Les said, the better II

Your mac’s disk suddenly starts clicking really loudly or grinding and you’re suddenly getting IO errors or your system is crashing. What do you do?

1. Turn off your computer!!

Hold down the power button. you can cease all damage immediately by turning it off. It won’t get worse while it’s off. Off is safe. If only other life disasters had off buttons that could halt damage.

2. Panic, get drunk, etc

Call up your ex mother in law. Feel sorry for yourself. Cry. go ahead. Do all of this as often as you want and for as long as you need, but make sure that your computer is off whilst you drink, panic, make a fool of yourself, etc. You’re not thinking well while you’re freaking out. So take the time to do it, but don’t expose your disk to additional risk

3. Figure out what data is important

You are not going to be able to get an image of the disk. Your disk has errors. You need to figure out what you need to save. Generally, this is your home directory. Make a list of what matters by priority. Yeah, you want everything, but you may need to grab your bookmarks before you grab your 40 gigs of iTunes library. Things like your bookmarks, your apple address book and your apple calendar and in your home directory under Library. You may want to grab that.

4. find a computer with a lot of free disk space that you can borrow and a firewire cable
5. boot your computer as a firewire device.

hold down the t key while it boots. A firewire logo should appear on the screen. If it starts clicking and grinding TURN IT OFF. Try repositioning it and try again. You may find it works at a funny angle or on it’s side or upside down.

6. Connect the firewire cable between the good computer and the bad computer and start copying data

Get it by order of importance. When the disk starts clicking and grinding again TURN IT OFF. It may also just slow to crawl. turn it off in that case also.

7. Let the disk cool down

Let it sit off for a while to cool down. Then try getting more of your data. You can stick it in the fridge to cool faster if you can guarantee that you won’t get condensation inside the computer. Anyway, this just cools it down faster. Letting it sit will also cool it. cool is good. cool spins better

8. Repeat the grabbing and cooling cycle until you get everything or the disk completely dies
9. Take your computer to the store to get a new disk

If you have apple care, great. If you don’t you may want to consider it for next time. Also, ask the store about professional data rerieval, if you need it. Prices usually start around $500 and go up. The guy at the campus store told me the last two disks he sent off each cost $1200. Data was retrievable because the users turned off their computer when they heard loud clicking and grinding noises. Otherwise, disks and grind to death.

10. formulate a backup policy

Yeah, we’re supposed to the them. But we don’t. Who knew my disk would actually die? I haven’t seen that happen in ages. anyway, you need a backup plan and preferably, one that happens automatically. I don’t have answers here, but i think storing things offsite is good. Your data is just as lost by fire or theft as by dead disk. You need backups in a location where local calamity won’t destroy them.

Tags: Celesteh, Macintosh

1. Denial
I’ll just create an image of my entire hard drive.

2. Bargaining
I’ll just leave this running and it will, um, speed, up, right? I’ll call apple and if i plead with them they’ll tell me secret tips like freezing the disk drive (which may or may not work, as ipods seize up when frozen.)
3. Anger
I will never trust a laptop again!
4. Acceptance
Maybe it’s not worth $500 to save some diary entries, my address book and a few scripts. Maybe I could just rewrite my scripts.

The moral of the story

Maybe it’s best not to do tech work for something you’re personally invested in. I should have asked for help sooner, rather than drunkenly trying to copy the whole thing. Try to save everything. end up with nothing. thank god i had enough sense to grab my school work first.
also, it’s amazing how invested i’ve gotten with an inanimate object. in the future i need to 1. do backups. 2, not entrust my sense of self to a machine. 3, use paper more often.
Tag: Celesteh

Drinking will not solve your problems, no no no, but it certainly helps you forget what you’re thinking about.

No, it makes the fucking problems worse. Why didn’t I just turn the damn thing off and then wait until later and prioritize what I wanted to save? Now I’ve got a broken 12 gig disk image and no guarantee that i’ll be able to mount the physical disk again.
I feel real sense of panic when I think about this. My laptop is turned off. I will eat and do other stuff. then I will come back and try again. If it fails, I will go to the campus computer store and ask questions about disk repair. Maybe a new motor could revive it enough. Maybe there are some types of data recovery which only cost $500 or so.
The data I want: my diary, my scripts, my tax receipts, my frequent flier info, my addressbook. I can live without all that stuff.
I hate letting go. I am so not zen.
Tag: Celesteh

The last 12 hours of copying data:
-rw-r–r– 1 celesteh  staff 12368261120 17 Feb 13:34 laptop-image.dmg
-rw-r–r– 1 celesteh staff 12545871872 18 Feb 01:20 laptop-image.dmg
200 megs in 12 hours. not good. still just a quarter of the way done. i thought it would be a good idea to create an image of the whole disk. i should have just gotten my home directory. The 12 hours previous to that, I grabbed like 11 gigs. Things are clearly grinding to a halt.

