect world, I’ll put some more on Flickr.
This essay was originally published in 2004.
I told myself that I just wanted to see it with my own eyes, admire the box art, feel its weight in my hands – but before I had stepped out of the stacks of books and into the neat rows of CDs and DVDs, I knew, beyond all certainty, that this was a bald-faced lie. Just give it a look was quickly eroding into Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie. I was like an alcoholic who had sworn off alcohol. I was like James Frey, like a thousand other drunks, holding a cold beer in my hands just to so I could pour it down the drain. Yeah, right. I was a joke. A lie.
I didn’t see it anywhere, so I asked a clerk.
“Do you have the Star Wars DVD set?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “They asked us to keep it behind the counter for some reason. I don’t know why.”
He walked behind the cash register, grabbed a package with two hands and handed it to me.
And then I kind of blacked out for awhile. I remember it was heavy and expensive, and I remember thinking, Oh, what could it hurt, and then there was nothing. End of reel.
What could I do? What could I possibly be expected to do? My reasons for not wanting these movies disappeared, like fog in the early morning sun. They were noble reasons, yes, certainly noble – but just that – intangible, moral principles. And this would not have been the first time principles had lost out to tangible lust. After all, I had the toys, I had worn out who knows how many VHS copies of the films. I had been to conventions, been to expos, had brought a plastic lightsaber to a midnight screening of Attack of the Clones (and The Phantom Menace).
I was powerless.
I was a nerd.
And then someone was shaking me, and the world snapped back into focus.
“What do you think you’re doing with that?” Nicki said.
“Um, nothing,” I said.
She stared at me in a way she has perfected, that is innate to women, like menstrual cycles and a deep affinity for chocolate.
“Well,” I said. “I think maybe I was too harsh, earlier. I think I might pick it up after all.”
Junkie.
“Put it back. Right now,” she said.
“But,” I said.
“Now,” she said. “If you buy it, you’ll just feel bad about it later. Take a stand, for once.”
I held the box in my hands. I looked at her, then at the box, then back at her. I considered bashing her over the head with the DVDs and making a mad dash for the door. My fingers tightened on the box. My body was feeding me on: run, run, run, clock her and run. She’s just jealous of Princess Leia in full digital quality.
“Now,” she said, again. “Put it back.” She had her hands on her hips, which I have learned to recognize as a warning sign, like a cobra’s hooded hiss.
I hung my head, and, defeated (or, I guess, victorious), I put the Star Wars Trilogy DVD Box Set (Widescreen) onto the shelf closest to me, next to a stack of Redbook magazines.
“You’re right,” I said.
“Yeah, of course you’re right,” I said.
“Thanks,” I said. I jammed my clenched fists into my pockets, and tried to convince myself that I didn’t really want to hurt her. Not really.
So, I didn’t buy it. But I almost did. Close thing, which leads me, oddly enough, into the thrust of this story: What am I all up in arms about? Why am I so outraged? So full of moral indignation?
Why couldn’t I just fork over my $70 and shut up about it?
It turns out that these three films – A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi – are a lot more than a few lightsaber battles and a couple of Ewoks. At the core of these films, these newly remastered DVDs, is a question about the very nature of art, and, in particular, movie making.
There have been, all told, four versions of A New Hope. I’ll just stick with this, the first film, as anything more would just confuse my tiny, fragile brain. The original film was released in 1977. Then, in 1981, it was re-released, with minor edits. Then, in 1997, it was re-re-released, after undergoing a rather exhaustive overhaul: new scenes had been added, old ones cut, dialogue changed. Tuesday, September 21st, marked the fourth release of A New Hope. It has, again, undergone extensive edits.
I got kind of exhausted just going through all that. The point is, the film released in 1977 is no more. It is, in the words of the man who created it, “on VHS, if anybody wants it.”
But why so many edits? So many editions? Let’s ask George Lucas himself. Or, rather, quote from an AP interview; I found on Yahoo.
