RyanHarne.com

Have you ever had news important enough to require deliberation and concentrated effort before you felt it was ready to reach the world? I’ve had such news lately. I’ve had it for 2 weeks and am only now going to take a shot at telling it.

Four weeks ago, I took a trip to the dentist. This trip involved 90 minutes of driving because I haven’t changed dentists from the hometown to my current residency. After that, certain people expected me to return to Blacksburg. I made some feeble, fabricated excuses and drove somewhere else.

Once I arrived in Charlotte—did you know, there were fewer than 10 turns necessary to go from Lynchburg, VA, to Charlotte, NC, Southpark Mall?—I went straight for a certain shop. After a few weeks of communication, I was finally meeting him. No, this was not some romantic rendezvous, but rather a meeting for business. Important business.

No, I did not require the use of an assassin, a drug dealer, or an emergency accounting consultation. I needed to buy an engagement ring. Fortunately, I had already picked out the ring, making the effort of “shopping around” something I could save for less important purchases, like bike gear or computer add-ons.

The man I met is named Vincent. He had searched through an expansive database for the type of ring I was hoping for and grabbed several to match my list of wants as closely as possible. Once we looked through the selection he gleaned for me, I narrowed it down to the 2 I was already anticipating choosing from. Looking at them side-by-side provided little differentiation, but, when modeled by another [female] salesperson—thanks for doing that, by the way—there was a minor distinguishing feature of one over the other. I took some time to contemplate the situation.

When I announced my decision, he said, “Are you sure?” Despite giving me a look neither of disbelief nor of salesman-like confidence, his question pierced in a way that made me review and consider the time I had spent with the person this engagement ring would be going to. My pause encouraged him to take another inquiring stance, “Have you eaten yet?” My Subway late-lunch was digesting, yes, but I admitted to wanting a coffee. After informing me of the Starbucks nearby, he said he’d be around when I got back.

I ordered the usual—venti iced coffee. Taking it away from the chaos of that Friday afternoon franchise, I sat down on a food court chair. Almost 2 years of posts, digital encounters, and, now, days together flashed before my eyes. I thought back to the very first postcard she sent me. The dinosaur with the speech bubble shyly saying, “hello”. I remembered, with vibrant clarity, our first conversation on the phone and the uncanny second-nature of the talk, even though we had never before heard the other’s voice. Sitting in that food court chair, I remembered returning from my first visit to Atlanta and proudly changing our facebook status to “In A Relationship” from being friends before. And the way I smiled when around her (but not in front of the camera—I’ll adjust to that eventually). And how I knew that there was simply no one else I could imagine myself spending the rest of my life with.

With a half-emptied iced coffee, I took the steps back in the direction of the shop. Vincent met me and I told him what I wanted to get. I followed up with, “I’m sure.” And I was. 100%. Another half hour later, I was leaving the Southpark Tiffany’s with a beautiful Tiffany-blue bag, containing a ring, some documentation, and some extra Tiffany’s ribbon should I need it.

I was incredibly thankful for Vincent’s help, his inquisition, and his patience. He was setting me up with a ring that would change my life. And, I was on my way back to Blacksburg with a ring in the passenger seat that made me smile with each look over at it.

I bought some Russian hot cocoa mix a while ago and discovered it mixes well when brewed with Starbucks’ Pike Place roast. Pike Place is already a reasonably good brew, but with a thin layer of this cocoa mix on the bottom of the filter, the resulting drink is quite fulfilling. The taste is hard to describe but, when compared to most other coffees, this tastes deeper. It’s similar to your first time trying out 9-grain sliced bread when, all your life, you’ve been unknowingly suffering along with Sunbeam’s white bread—the first try may be overwhelming but then the realization hits that you should have tried this years ago. So, if your local, friendly Russian is making another trip back to his motherland for some Stoli’s and kalashnikovs, hand him a few Benjamins for his trouble in swiping you some packages of hot cocoa mix. The chocolate mix is cheap, but he’s going to need the rest of the cash to bribe that type of cargo out of the country.

It occurred to me today that I demand my shoes be tied at the same time so as to avoid any significant difference in tightness or slackness of string. And this occurred to me when I removed a stone from my left shoe but also untied my right shoe so as to be able to re-tie them at the same time. I’m left confused by this realization but also confident in my self-explanation for such behavior.

Finally, it’s remarkably easy to give things away for free on craigslist. Within 3 minutes of posting a listing, I had 1 reply. Within 5 minutes, I had 3 replies. Problem solved.

I have thus far refused to give in to Twitter even though my levels of concentration and time-alloted capacity for writing have diminished for complete Wordpress entries. Whereas, in the past, my evenings used to be an opportunity for expression, now I spend them playing around with Preston (aka, “super dog”), solving household puzzles with the assistance of an engineering education, or reading the news on NYTimes.com. Twitter would actually become quite useful for me, not to mention potentially addictive. But, I’d simply rather not surrender to that form of instant-gratification-blogging.