What if I just gave up computers and went offline? How would my life change? I could write out things by hand. I could play tuba. I don’t have many offline skills. My housemate helpfully points out that I know how to read. It disturbs me how dependent I am on technology (I am aware of the irony of blogging this). I beleive in technology. Like a beacon of hope. Like a weird, secular religion. Maybe I should let go of it. Do I have to give up on everything that I rely on? Do I have to reorient myself in a more self-reliant direction? Should I remake myself into someone who is offline? It disturbs me to think of just how much my life would change. Which is why I think it might be a good thing. Being stuck in a mold is a prison. Needing a computer to do any work is a trap. They will not always be there. american hegemony will collapse. The oil will run dry and we’ll all be offline. So do I own my computer, or does my computer own me?
On the other hand, it would be mighty difficult to write a thesis on computer music without a computer. Is there a way to let go without letting go? It sounds like there can’t be. And what would I be throwing away if I walked away from technology? A valuable distribution system at the very least.
I let myself get too invested in technology. How could I just carry on without my data? Maybe it would be better to never do this again. blah blah blah. I need a support group. Is there someplace you can go for dealing with the sudden loss of data?
Tag: Celesteh

Well, I’m, um, creating a disk image. I wonder if maybe just the motor was burning out or something. It’s um, going slowly:

[whiptail:/Volumes/fw-1] celesteh% ls -las laptop-image.dmg
24156768 -rw-r--r--  1 celesteh  staff  12368261120 17 Feb 13:34 laptop-image.dmg
[whiptail:/Volumes/fw-1] celesteh% ls -las laptop-image.dmg
24157280 -rw-r--r--  1 celesteh  staff  12368523264 17 Feb 13:35 laptop-image.dmg

Uh, great. And it’s a quarter of the way through.
Do laptop screens get burn-ins? The firewire icon has ceased bouncing around on my laptop screen and is now just in the middle. it’s bright too. I don’t think there’s any way to dim the screen.
so how much does data retrieval cost, anyway? Can anyone recommend some place?
Tag: Celesteh

Drinking will not solve your problems, no no no, but it certainly helps you forget what you’re thinking about. also, me= lightweight. yes, so whilst i was sitting in the electronic music studio, preparing to create an RSS feed for podcasting (w00t) containing the reading or my firt symphonic piece, when suddenly, there was a loud clicking and grinding sound emerging from my laptop and i started getting IO errors. rebooting did not help. i booted it as a firewire disk and over the course of a much too long a time, i backed up my school data to Phillip’s computer. all throughout there was grinding and clicking and a painfully, mournfully slow data transfer. then i took it home and backed up my supercollider data. now i have it mounted as a frewire disk for my desktop and am creating a disk image. my hope is that i can take it to the compter store and that apple care will give me a new disk and then i can just re-image it and have the exact same computer as before. cuz disks do start to get full of crud and wiping them periodically is not a bad idea. but this is only a year old. and i like my disk. it has cool stuff like authorizations to run software that has obnoxious liscening control eneter code special key one computer at a time blah blah blah.

The image is going rather slowly, but not worrisomely slowly. maybe walking home shook everything back into place. if i take it to the computer store and it doesn’t show symptoms for them, i am still going to demand a new disk. my thesis. no backups. moment of panic. i had a moment of panic this morning when i communicated my thesis concert date to my advisor (April 5th) and he said, “oh, that’s just two weeks after spring break. pretty soon.” I looked stricken.
Readig drunk blogs is so great isn’t it. maybe i should halt drinking cognac before i float away from reality. i had a beer before office hours and then some jim beam from aaron’s hip flask when my computer started the click of deatjh. and now i just forgot that iw as not going to sip any more and then took another slip. it’s a slipper slope from here. i just did it again. goddamit. i have enough problems with relaity when i’m sober. do you ever have a feeling like you’ve sort of been out of the office for a while. what’s going on? so many of my reactions to people are not conscious. i’m much more alert when i’m typing. where alert = not dissasociated. i’m going to use that word even though i don’t know what it means. sometimes i giglle at things. if i’m giggling, i’m not home. it’s weird when i’m not home. ofdd times. times when i ought to be paying attention. and my computer is like, i dunno an umbilicall cord. it cannot die. my lif e is on there. i read a science fiction when i was a kid about an apple newton that attached directly to your brain so you ended up outsourcing your thoguhts to it until it became an extension of yourself. the author thought this was cool idea. but what about when the disk died:? what then? woudl you lose the memory of your 4th birthday party? would your thesis vanish into thin air? would you lose all the pices you had written in the last year? i’m thinking deep thoughts now. sense of self. what it means to interact with external stimuli.
My tuba broke durng class today too. i was having problems with my 4th valve sticking and was oiling it and pushing the rotar thingee up and down when sddenly the button disattached from the rotar. fortunately, my pocket knife is advanced enough to both take aparta computer and repair a tuba. you buy a tuba and it costs 2 – 4 imes as much as a computer, but it will last for a hundred years. you buy an analog modular type snth from MOTM for around the same price and it will last for about 30 years (maybe longer). you buy a laptop and it will last 5 yeard if you’re insanely lucky. otherwise. 2. maybe 4 years. what a tremendous waste of money. and here i am typing on my 5 year odl desktop (it’s still a fast computer, dsmmnit) about how computers suck and i need to experience life without mediation or more directly and while present and what not. i’m going to stop programming entirely and learn to meditate and go sit in trees o n the outskirts of yellostone saving buffaloes from wymoing ranchers who are legally empowered to kill them and be a diryt ippie activist luddite and pay folk musc on ym tuba. strating tomorrow. goodnight
Tag: Celesteh