To me, the special edition ones are the films I wanted to make. Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It’s abandoned or it’s ripped out of your hands, and it’s thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It’s a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, “That’s exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I’m going to put it out there.” And even most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work now. They’ve got a new perspective on it, they’ve got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done. … I wanted to actually finish the film the way it was meant to be when I was originally doing it. At the beginning, people went, “Don’t you like it?” I said, “Well, the film only came out to be 25 or 30 percent of what I wanted it to be.” They said, “What are you talking about?” So finally, I stopped saying that, but if you read any interviews for about an eight- or nine-year period there, it was all about how disappointed I was and how unhappy I was and what a dismal experience it was. You know, it’s too bad you need to get kind of half a job done and never get to finish it. So this was my chance to finish it.
Now, at first, this may seem like a pretty innocuous quote – but as you will soon see, it’s not. It is, in fact, an insidious attitude that will get you nowhere, and fast (or slow). I will concede that, sigh, yes, perhaps, with the benefit of age and wisdom, artists may often think of ways they might have done things differently. This, I hypothesize, is the why Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails releases fifteen remixes of each of his songs. But, you know, I’d bet you dollars to donuts (as my dad says) that, no matter how much the end of After Hours might bug Martin Scorsese, now, twenty years later – that’s all it’s going to do – bug him. He’s not going to re-edit the god damned thing, and I’ll tell you why. I’ll let you in on a little secret.
Because time moves on, and art is never done.
I think George Lucas has trouble getting down with either of these ideas. He talks a lot about how he has perspective now, knows what he wants now, has the resources now, can make what he wanted now. That, at long last, Star Wars is done. But you don’t have to think too hard to realize that he must be getting a hell of a deal on some nice Columbian rock. It’s not done, and, while most people can deal with that, George Lucas, apparently, cannot. We grow and change constantly. Besides eating, sleeping and fucking, it’s pretty much all we do. What we thought was perspective changes into new perspective. What we thought we wanted shifts and shimmies, like dunes in the desert. The technology that finally lets us get it right turns into new technology – and all of that means that year to year, month to month, day to day, second to second – the finish line doesn’t sit still, waiting to be crossed. It stretches on in front of us, in fact, to infinity (or death – and guess which comes first?) If, like Lucas, you start to play this game, to follow this paralyzing instinct, you will never, ever, stop chasing an unobtainable goal. Art is never done – done doesn’t exist. Art just is. 20 years from now, Lucas, I guarantee, will still be chasing his demons. Star Wars will be re-re-re-re-re-released, with digital replacements for Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, so George Lucas can micromanage yet another layer of subtlety.
George. Please. Leave it be.
And that’s not all (although, I admit, after this many pages, maybe it should be). All this revision creates a major pop-culture schism. The original (wonderful) film has influenced kids and adults alike for 30 years. It wasn’t what it is now. It wasn’t a parade of this CGI bullshit. For 30 years, this imperfect masterpiece has permeated our culture, and this Orwellian slant on movie-making leads to a single profound question: What is Star Wars? Today, what are people talking about when they talk about these movies? Revise, edit, re-release, repeat, repeat, repeat – each one, an echo appended to a chorus that is becoming increasingly hard to hear. To put it another way, imagine if every ten years, the (remaining) Beatles issues “more finished” versions of Abbey Road. A new disc, every ten years, with a reworked, restructured sound – with new tracks and changes to old ones. How would anyone ever talk about the album? How could it ever make a cohesive impact on people? It couldn’t. Like Star Wars, its meaning would begin to fragment and dilute.
It would end, as T. S. Eliot once said, in a heap of broken images – and I fear the same inevitable outcome for our boy from Tatooine.
George, please, let it be.
