encoded notions

5:30 AM.

“R.B., wake up.”

I was in the middle of a good dream, and there goes my mom ruining it. And why’s she waking me up in the whee hours of the morning?

“The neighbor lady called, her garage is burning to the ground. She can’t find her dog and she asked me to help her look.”

My first instinct is to assume that my mom had a seriously real dream, but then I hear sirens outside. Throwing on some clothes, I descend the stairs and attempt to sneak a peek at the roaring blaze.

“When they opened the front gate, their dog started running away because he was scared. She’s afraid that he’s lost and won’t find his way home.”

Well, that dog of theirs certainly seemed stupid, and also very plump. I find myself not entirely awake and now walking outside with the hint of a glow on the distant horizon indicating that dawn is fast approaching. There are voices shouting the dog’s name. The street is closed, and there are firetrucks going past my house. I hope all the commotion has spooked the skunks into hiding.

If that dog decided to hide on our property somewhere, I don’t think we could find him for a while. There are too many cars and trees to hide under.

I examine the remains, still smoking as they apply water. The tree above the garage had also been on fire. A little more wind and a little more sleep for the neighbors and their house would’ve caught fire too. Ironically enough, they just put their house on the market yesterday since they’re moving to Florida. I suppose they’ll have to remove the line “and two car garage” from the listing.

Whoa. There was a van parked inside the garage when it went up in flames, and now it looks like something from the set of CSI: black metal ribs with chunks of char.

We look for the dog a bit more, and then my sister and I return to bed at 6:00 AM.

They found the dog the next day. He was hiding in the field behind my house.

Last year, for my 20th birthday party entropy was kind enough to give me a Great Blackout in the northeast. For my 21st birthday I was waiting for something of roughly equal caliber to cap the day. I got what I was expecting.

Prior to our July 4th celebrations my father and I took a trip to Virginia to buy good fireworks. This included reloadable mortars that look almost professional-grade. In typical fashion, we didn’t use them all because that would’ve been a bit too extravagant, even for us.

At around 9pm yesterday, we brought out the mortars, roman candles, fountains, and bottle rockets for some explosive goodness to celebrate my 21st birthday. A mortar to start things off with some cannonball-fire sounds. A few of the minor filler-things before another mortar. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Then a pickup truck pulled into the driveway. All of us immediately assumed that the local police had come by to pay us a visit since these types of fireworks are legally frowned upon around here. My mom stashed the mortar tube. As quickly and quietly as a hummingbird, all of the incendiaries went into hiding in the house and we pulled out a few Pennsylvania-grade crappy fire-toys for a cover story. It turns out that it was just some guy who had to turn around, and so we resumed our display.

After a few more smoke clouds, I thought I saw a car parked in our front driveway just watching us, so we packed it up again and scouted around for people waiting to catch us in the act. False alarm once again because I had mistaken my sister’s car for an unknown since I didn’t know it was going to be parked out front. We were all very spooked this time, and the group concensus was that only one more should be lit. Big Mortar vs. 150 Saturn Missile Battery?

The 150 Saturn Missile Battery was long and loud. Immediately we brought the rest of the stuff inside and cleaned up the mess. About five minutes later, a local police car pulled in the driveway and a cop knocked on the front door. My dad went out to talk with him. Meanwhile, my mom, sister, and I efficiently snuck the rest of the fireworks into an adequate hiding place in case the cop already had a search warrant (we were really paranoid at this time) and intended to come in.

The cop soon left and my dad looked like he really needed a drink or two.

It seems as though the cop was responding to a report of loud noises. A non-nextdoor neighbor had reported us. Upon driving past our house he had seen something in our backyard (the SMB) the cop had circled around to pay us a visit.

Dad: “Hi.” Cop: “We had a report of a weapons-discharge from a few houses down. Then they corrected themselves by saying they had heard fireworks. Is this true?” [I suppose that was the sound of the mortars BOOMing through the 9pm sky.] Dad: “We just have some PA-grade fireworks and a few other things to celebrate my son’s 21st birthday.” Cop: “Things like bottle rockets are illegal in this state, sir.” Dad: “Oh. Do I have to sign something then? Is there a fine?” Cop: “Off the record sir, I’d rather have your son celebrating his 21st birthday here with some fireworks rather than out drinking and driving. Tell your son to have a happy 21st birthday.”

And with that he left. Afterwards I realized that I was setting off the fireworks and I’m no longer a minor. That could’ve really made for an interesting birthay. Having a cop visit the house ranks alongside the Great Blackout of last year.

I think to top this, for my 22nd birthday I’d have to accidentally kill someone and get help covering it up.

On February 9th, 2004, UruLive was cancelled.

On August 5th, 2004, the community received a gift—something to satiate their thirst for interaction Untìl Uru.

Uru was built for people - a place for people to meet, grow and wonder. The deep city came alive with the sounds of life - and then it was silent again. But the life of Uru is in the people. It will not awaken again until Uru has people again …Untìl Uru has people again. This is not Uru, or Uru Live. It’s only a breath, a spirit of what Uru was. It’s a heartbeat until Uru can slowly grow again. …Untìl Uru can slowly grow again.

