The state of the summer

Over on Facebook I started changing my "interests" field as a joke to whatever random thing I was obsessed with for the week. Most recently it reads:

what is killing the black oak trees in my back yard, camassia

What killed the red oaks (they looked black cause they were dead as doornails) was a fungus called Hypoxlyon. This spring just before the leaves started to bud, I could look out back into the county park and pick out a straight line, going about 200 yards back into the woods, of standing dead red oaks, all with the same mottled silver fungus on the bark. Hopefully it doesn't make the leap to white oaks. A buddy of mine felled all the dead and dying ones for me, and I've been slowly building up a stack of firewood from it. It's almost dry enough to burn as it is.

Last year for fathers day, I rode my motorcycle down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Roanoke. One of the plants I saw along the road side caught my eye, they looked like some kind of Lily. Uncle Frank called them "Rock Lilies", and dug up a bunch of them for me at at his cabin near Lexington. If I'm reading the book right, they're called "Camassia". I planted them in the front bed, and they got really droopy and started to brown, so I cut them down to stumps. They sat that way for a month or two, and just started to shoot up. I'll take a photo when I get home.

Time for some new interests, I guess.

SATA PATA MATA

Last night I added some memory to my PC, a generic, home-made thing with an Intel D865PERL motherboard and a Pentium IV. I can't be bothered to use grounding straps and that type of junk. I have never successfully messed up a computer with static electricity, while having succeeded at virtually every other feasible method.

I also had the machine torn open to swap out another SATA hard disk that was laying around, so that I could try the Windows 7 beta without ruining the old copy of XP that was on it. The machine only has two SATA power connectors, both of which are daisy chained on leads that also have the older type of 5/12v Molex drive connectors. One of those Molex connectors was in use by a CD drive, and the extension with the SATA cable wasn't long enough, so I unplugged it from the CD drive the night before.

The next day I dragged my chubby ass across the carpet to insert the new memory, and POW, a nice fat blast of static shot from my hand (with the memory in it) to the computer case. Big deal, I though. I restarted the computer and it was fine, now I've got 2GB of ram. I turned off the computer again to reconnect the second hard drive, and when I touched it, POW, another fat blast. I'm blowing stuff up left and right now.

I fire it up, I get the self check screen, and then nothing. No beeps, no messages, it just sits there. Poor old SATA drive, I think to myself. I disconnect the one that I'm sure I've exploded, and put the old one back on the primary channel. Same deal. Ugh, I thought, clearly, that big blast of static has travelled over the SATA cable and into the motherboard, destroying the SATA controller chip and with it, my motherboard.

Then I remembered- after years of troubleshooting computers, I still have that nerd tendency to dream up a complicated, fantasy explanation for a simple problem. Here I've just added new memory in the machine, and I'm imagining that a bolt of static electricity is the problem. A naive mistake, but a common one. I shut it off and removed the new memory.

Same problem. Maybe I nudged the old memory while installing the new stuff. Reseating memory is my go-to cure for almost every PC problem, and it works about 50% of the time. No dice. Maybe I nudged the CPU while I was putting in the memory. I take it out, check to see that the diaper rash cream I applied as thermal paste is still greasy, and its fine. Damn. Reseat the video card. Damn.

The worst part of this is that, now that I've blown up the motherboard, I'll want to return the memory I just bought, only I'll feel bad about returning it since I've probably just blown it up too, but I'll feel bad about buying a new motherboard if Ive got 50 bucks worth (yes I know) of DDR memory that won't work with a new computer.

Another thing is bothering me- I know that this computer has exhibited the same problem at least a couple of times in the past, but I can't remember what caused it. Maybe I never found out what caused it, I can't say. But I know I've seen it sitting on the BIOS screen like this, and at least once after 10 minutes or so, it booted right up as if nothing was wrong. What the hell?

After rebooting it 6 or 7 times, I managed to hit the SETUP key at just the right time to get the thing into CMOS setup, which was working just fine. I know now that my memory and my cpu are OK, but I think that I've probably blown up the SATA controller, which causes the machine to hang when it starts probing for hard drives. I've already tried booting it up with no hard drives, with the same results. It's not making sense.

I page through the CMOS SATA options and everything looks fine. I load the CMOS defaults, reboot, same thing. I get back into CMOS setup, but I'm stumped.

Just above the SATA drive options are the PATA options. Something doesn't look right here, I think. How is there a slave CD drive, but no master? Also, don't I have two CD drives in this machine?

Son of a bitch.

I look down at the computer, and see the back of the CD burner, with a big fat PATA cable marked "SLAVE" stuck in the back of it, but with the power connector empty, after I scavenged it to power the other hard drive.