And until you do – until these movies are released as they were, and as they should be – beautiful, fierce, and flawed – I’m not going to buy them (and believe me, you’re going to miss that $70.00 up there in your palace, where you hunt homeless people for sport with rifles made of pure gold). I’m on the band wagon, now. I’m high and dry and doing ok, as long as I don’t get too near a Best Buy. I’m working the 12 steps (#3 – Greedo didn’t shoot first!)
I’ll wait. And I’ll go without.
One day at a time.
Nightswimming
I’ve been interested in long exposure photography for awhile. I spent a few days on Lake Huron, outside of Oscoda, and it was a great chance to play around with my camera. There was a lot of stumbling through the underbrush along the beach at night, and fumbling to adjust settings in the pitch black. After a couple of days, I improved my technique a little bit by bringing along a flashlight, and also bug spray.
I’m reasonably pleased with some of the results. Did that have enough qualifiers? I cannot tell a lie – part of the advantage of showing them here is that there are certain size constraints. At full behemoth bazillion megapixel size, I think they lose a little luster – but a few really look sharp at a more reasonable size.
Spotify Impressions
When I heard that Spotify was coming to the US, I was super excited. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was excited, because I didn’t really know what Spotify was, other than it was a Thing on the Internet. I just had the sense that other, more knowledgeable people were excited, I guess. This has happened before. I was also really excited to get onboard with Google Wave.
Last week, Spotify finally launched in the States.
Why Spotify is Great
1. Spotify’s little catch phrase is, “All the music. All the time.” This is (mostly) true. I consider my digital music library to be pretty robust. At last count, I had a collection of 31,312 songs. That’s a lot of music, right? Spotify has a library of 13 million or so. 13,000,000. As long as I’m connected to the internet, I can listen to any of it, instantly, whenever I want. On my computer at work, on my computer at home, on smartphone – wherever. All I have to do is launch the Spotify application and I’m off and running.
2. I lied! You don’t even have to be connected to the internet! Playlists and albums can be saved for offline listening, too – so if you know you’re going to be out of touch, you can still get access to the music you want.
3. It integrates! The thing that bugs me with services like this is that, as a general rule, they don’t play with the music you already have. This results in lots of bouncing between applications. I dislike anything that involves bouncing. (See: Appendix A, The Trampoline) Thankfully, Spotify gracefully deals with your local music catalog, and even imports directly from iTunes and Windows Media Player – so you can listen to the music you already have and the music in the Spotify library from the same sandbox, and that’s great.
4. I get the feeling I’m just scratching the surface – there are a lot of features here. Among other things, there’s some sort of social aspect involving sharing playlists and making friends and at some point I’m sure it will involve me logging into Facebook. This does not super interest me, but, hey, there it is.
Ah-ha, you say, at this point, because you are smart. Ah-ha! If Spotify is all music, all the time, why do I care about accessing my old music library? Why do I care about all those tracks I purchased from iTunes and Amazon? Spotify has all the music in the world at my fingertips!
Why Spotify is Not Great
1. Yeah, sort of. Don’t get me wrong, 13 million tracks is an awful lot of music. Like, a lot, a lot. But it’s not everything. And I swear I’m not listening to your brother’s friend’s girlfriend’s indie rock band – but there have been a few times now where I’ve gone to listen to something and come up empty handed. That’s why it’s a good thing that Spotify works gracefully with my old music collection. It means that when Spotify doesn’t come through, I can find that album I want to hear without having to go launch iTunes and root around.