what’s more fun that working on your thesis? How about putting a Creative Commons license on music from last Fall?
My political pieces have a limited shelf life, so keeping them to myself would be stupid. Download the, trade them, creative derivative works. Link

Tags: Celesteh, Music, Creative Commons

Friday, I started catching a cold and by Friday night I felt kind of ill. I set up webcasting for the Bill Dixon concert. It was the first official webcast from school. My computer was crashing with Quicktime Broadcaster, so I had to work out those issues, get a line out of the DAT machine, set everything up, all while feeling sick and the run and do a soundcheck and play in the concert. I felt dizzy after playing some notes. Cold medicine to the rescue. It is ungood to tech for a concert and then go play tuba in the same concert. However, I can now do webcasting and could teach it to others.
Despite a very harried set up, the concert went extremely well. It was a joy to play Dixon’s music. I felt like I played well. and the webcast was successful. So all was well. Somebody who heard the concert said they dug the tuba. Cool. I didn’t even know anybody could hear me.
Saturday morning, I woke up early, consumed caffeine and then set up a webcast for the Bill Dixon symposium. then I drove to the airport and picked up Cola! Yay! I dropped her off at my house so she could nap after taking the red eye and then I went to the rehearsal to my 5 minute symphonic piece. Aaron conducted it. the orchestra was sight reading. Aaron really pulled the piece together in 45 minutes of rehearsal. They played it very well at the end of practice. I wish I had a recording of that run through. I wrote the kind of tuba part that I thought I would like to play. The tuba often had the theme. The player was kind of timid. It seemed like he was thinking, “I could possibly be meant to stick out that much.”
for those of you just joining this feature, Cola = Nicole. She is but one person with a nickname and is my girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen since winter break. I was extremely happy to see her.
I went to part of the afternoon session of the symposium. They were talking about identity and music and opportunities for musicians and racism and nationalism and many fascinating issues. I cut out early, though and went to wake up Nicole and consume more caffeine (it works as well or better than cold medicine sometimes). Then we went to the orchestra performance of three student works, including mine. Angel, the director, asked me to come up and say a few words. I had no idea that was coming. The piece was about my marriage breaking up (as much as pieces can be about anything), but the title was from a 15th century mystery play about Joan of Arc, so I talked about that. Then they played through it. It didn’t go as well as during the practice, but that’s to be expected. It was pretty good. There was a fair sized crowd there, including my advisor. I await his feedback.
Then I had some time off to spend with my sweetie. Then I webcasted a concert by Bill Dixon and Ran Blake. It was fantastic. I had my first symphony performance. I got to see my girlfriend and then I went to a great concert. All in one day.
Sunday was actually my birthday. I’m 29. I have mixed feelings about that. But my Saturn return is now over. Theoretically. I’m not into the self-examination thing anymore right now. Maybe I should re-do it periodically,
the grad women in the music department arranged a potluck brunch and “surprise party.” It was sooooo heterocentric. Little (like model train scale) plastic penises were handed out. Riiiight. This idiom is clearly aimed at Midwestern married housewives. One nifty thing offered for sale, however was a semi-programmable silver bullet. It was clearly AM modulated, by a sine wave, a ramp wave or a pulse wave. I want to write my synthesizer manufacturer to ask how many amps I can run through my VCA. I seems like I could have batteries on one side and bullets on the other and use a LFO or a laptop outputting a subsonic audio signal to control the speed and then put them on drumheads or something. I had a piece for vibrators and electric guitars at my undergrad thesis concert. I don’t want my dad to think my academic experience is all about vibrators or something. although, at 29, should I still care about that or am I old enough to stop worrying about it?
I remember going to a 29th birthday party as an undergrad and thinking of the birthday girl as an unqualified grown up. Totally a responsible adult who didn’t have much in common with us students, but who was fun. la la la
Everyone since Charles Ives likes to talk about grey haired women as the ultimately unhip concert attender. If your music appeals to gray haired women, then you suck and you’re not avant guard enough. However, time marches ever onwards and some proponents of this meme will find themselves a victim of it.
Today I took Nicole to class with me. It was Anthony Braxton’s seminar. I had been talking about him. Nicole didn’t believe me. Today, she learned that I am a more reliable witness than I seem. We watched Alien. Mostly, I think, because anthony loves the movie. But we talked about motivic material and sound design. there’s a cheesy symphony at the very end which really doesn’t belong. However, the main theme of the symphony is an inversion of one of the major themes of the movie. I hadn’t seen the movie before, so I was more aware of plot than of sound. Also, it was clear from the start that you had to kill the cat. As soon as they found the cat while searching for the alien, they had to have realized that they had no way of knowing if the cat was infected or all the paths to infection. Also, how did the alien get so big after popping out of the ill-fated crew member? Was it eating the food stores or what?
In the afternoon, Nicole sat in on Braxton’s ensemble. We played one of each type of piece that we play, so it was a good introduction to what we do in the ensemble. Then, alas, she went back to the airport and by now she in Dulles waiting for a flight to Oakland. I was so glad she came to see me. I miss her when we’re so far apart. And it was just perfect timing, with all this stuff going on at the same time. I think she got to see what my academic experience is like. She said this afternoon, “your life is weird.” It is indeed.
Tag: Celesteh