At least a dozen times before, I've had a machine hang at the PATA probing during boot up when one of a handful of things is wrong. The master/slave jumpers are wrong on one device. Cable select is enabled but the cable is plugged in wrong. One of the drives is simply fucked up and wont work at all, etc. etc.

This is yet another reason why new things like SATA are such an improvement over old crap like PATA. Back in the old days, your goofy little IDE/Serial/Parallel/Kitchen Sink controller card had 900 jumpers on it and a leaflet written in cuneiform scratches, and every time you nudged or even looked at the card, the machine would stop booting until you had a seance, cleaned the contacts with alcohol, and scratched a bald spot on your head until you realized you were just mixing up J1 and J11 in your head and you had disabled the IDE controller and put COM2 on IRQ?.

It's the same thing with things like PATA, its a jive-ass, cheap-ass mess of enormous, unreliable ribbon cabling, making a rats nest of your computer and being a general pain in the ass for as long as you own it. When people were building computers with PATA controllers in them, nobody ever sat down and said "Oh, I'll be damned, we forgot to check what would happen if a drive was hooked up in cable select mode as a slave but somebody forgot to plug in the power connector!". Or they thought of it but just didn't give a hoot about it. Drives are supposed to be powered, you jackass.

PATA also lends itself to a lot of experimentation when things go wrong. There are so many options that often when you stumble across the right configuration, you aren't sure how you did it, or you don't even realize you changed something. So you don't walk away any wiser about how to fix the machine. SATA is much nicer because there's a little cable that goes from point A to point B, and it has a little lug that orients it to the connector, so you can't accidentally be stupid.

Some day I'll meat the SATA guys, and hug them.

Maps

Several years ago, I began to spend a lot of time looking at maps. Before I moved to Boston in 99, I bought a copy of the Delorme gazetteer for West Virginia with topographic maps of the state.

Life in West Virginia, for a kid without maps, is magical. You might climb the mountain in your back yard, go down the other side, and find yourself on the side of the road someplace miles and miles from where you live. Even with a rudimentary knowledge of the roads of Boone County, it is still often impossible for people to believe that two places so far apart by car might be separated by a single ridge.

When my father explained to me that you could take a left off route 85 at Van, drive up through Twilight, and eventually come out on Route 3 not far from Whitesville, I thought he was pulling my leg. In my internal map of the world, those places were hours apart. The route through Twilight to Beckley is one you would take if you lived there, but not if you were from anywhere else.

It was even harder for me to believe, but the old man told it so solemnly that you knew he hadn’t believed it either, that you could turn off 85 up around Bob White, go over Cazey Mountain, and come out in Logan county. For a 10 year old kid from Boone County, the existence of such a route makes the science fiction interstellar wormhole seem like kid’s stuff.

I have still never travelled over Cazey Mountain. The closest I ever got was when my father took us all out in the big K-5 Blazer one weekend to see where a road went. Today this is called “Four-Wheeling”, but back then we had no name for it. We had no names for the roads either, or we might have heard several names for the same road. That one turned out to be Jack’s Branch and my sister and I at one point were crying and hugging because we didn’t expect to ever see home again.

When I got the Gazetteer, I spent hours looking at the plates for Boone, Raleigh, and Logan counties. You cannot hope to ever have a real understanding of the geography of southern West Virginia. I think the most you can hope for is to know where the ends and intersections of the various roads are. There is nothing flat, nothing straight, and nothing level. Euclid would have hated it.

Looking at those maps caused a change in me. I suspect that the same change must have occurred in my father, some time between the time he learned to drive and when we stopped taking our weekend roadfinding expeditions. I believe he was after deer, or Carl Caruthers or Eddie Richardson had the urge to wander and took him along to help unstick the truck. By the time I was old enough to go off hunting on my own, finding land that wasn’t posted was harder, or I just wasn’t as adventurous as the old man, but with those maps I could take the trip anyway. I had a hunger for those maps, it was like I could taste the earth in my mouth and it was the flavor I had been craving all my life.

When Google Maps came along, my case worsened. Now I could zoom in and out. My wife and I had been spending a lot of time around the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts, never with a map and always confused later when we tried to figure out where we had been, or how we could get to some prime looking fishing spot without a boat.

I came into some money around this time, and that taste of earth became too much to bear; I wanted to buy a piece of that land, but I had no idea what I’d do with it. I think the kind of craving that had me wouldn’t have been eased by ownership, anyway. Once you are standing in a spot, it becomes like any other spot. Having seen it, the only way to enjoy it is to move from it, and digest it slowly as you move to the next and then eventually home.