2. Except… I mean, everything’s about streaming these days, right? Streaming is important. The MP3 file came into wide-spread distribution in, what, 1997? Back then, I had maybe a couple hundred MP3 files and a single computer. Everything has gotten bigger and more complicated. Now, I have over 30,000 tracks. Instead of one computer, I have a desktop and a laptop and an iPod and a smartphone and a work computer and a car stereo and a home stereo. When I want to listen to something here instead of there, I don’t want to have to futz with syncing libraries and merging songs and remembering what lives where. I can barely remember to dress myself. Cloud streaming solves this problem by shoving my music out onto the internet, and letting me access it from anywhere I can get online. This is apparently the Next Big Thing. Google just launched a music streaming service. Amazon just launched a music streaming service. Apple has a streaming service on the way. All these services are about letting you access your existing music library anywhere you can get on the internet. Since Spotify does this already (but for a lot more music!) it’s not a big leap to assume that part of the core functionality would be to let you upload your own tracks into the Spotify cloud. Except, inexplicably, it does not. Maybe it’s a a record label thing – but when have you ever known a record executive to try to curb the ability of people to listen to stuff they’ve bought? Who knows why? I just know it sucks, and it’s my biggest complaint with the service.
3. Oh, and also, I waited until the very end to mention that it’s not free. Well, it is free. And it’s not free. It’s tiered. You can pay nothing, or you can pay $4.99 a month, or you can pay $9.99 a month. The more you pay, the more features you get- and point of fact, some the features I talk about under “why spotify is great” are only available to incredibly rich and powerful people like me who signed up for the $10 plan. I signed up for that plan both because I didn’t want to have to wait for an invitation to join the free service and I wanted access to mobile streaming on my phone.
Regarding the charge, I told my wife that this was all a one time thing – that I was just “trying it out.” I’m not sure yet if that’s a lie. It’s only been week, but so far it seems like a service with a lot of promise.
I like video games and I play them a lot. With everything in life I try for moderation, so I keep it to the weekends. This rule is subject to change without notice, whenever I feel like it, and sometimes it does, but I try to stick to it. Some of the games I play are.. well, games – they’re competitive sport, with points and rules and scores and things. These mostly involve guns. Some of the games I play are driven by narrative – they have a script and characters and quests. These games try to impart a kind-of cinematic experience. Both kinds of games are good. It’s a mood thing.
It’s kind of a strange time to be a gamer. Video games have become bazillion dollar industry. Game developers have gone from mom’s garage to sweat shop laboratories at Electronic Arts. People found out they could make money – because other people like to get stoned, sit in front of the computer, and fish virtually and now Gamestop has a midnight laugh party like every other night. In other words, the market has flooded, exploded – and quality has trended downward as profits trend up. Everything that isn’t nailed down has been monetized. You can pay $27 for a set of special hats for your character to wear. You can pay $10 for a new set of multiplayer maps. You can pay $5 to change your character’s hair color. You can pay, pay, pay.
For my hard earned cash, I have modest expectations. I want to enjoy myself for an indeterminate amount of time – until I inevitably lose interest and move on to something else. I feel like that’s fair. You know what I don’t want for my $50? I also don’t want a game that is full of horrible, ridiculous bugs that make me want to tear my hair out. For me, that’s like anathema to enjoyment.
All this is kind of a circuitous way of me saying that if you like games, I don’t think you should buy Fallout: New Vegas. I never played Fallout or its sequel. They came out a long time ago – as in decades – and I’m just the worst kind of person in that I find it hard to go back and play old video games, because I think they’re ugly and unsophisticated by the evolving standard of now. I know, shoot me. Anyway, Fallout 3 came out in 2008, and I picked that up and I played the ever-living hell out of it. I mean, I played it a lot. There was no weekend rule for Fallout 3. For several months I mostly just transitioned between states of sleeping, eating, working, and playing the game. Briefly, for the unfamiliar, this a role-playing game. You set out across the ruined landscape of a post-apocalyptic alterna-America – one of a handful who survived the nuclear showdown in a system of underground vaults. It’s like Mad Max set to Benny Goodman, sort of, I guess.
Anyway, I liked the game a lot. I was excited when they announced a sequel. I mean, how can more of a good thing not be a good thing? Well, it turns out it can not be a good thing when it’s broken and stupid and shitty.