The L.A. Times has an article today about using classical music as a crime deterrent. First, some background:
Wesleyan had a symposium last spring about environmental sounds. Someone presented a paper using music to chase away teenagers. The researcher found that classical music doesn’t repel anyone and the evidence is all anecdotal. Nobody has actually done studies. The L.A. Times claims otherwise, but who knows if the reporter actually did research or just reported what everybody “knows.”

The L.A. Times article talks about what it means, socially, to use Art Music as a weapon. They have an elitist take on it, however, and speak only from the point of view of high art types and the police/state. No actual thugs or teenagers were interviewed. Middletown, CT has a parking garage which blares baroque music all day every day. There s a coffee shop on the first floor of the garage. Teens congregate outside the coffee shop. The inside of the shop blasts industrial music to attract the teens. The outside of the coffee shop blasts classical to drive them away. The teens I’ve talked to say they don’t notice and they don’t care. (It drives me crazy though.)
What environmental sound programming actually does is define space. Let’s say you’re in a mall. the whole thing is indoors. There are many hallways, rooms, etc. You have some rooms that are shops that must be differentiated from the common area of the mall and from the store next door. the entire environment is totally homogenous, so they need to use several cues to define themselves as a separate space. These involve things like color scheme, decorations and sound. the large mall has one sound track. Each store has it’s own soundtrack. They contract with companies like music to provide them with a soundtrack which reflects whatever image the store is trying to sell. Sound design in this context is about creating feelings of group membership. This store plays your music and sells your clothes. It welcomes in the demographic that the store hopes to attract.
Using art music on Middletown’s parking garage is basically the same strategy. The music says, “this is not your music, this is not your place to hang out.” Rather than be “uncool,” or somehow cause people to switch to concert behavior, what the music actually telegraphs that public spaces are reserved for the upper classes. and how can you possibly object to classical music? It’s the highest form of art! Anyone who objects to this plan is either a thug or a philistine.
Obviously, public spaces belong equally to everyone regardless of class or any other factor. Things that try to define it as reserved for the rich are objectionable. The weaponification of sound is also extremely probelmatic. This trend is related to the army blasting rock music at detainees. Remember when we invaded Panama and played loud death metal at the Papal Nuncio until Noriega surrendered? Also related to the sound cannons owned by the New York police department. Public sounds used to mean carillons playing noon concerts. Now it’s something to divide and destroy.
and what does it mean for Art Music when the state insists that it’s objectionable and does not belong to youth or the poor? I believe there is a plot afoot to destroy art. We all have to listen to commercial pop and hate and fear all serious art and serious music or else we’re uncool? The future of music is doomed.
Tags: Music, Muzak

Tomorrow, February 11th 8:00 PM Crowell concert Hall, I will play tuba with the Wesleyan Creative Music Orchestra, lead by Bill Dixon. This concert will be webcast, starting from 6:00 PM EST (3:00 PST) , obviously including our rehearsal. The stream can be found at rtsp://snuffy88.its.wesleyan.edu/wesmus.sdp . You must use Quicktime to view the stream.

Saturday, february 12th, at 4:00 pm in Crowell Concert Hall, the Wesleyan Orchestra will play my five minute symphony. This concert will not be webcast, but I will post an mp3.
I have reserved the Wesleyan Chapel for my thesis concert, but I’m going to have to call and ask which date I reserved it. I think April 5th. They want all this information about what I’m going to do. Damned if I know.
Tags: Celesteh, Concert, Music