I zoomed and clicked anyway. I’d pick a point somewhere mysterious to me, usually something down along the Greenbrier River. I’d look at it up close and then back out. Holy shit, you could walk to Virginia from there, in some places. Sometimes there’s so much land and no towns. I wished I could zoom all the way down and look and the gravel on the side of the road. I wanted to see the Blackberries at Army Camp on New River.

Getting a motorcycle was like the valve on the water heater that goes off and floods your basement, rather than blowing up your house. Years up pent-up wanderlust flooded out, wrecking my home life, and continuing in an unabated torrent for about a year and half. If I had an hour to spare, I was off on the bike. If I didn’t, I was looking at a map, trying to figure out where I would go next. I could not let winter interfere with the serious business of scouting, so I bought an electrically heated getup, and rode around in January and February. Today I could barely be bothered to take the bike if I wasn’t feeling like zipping the liner into my jacket. It is amazing that my wife didn’t leave me simply for purchasing a motorcycle, much less for stranding her at home with a new baby while I was out finding all the roads in Massachusetts.

I am lucky to have a wife so understanding in these matters. I am luckier to have a wife whose primary objection to my motorcycling was simply that I alone was out seeing all the interesting country on a death machine that she would not throw a leg over for money. She would usually suggest that we retrace part of the route by car, so that she could see the landmarks I recounted.

I am permanently caught in some kind of gravity, the center of which is the bridge over New River at Prince, WV. Its pull was too strong; I could not stay in Massachusetts. In Virginia, I can orbit it like a comet that comes twice a year. Last year I made the trip by motorcycle, over the Appalachians the old way, through Grant and Pendleton and Pocahontas and Greenbrier. I had no route planned. I had not thought of whether I would use the bridge or cross the river someplace else, but I crossed it and upon crossing it I felt that I had crossed the center of something, a spot where a compass pointed nowhere, or a line where toilets fail to swirl.

At the bridge, movement became the device for reaching the point of stillness, rather than leaving it. The vehicle was a tool for finding the place I would stay, not a means of leaving the place I had been. I did not know it then, and it is only after time that I see that the change occurred there, and then. At the time I felt only that I had been overcome by something that I did not recognize.

Last week McCallister told me he was buying a house in Pocahontas, a good base for ski operations and a fine rental property for someone looking to do some fishing. The photo he sent me was a Google Maps link. Since they added some of the larger rural state highways, I’ve been spending many evenings trying to find the spots along roads that I remember from travels on the motorcycle. Finding them often causes me a shortness of breath that I guess to be awe. I zoomed out and as the names of places appeared my heart tightened. Cass and Green Bank were there- when you see those names together on the sign for the exit to US219 on Interstate 64, you would have no idea what they mean until you have been through them. Cherry Grove looks nice, but I’ve never been there, except for the pictures.

I now have a home that I love, and a family that I love in a way that makes houses and land seem laughable. I think now that, instead of starting at a center and working my way outward, I will spend the rest of my life in the infinite web of roads about the center, and to think about what I will put down as I get close. I don’t think you need to find it, to the inch, and put a stake in the ground there. You only need to be near enough to orbit, as time provides.

This weekend, I bought a maul and a hatchet. I took the little electric chainsaw my father gave me, and dragged a few black oak trunks that the county had felled after something got them and left them standing dead, too near houses. I never split wood as a kid, but I’d put the pieces on the block for the old man to do the swinging. I guess I’d learned it by watching, and now we have a stack of wood that’ll probably be dry enough around July, I’d wager. It’ll be wonderful for the fire next winter.

Technology I am excited about

Google added Wikipedia Geotagged articles as points on interest on Google Maps. This will be the coolest thing ever on car trips, although I'd very much like it to work on a system with a static copy of Wikipedia, since most of the places I like to drive to are rural and I don't want to have some nutty wireless internet connection.

Google also added Street View data of some of the rural highways in West Virginia. Clicking down some of the roads I've travelled in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties caused me to lose my breath a few times.

What I want next is geotag reminders. When I'm driving and I pass a Supermarket, I want the GPS to beep and remind me that I need to stop and get a dishwashing brush to clean out the coffee pot at work.

The End of Race as We Know It

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i07/07b01101.htm

Darfur: the dangers of celebrity imperialism

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5852

Every day when my wife gets home, she runs down a checklists of questions that unanswered would result in the implosion of our home and the breakdown of western society. Any attempt to blow off these questions or provide stock answers is emphatically discouraged. This is all despite the fact that the daycare sends home a manifest of every poop or nosewiping that occurred through the 6 hours or so that the girls are there.

To streamline this handoff process, I have created a form of my own, with a variety of blanks, boxes, and multiple choice fields that I can use for briefing my wife each evening.