This game, this sequel, Fallout: New Vegas, came out last October. I think the story is great. I think the characters and environments are engaging. I think most of the improvements and innovations they made to the core gameplay are positive. But the thing is, when you can play the thing for like a half hour at a time before everything comes crashing down around you, all of that doesn’t really amount to much. In fact, the potential of the game makes the disappointment that much worse. I mean, if you have a shitty game and it crashes all the time, that’s no big loss. But this game has so much going for it.
And so much wrong with it. Sometimes it crashes. Sometimes it crashes my entire computer. Sometimes the game sort of kind of works, in away that requires the scouring of user forums for other affected players, so that you can form an impromptu development team. Always a bonus. Sometimes quest items and characters and events blink out of existence for no discernible reason, rendering it impossible to progress – invariably leading to sessions rummaging through game guides searching for obscure console commands to try to manually reprogram the game – an extra enticing treat! I mean, this thing is broken.
But, hey. Maybe I’m that angry old guy, wrapped up in my old bathrobe, shaking my fist at the sky. Maybe I’m just a statistical outlier. Maybe it’s not a horrible, broken game – maybe I’ve just got a horrible, broken computer, and I’m projecting my bubbling frustration. Fair enough. Let’s see what some actual game reviewers who are actually paid actual money to actually review games had to say about New Vegas. GameZone called it ”a heaping pile of bugs.” 1Up lamented, “If only it was a stable product and didn’t ship with so many bugs.” Armchair Empire said, “I can only say that it’s beautiful but tragically flawed.” Kotaku, I think, puts it best:
This engine, despite being capable of some amazing vistas, is also busted at a fundamental level. Plastic-faced people, archaic character animation, dodgy AI path-finding, unreliable mission structures, misplaced map markings, these things – which let you down in Oblivion and in Fallout 3 – will let you down in this game as well. You’ll even run into game-breaking glitches like becoming stuck in the terrain. When you have to hard-save a game every five minutes for fear of it crashing or trapping you, there is a serious problem.
I bring all this up only because while kicking around the internet I noticed that on April 30th – as in, 7 days ago – Bethesda Software finally released a “comprehensive” patch for the game. That’s right! It only took six months, but apparently they’ve fixed the bulk of the technical and gameplay related issues that drove me to the brink of my very sanity.
To which I say: I’ll be sure to download that right away. Fuck you.
What I’m saying is – when you release a broken, horrible product, bilk $50 from us for it, and then putz around for six months before attempting to fix it in any meaningful way, that’s kind a dick move. Imagine me doing a really good Clay Davis. You think I’m going to go back and play a game I already tried to slog through once 6 months ago? That was like fifteen games ago. You only get one chance to make a first impression. I don’t suspect for a moment that the majority of developers behind the project were like, “Hey, let’s work really hard on this thing, and really give it a lot of promise, but then leave a bunch of stuff in to make it suck instead of taking another 6 months to do it right.” In this, as in most things, it’s probably safe to assume that some evil corporate overlord needed another floor on his fancy-pants castle-mansion, so he pushed a product out the door to make some green. And it is my solid assertion that, even if the game is now fixed and fully playable, no one should be rewarded for that. There are a lot of other, better games out there. Games that get it so completely right – like Portal 2 (which I implore you to buy immediately, especially if you haven’t tried a videogame made in the last 20 years).
As a colorful and also hilarious addendum, I thought it would be amusing to point out that apparently when the aforementioned “comprehensive” update to New Vegas was released on April 30th, a disastrous glitch was found in the Xbox 360 version – a glitch that corrupted any and all save game data.
This problem has apparently since been resolved.
Hey, it’s Kevin Bacon!
The thing with Google is that Google is fantastic. I love Google. The people that work for Google are obviously way, way smarter than I am, and the tools they create make my life better in innumerable ways. That does not mean that everything they do is awesome. Sometimes, despite all the fanfare and beta invitations, shit doesn’t work out. The nerds can’t be right all the time. Remember Google Wave? Yeah, I’m still not entirely sure what that was, but I used it once to make a penis joke. And now there’s Buzz, and of course we’re all totally buzzing away on our Buzz clients and following @BronxZooCobra on Buzz. Yeah.