Untìl Uru is just like UruLive, but without the actors or the potential for new content. Everything that was available at the end of UruLive is accessible. There are already several shards running on fan servers.

Life exists in the cavern again. Voices call out to each other. Cheer and merriment. Linking and lagging. There are even some who work to bring a new story to this place devoid of direction, since the D’ni Restoration Council has left the cavern.

In the words of Yeesha:

The water flows downward, and there it pools and collects, and finally, it reaches the roots. And the tree begins to grow again.

Perhaps the ending has not yet been written.

Sometimes events make me feel like there is just a smidge of Nostradamus in me.

Two years ago in the fall, I came home to my dormroom and was greeted by a slew of error messages containing the same content emanating from my Linux box named Araval: { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }. I mostly ignored them, and didn’t understand their extreme importance to me until much too late. For one split second I was greeted by the Windows Recovery Angel and he recommended that I restart my PC to correct the error.

Don’t get me wrong, if Araval was running Windows this advice would be good, solid advice, but this was Linux. Linux rarely—if ever—needs to be rebooted. I power cycled it and poof, it refused to recognize my 4 month-old 80GB IBM Deskstar hard drive. This was the drive that contained my music, movies, and my /home partition. For those of you who are not *NIX folks, the /home partition is roughly the equivalent of a superfolder that holds the My Documents folder and personal settings for all of the users. Good thing my windows partition, /boot partition, and linux system partitions were still operational. I was able to quickly bring my system back up to speed to where I could at least start browsing the internet to understand what had just happened to me.

Those { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } error messages that I was ignoring were actually indicators that my hard drive had been acting a bit suicidal and was now standing on a window ledge on the empire state building. The moment I turned off the computer was the last moment that hard drive would ever spend alive.

I stumbled across a forum where there was a discussion running about the IBM Deskstar line of hard drives. Many of them had nicknamed them DeathStar drives due to their tendency towards pushing up daisies. These hard drives have a fundamental flaw that causes them to completely exhaust their internal sector-redirect tables. When those tables fill up, my favorite error message begins to broadcast, and the drive will only work as long as it is currently powered-on.

I should rewind for a moment and explain this table idea. The hard drive manufacturers know that random things will befall a drive over the course of its life, and that a few dozen sectors on that drive will become faulty over time. This would ordinarily mean that the drive would start attempting to store data in bad locations of the drive and that data would be lost forever. Modern drives can detect when something wonky happens to a sector and it makes an entry in the redirect table pointing the old sector to some newly chosen sector. With the table in place, any access to the bad sector is not permitted since the access is simply performed somewhere else.

I learned a lesson from this ordeal: always have recent backups. I lost a ton of data when that drive died since I had been neglectful of backing up my personal files. It felt like a part of me had died along with Mr. Deskstar. I immediately purchased 2 60GB Maxtor drives and a RAID level 1 card to give me a bit more peace of mind for the future (a RAID-1 array sends data to 2+ drives whenever data is sent to a single logical area in the system, essentially guarding against a hard drive failure with a constant backup).

Over the course of the past three days, I’ve been thinking about building a new computer to effectively upgrade Araval to something more modern. Just before dinner today, I bought a majority of the core components such as the CPU, the motherboard, and the graphics card. At approximately 10pm this evening, my case started emitting a strange clicking sound that sounded strangely like a fast-switching relay. Also, two major file read/write operations were running on the RAID disks when my IM client froze and my kernel gave me a { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } error again, this time followed with a { Unrecoverable } secondary error code and indications that the error was occuring in RAID drive 1.

Naturally, my first gut-reaction (more like the reaction you get when an alarm clock sound is played and you cringe in physical and psychological pain) was to NOT REBOOT THE COMPUTER—at least until the source of the offending sound was located. Unfortunaely, I did not locate it before the system completely froze forcing a shutdown.

After my shock, I started to think about what little I knew of the problem: a) the error was in only one of the RAID drives b) the sound was very mechanical and was sourced in the middle front of the case. I got myself to believe that if the error were in the hard drives, it was most likely a fatal health issue and also it only affected one of the two mirrored RAID drives. It took about 4 hours of screwing, unscrewing, cleaning, and transplanting to determine that I have some slightly-more-than-mild data corruption on my windows drive due to the sudden shutdown and that RAID drive 1 had suffered a mechanical failure.

Since the RAID card’s BIOS provides a feature to rebuild the first disk once I can find a replacement, I can have the array up and running as good as new in about two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Ten minutes spent on Maxtor’s website yielded me a free replacement for the damaged drive that should arrive next week.

Most times when planning for the worst, be it buying insurance policies, buying a fireproof safe, filling your spare tire before vacation, or backing up your data you never actually expect the worst to happen. Ironically in my case, 2 years after investing in a RAID-1 array for “insurance” purposes it has performed beautifully and saved my data, just as I had planned.

On a more humorous note, I think that Araval was jealous that I was building a new computer.