Uncle Biek

Okay, which one of you forgot to tell me about the clock going back one hour this weekend? Come on don’t be afraid, there’s nothing to worry about …

When I arrived this morning, thinking it was little over eight, I was surprised how little vehicles there were on the parking lot here at my work. While I was walking to the car I remembered my brother in law having a week off last week so I figured ‘oh, now it’s our turn’.

Right … Then, I guess about 5 seconds ago, my eye fell on the clock that’s within Windows and it showed that it was … little over eight … again! Then it hit me: I missed the summer time to winter time change over the weekend … again … ;-)

So now I’m looking for whoever forgot to call me and find why he or she didn’t. That person probably thought ‘let’s not tell him this time, at least he’ll be at work on time once this week’ and I have to admit that this is a pretty solid way to achieve that *grin*

But I’m a warned man now so this will not happen again soon. (But it probably will when we change back but lucky for me that’s not for the next half year or so ;-)

In my (computer ;-) case it’s RAID 1 to be exact. RAID, when used as an abbreviation in the world of computer electronics, means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks and there are a couple of ways of implementing and using this feature.

RAID 0
This configuration is the fastest of all the RAID levels, it uses a technique called data striping (see below) and requires at least 2 hard disks.

RAID 1
This level uses a pair of hard disks at a time to provide fault tolerance (there is no performance benefit) and requires at least 2 hard disks.

Using a technique called disk mirroring (see below) the same data is written to both disks at a time, so if one hard disk crashes then the same data is available from the remaining hard disk.

RAID 2
The RAID 2 configuration uses data striping (see below) and a fault tolerance technique called parity (see below), it requires at least 3 disks.

Two (or more) of the disks are used to store the data and one disk is used to store the parity (see below) information.

RAID 2 strips the data into bits which is why RAID 3 (below) is a better implementation as it strips the data into bytes instead.

RAID 3
A common RAID level similar to RAID 2 except that the data is striped into bytes and not bits, giving a performance benefit over RAID 2.

RAID 4
RAID 4 strips the data into blocks and uses a parity drive for fault tolerance, at least 3 drives are required, not a commonly used implementation.

RAID 5
A popular RAID configuration utilizing at least 3 drives.

Data is striped across the drives in bytes, the parity data for one particular drive is stored on another drive allowing the data to be rebuilt using the parity technique.

Since I’m on a bit of a tight budget but wanted a fault tolerance system RAID 1 was the way to go for me. So I got myself two 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA150 drives and set them up in a RAID 1 configuration in my PC’s bios.

Then I encountered another problem: Windows needed to know what controller it should activate as at that point the setup didn’t recognize the correct controller. Now I knew I had to have a floppy disk somewhere with those drivers on it but finding it was going to be a bit of a problem.

Luckily for me Bas took my advice on which motherboard to buy and because we bought our upgrades at the same time we now have the very same basic configuration and therefore also the same motherboard.

So I asked him to look up the floppy because I know that a) he’s a bit more organized than I am and b) he only has about 5 floppy’s so it should be pretty easy to find it. Specially when compared to me, because I would have had to go through piles of floppy’s and CD’s to find it.

When I got the disk from him the Windows setup could continue and was finished about 20 minutes later. And that’s the state things are in right now. Tonight I’m going to see what data can be restored from the other drive so I can hopefully finish the whole business up this weekend.

Because I’m still not able to use my computer I’ve Sunday started to watch the 24 series on DvD. Stefan had told me he liked it very much and loaned me the first season, or day if you will, so I could have a look.

But since I love sim racing a whole lot more than watching TV and I’ve been kind of busy lately I just never got round to watch it. Until now of course, with my PC not working I now have more spare time than I want.

So I started Sunday evening with the first day and am now somewhere in hour 9 I think. I have to be honest, it’s good. I like the way it’s put together and since I put in the DvD I’ve not seen a dull moment.

The fact that everything is presented in real time is not brand new (I think Nick of time with Johnny Depp was the first movie that used that principle) but it’s done very nicely, specially since there is more than one story line combined.

Since I haven’t got my spare hard disk yet I’ll probably watch a couple of hours again tonight, and during the reinstallation of my computer tomorrow I can again have a few more. It’s kind of gripping and I really want to know how the day ends now.

Yesterday afternoon, just when I got home after watching another great A1GP race with Bas my computer started to slow down and after a while came to a halt.

At first I thought something had just messed up the memory as usual and restarted the system but when that took about twenty minutes in total I knew there was something very wrong with it.

And if I still had any doubts the amount of error messages that came up when I finally had my desktop again was no fun either. ‘Can’t write file, data lost’, ‘Unable to write to disk’, ‘File not found error’, etc.

This means that the hard drive is about to go haywire and I need to get the data off it before it finally does completely and I’ll be unable to access it. And of course (as usual) I do not have a very recent backup so it’s very important to me that I do get the data back. All of it.

During my lunch break I’m going to get a new hard drive and if I can finance it I’ll get two of the same type so the chances on me loosing important data are then reduced to zero because of the RAID configuration I’m putting them in.

Let’s just hope that I haven’t lost anything, because that would really tick me off big-time.

Today’s topic: goals.

Goal:

1. The purpose toward which an endeavor is directed; an objective.
2. Sports a. The finish line of a race. b. A specified structure or zone into or over which players endeavor to advance a ball or puck. c. The score awarded for such an act.
3. Linguistics a. A noun or noun phrase referring to the place to which something moves. b. See patient (sense 2).

Whenever you talk to people and at a certain point tell them what your dreams in life are they tend to smile understandingly and tell you how good it is to have goals. What they are probably meaning is more something like ‘well that sounds really difficult but we hope you will succeed.’

I’ve been thinking about those so called goals in life a lot lately. And wondering about how good it is to have them in the first place as I’ve now reached a point in my life where I don’t see me achieving any or a whole lot of the goals I had, say, fifteen years ago. At all.

That doesn’t mean that I’m unhappy about the way my life is going so far, not at all, but there are most definitely times when I wished I took a slightly different path through life, because then I could or even would have reached some of these childhood dreams.

This may sound a little pessimistic right now as I’m only thirty three years old now and there is hopefully still a lot of time on this earth ahead of me. And the tone of this post probably has something to do with the fact that since my job change I’m a bit too busy for comfort with a lot of things messing with my head. Life stuff, you know, like children for example.

What do you tell them when the time comes? To set goals at will and pursue them for the rest of their life’s? Or do you tell them to be modest about setting goals and carefully think them over so they have a better chance of achieving them in the future? I don’t know yet. And now that I’m thinking about it …

If someone had told me, when I was a child, that the things I wanted in life were never going to happen, being the stubborn guy that I am, I probably wouldn’t have believed them anyway ;-) So that wouldn’t have done any good or prevented me from having this kind of dissolution now that I’m all grown up and stuff …

These kind of subjects are always tricky I guess and we’ll probably never get the answer we want out of them. And you know what? That might just be the whole deal about goals. It can be a kind of support to grab hold off when your feeling a little down. ‘Wait until I grow up, because then I will … ‘. We need those thoughts I think, otherwise what’s the whole point of us being here in the first place.

I need to quit this topic or else I’m afraid I’ll be loosing it. But it’s stuff like this that keeps creeping up behind me when I have a few spare moments to think. Preferably when I’ve just gone to bed, waiting to fall asleep. Then is the most dangerous time of day for my head. It has nothing better to do than play all these ‘what if’ scenarios with my mind and it’s getting increasingly better at it too sometimes.

So … what do you want to be when you grow up? :-)