So let’s talk about the Google TV. I think part of the problem out of the gate with the Google TV is that it’s hard to describe. And on top of that, not a lot of people understand what the Google TV is. Every time I mentioned to someone that I had a Google TV (a Logitech Revue), they would invariably say, “Oh, what does that do? Is that like an AppleTV?” And the thing is, it’s really hard to concisely describe what the damn thing is. And even if something is great, if you can’t explain it to people you’re not going to get much traction.
The easiest answer is, “It’s like Google, but for your TV,” but I understand how that could be a slightly unsatisfying. So, let’s make a test case. You’re sitting on your couch and you think to yourself, “Man, I want to watch an episode of House. That Hugh Laurie is so hilariously cantankerous!” You press the search button on your Google TV keyboard and type House. Then magic happens. Google TV looks on TV. Is House on right now? When will the next episode of House be on? Can we record it? Is there already an episode on your DVR? Google TV looks online. Is House available on Netflix? Is House available on Hulu? Amazon? Is House available on Fox’s website? Are their clips on YouTube? Google TV looks on your local network. Are there any episodes of House being shared from local media servers? It does all this, it collects it, and it presents it to you in an easy and accessible way. You press a button, then you get to watch House.
It does other stuff too, but I think most of it is secondary to this primary function. The Google TV comes with a full suite of applications – a web browser, program guide, twitter client, an NBA app – and access to a full app store. In the case of the Revue unit, it also comes with a Logitech Harmony wireless keyboard remote that wrangles all your AV devices – so you can manage your cable, TV, receiver, and Google TV all from a single device.
That sounds totally great, right? I mean, how can that not be great? Google, you’ve done it again!
Except not really.
Hand to God, it’s a daily struggle to not take my Logitech Revue out into the street and run over it with my car several times as a form of catharsis. I’m angry because it should work the way I described it. It wants to work the way I described it. Google and Logitech and Sony sold it as a device that worked the way I described it. And it comes so terribly close before it pulls a Wile E. Coyote and goes spiraling to its fiery doom. And now, six months out of the gate, it’s hard to shake the sensation that no one cares (no one in charge, anyway). To quote Charlie Sheen, “Sorry dude, I already got your money.”
So let us now enumerate the ways in which the Google TV fails.
- THE ENTIRE SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY THAT IS THE CORE SERVICE THE DEVICE IS INTENDED TO PROVIDE. It doesn’t work. That episode of House you wanted to watch? Well, there’s an episode on later. Want to DVR it? I tried, but the Revue couldn’t seem to convey the information to my cable box. Oh, there’s an episode of House already on your DVR! Cool, the Revue should find that. But it won’t, because that appears to be a perk only Dish Network customers get. So congratulations, all 6 of you. But Fox has episodes of House on their website! The Revue can find those! Oh, it sure can. Except Fox blocks the Google TV from accessing its website. Along with NBC, CBS, and ABC. Oh, and every channel owned by Viacom. Oh, and Hulu too. Google was supposedly in negotiations to resolve this issue at some point, but then I think they got distracted by a math problem or something. Not to worry! House is on Netflix! Except, inexplicably, the Google TV doesn’t search your Netflix queue. Instead, you have to launch the Netflix application and manually search for anything you want to watch. Fret not! You have that media server full of illegally downloaded episodes of House! Again, inexplicably, the Google TV doesn’t seem to index or search local network shares. You have to launch the “Logitech Media Player” – a program that has been in beta since launch – a program satisfies the bare minimum requirements of the term functional – that has crummy codec support, and that seems to crash about as often as it works. Using this program, you can slowly and laboriously navigate your network and try to guess the right file to try to play. Will it work? No one knows! Hooray!
- There are other things that suck about the Google TV. That app store? Still waiting on that. Logitech Harmony remote? You can get rid of all your other remotes! As long as you don’t have a Wii, or a Playstation, or a Xbox, or, um, well, anything else, really. Then you need to keep your remotes.
Maybe a patch will come out tomorrow and fix my Logitech Revue and it will live up to its promises and I won’t be filled with a seething desire to smash a piece of consumer electronics. I not overly optimistic, however. It seems like no one’s paying attention, and that’s a shame. The tantalizing idea of what the Google TV could be is exciting.
I am underappreciated.
I have a lot of stuff. I am a digital hermit. The bulk of this digital cruft is stored on a much-abused Windows Home Server I put together back in 2007. It started off with about 1.5GB of storage – 3 meager 500GB drivers. As of yesterday, it was pushing 6TB, with 3 fat, slow 2GB Western Digital behemoths. Unfortunately, even this 6TB solution has grown untenable. Two of the drives are pushing 98% capacity. The third is not too far behind. Yeah, 1080P videos are kind of big.
The plan was to upgrade these 2TB drives with 3TB models. To that end, I ordered one Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green drive as a test subject. When I get an OEM disk, I’m used to just getting a… disk. However, this drive shipped with a 1x PCIe SATA Host Adapter as well, which kind was kind of puzzling to me. It turns out there’s a good reason for this adapter. See, 3TB is apparently a bit of a deal – the sheer bulk apparently busts some sort of aged mathematical conceit that I do not really understand. I asked Don Winsor, who is both incredibly smart and also my boss, to elaborate on this point:
The bottom line comes from the fact that traditionally disks had 512
byte sectors, 512=2 to the 9th, and SATA had a 32 bit number for the
sectors, 2^32 ~ 4 billion. So multiplying these two gives 2 to the
41st which is 2 terabytes maximum capacity. To fix it you either need
to jump to a larger sector address (like 64 bits) or use a larger
sector size (like 4096 bytes, 2 to the 12th).From what I understand, using a larger sector size is much better, so
for systems that can deal with it (64 bit recent Linux or Windows 7),
the 4096 byte sector size is the way to go. This pushes the limit out
to 2**(12+32) = 2**44 = 16 terabytes per drive in a very clean way.
Yeah, what he said. Anyway, this became pretty evident when Windows Home Server (which is based on Windows Server 2003) booted up and detected the capacity of the new drive (sans controller) as ~700GB. Oops.
So, back to the SATA Host Adapter. I tossed it in my WHS box, hooked up the 3TB drive, and crossed my fingers. And promptly struck out. See, the SATA Host Adapter works out of the box with Windows Vista and Windows 7, but requires a device driver for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 – a device driver that Western Digital does not even remotely make available.
At this point, I became very sullen and had a minor temper tanturm.
However, I am a persistent sort. I took out the SATA Host Adapter and gave it a once over – it was branded as a HighPoint Technologies RocketRAID 62x. Ah-ha. So, undoubtedly, Western Digital just buys these cards from HighPoint, packages them up and ships them out. When possible, it’s best to get these things straight from the horse’s mouth, so I went over to the HighPoint Technologies website and started poking around for a device driver. Not surprisingly, HighPoint Technologies doesn’t list the PocketRAID 62X on its list of products – probably because it’s a specialized part they make specifically for Western Digital. I thought I was stuck yet again, and was on the precipice of growing even more sullen, when I noticed that the RocketRAID 622 has a driver path that reads http://www.highpoint-tech.cn/BIOS_Driver/r62x/Driver.rar. 62X, you say? Now where have I seen that before?
I had a device driver of unknown providence, for an unspecified version of Windows, for a different piece of hardware – and as I copied it over to my memory stick I thought to myself, “You know, if this works, I should get some kind of award.”
And you know what? It did. WHS picked up the device driver, installed the device, and the disk volume formatted to its appropriate 2.7TB capacity. Sometimes, I amaze myself. Nicki was less impressed. Nicki said, “Are you done yet? I want to play World of Warcraft.” But Nicki doesn’t understand – and, likely, unless you’ve spent the last hour Googling for this exact issue, you don’t understand either. If you do? Well, if you do, we are warriors of shared brotherhood.
Other problems loom on the horizon. This issue, and issues like it, will inevitably make me transition from WHS to something else – like, say, WHS2, which is based on Server 2008 (as opposed to 2003). However, Windows Home Server 2 also drops support for Drive Extender – the one damn feature of Home Server that, to me, is a necessity.
And so, just like with everything when it comes technology, there are a dozen good solutions and no perfect ones. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Hard Knocks is a TV show on HBO. It’s like MTV’s The Real World, except for sports fans. A swarm of cameras descend on a different NFL training camp each summer, and we get to watch the fireworks. If we have HBO. Which we don’t. So we get to hear about other people watching it, which I’m sure is almost just as good.
This year, the Hard Knocks crew is following the New York Jets and their bombastic coach Rex Ryan. Rex Ryan is kind of like a cross between – well, it’s hard to say, really – he’s kind of an entity unto himself. He’s larger than life. He curses and bellows and lumbers through the frame like a kind of jovial tyrant. You might be inclined to laugh, but he has an undeniable presence, and his coaching style is undeniably working. The Jets (to the surprise of absolutely everyone, except maybe Rex Ryan) reached the AFC Championship Game last season.
Ever since the first episode of Hard Knocks aired last week, the sports world has been atwitter with speculation that – wait for it, I swear I’m not making this up – Rex Ryan swears too much. I am absolutely serious. There are, out there in the world right this moment, coaches and journalists and pundits and columnists and radio hosts who are seriously debating this question. The question, if you blacked out or something, is, “Does a head coach in the the National Football League use too much filthy language?”
Today on a well-listened-to radio show, former NFL-coach Tony Dungy was asked about the coarse language. “It’s hard for me to be around that,” Dungy said. “I personally don’t want my players to be around that. If I were in charge, I wouldn’t hire somebody like that.” Dungy was then asked if NFL commissioner Roger Goodell should intervene and tell Ryan to tone it down. “I would hope that he does,” Dungy said.
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Wow, this must be some pretty bad language.” I know that’s what I was thinking. If you didn’t catch it you can watch one of the offending excerpts from the show as Ryan delivers a motivational message to his players. Go ahead, watch it. I’ll wait.
Seriously, right? That was it? This is what has ignited airwaves and phone lines across the country? I’m pretty sure I swear that much before I get out of the shower most mornings, and I’m as mild-mannered as they come. The NFL – the National Football League - is a juggernaut of testosterone. Professional football can be eclipsed in manliness by nothing, except maybe being a space marine, and that’s not a real thing yet. It is a game driven by raw emotion and the iron resolve to crush your opponent under the tread of your cleats – and we’re worried about swearing? Listen, I’m all for civility and fine china and salad forks, but guys, this is football! Violence and coarse language are like fraternal twins! Do you watch a Lethal Weapon movie so you can see Riggs and Murtagh run after the bad guys shouting, “Excuse me, sir, if it’s not too much trouble could you please pull your vehicle over at the nearest convenience?” No. No, sir, you do not.
As this is obviously the most ridiculous thing that anyone has ever brought up in conversation (ever), I duly recommend that we find something new to talk about . It’s been at least six hours since someone mentioned Tiger Woods. Also, as an addendum, someone should remove the pole that has apparently been lodged up Tony Dungy’s ass. Guy must kill at parties.
And because I can’t help it: fuck.
And also, while Googling how to spell Murtagh I found this link to a set of wedding photos for a couple actually named Riggs and Murtagh. I wonder which one is which.