Having said that, I went ahead and reserved my funeral at twitter.com/ryanharne. Attendance is optional, dress is business casual, & please bring gifts for the departed.

Lately, my desire to post something has been centered around a great article I’ve read, or something I thought of briefly, or an idea I would like to later expound upon given a fuller opportunity—each of which are the bread & butter of Twitter. Particularly in the case of an article I’ve read during the day, I’ve grown tired of rephrasing something I read in order to apply a personal skew. The greatest enjoyment I receive from writing stems from what is internally inspired. I simply have less time to devote to writing—some will cheer at this announcement—so, I may have to redirect my efforts in order to sustain an equal amount of creative output amongst the outlets available to me.

So, let it be said. Twitter, ryanharne, twitter!

When I bought my first LaCie hard drive, I was highly recommended towards the brand due to reliability and GB/$. That was 3 years ago. When I bought my second LaCie hard drive, I was highly encourgaed to skirt the brand due to ridiculously high failure and poor drives. That was about a year ago. Today, I have 4 LaCie hard drives, 3 desktop and 1 portable, 1 of which was added to my fleet just yesterday.

To be fair, despite Jeremiah’s many hints to avoid LaCie last year, I have never had an issue. Since I back everything up twice over, I’m not even that concerned about a complete failure of a single drive. I remember my visit to him in Boston in 2005 when I came across his stack of 5 or 6 LaCie drives all daisy-chained to a single Power Mac G5—the cost of being in new media production, yet an elegantly-stacked cost.

So, what a shock to my data security ego when Becky’s LaCie hard drive failed in action. Granted, certain unfortunate events transpired to encourage the disaster, but it was a LaCie that died; a tear passed silently down my cheek at the news. The real catastrophe was that she was currently working remotely using this LaCie as her main disk, a drive which also contained some files that were backed up nowhere else. When a myriad of software data recovery solutions all failed to see the mounted volume, we were disappointed and appalled at the estimated cost given to us for data recovery from the industry pro in the field. It would cost a $3,500 fortune to recover the whole hard drive which, by the way, was the old RAID striped-0 LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB, for those savvy with the technical details. Since that LaCie actually used 2 drives to make a larger, single volume (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) the repair costs really rocketed at our specific misfortune.

A fellow Apple engineer recommended a fix but then recommended against it. This fix involved something that would make most tech nerds nauseous, and probably require some rehabilitating hours of WoW later. He suggested I hit the drive. Literally. Smack it. Like a rabbit ears television. Like that old lemon you bought from the car salesman with two gold front teeth.

Well, he actually seemed to recommend a smack more akin to spanking your eldest or most cherished child, but, a hit nevertheless. And, in the most controlled of environments, I did this.

It worked.

In order to turn this into a how-to, I will describe precisely how I did this so that you, too, can fix a broken LaCie hard drive and clench your stomach with each impact.

I chose a well-carpeted floor as the landing zone. To be specific, I wasn’t hitting the drive but rather letting it take a carefully-orchestrated fall. Some first drops were attempted and my method for dropping it was then selected. The LaCie drive would fall on its recessed power button with me holding the sides as it fell, making sure the impact was head-on and no side-to-side motion occurred. The rebounds were not stifled, so after the LaCie hit the carpet and rebounded, very slightly, I let that motion dissipate over time naturally.

The falls took place at about 5 inches from the floor and, again, allowed the LaCie power button side/surface to make carpet contact. Some non-powered falls proved to be pointless in drive recovery—it seems the hard drive needles are locked when the drive is not plugged in to a computer or wall power. In our case, one of the needles was jammed and a standard plug-it-in would result in 3 loud clicks of the needle before the LaCie would give up the ghost. Disk Utility would see the drive as nothing more than a mounted device, without any associated volume. The non-powered falls changed nothing, so, with reluctance, I began thinking how to compose the perfect powered fall.

Instead of simply applying power by hitting the power button, I decided the best thing to do would be to plug the FireWire cable into the back of the drive which would initiate the powering and data-reading sequence. The other end of the FireWire cable was always plugged into my MacBook so it was always powered and ready to start up an attached drive.

So, with the LaCie in hand, I plugged in the FireWire cable and listened as the platters began spinning up. I will point out that the platters were spinning perfectly, from both of the RAID 0 disks, and this may not work well, or at all, if your disks do not spin as perfectly as these were. If the needle wasn’t working, in our case, you wouldn’t be able to tell any difference in operating sound because the spinning disks sounded perfectly natural.

So, as the platters began to spin up the first jammed needle click resounded. At that, I dropped the hard drive onto the power button face. After a few drops, and full unplug-plug sequences (again, the clicking sound only happened 3 times, so only 3 attempts could be made during a single sequence), the drive finally mounted correctly in Disk Utility. However, the mounting took a very long time, upwards of 10 minutes. I was patient, though, because I knew something was different after the successful fall because the needle appeared to be reading correctly and making the appropriate hard drive needle noises (you know, the clicks of hard drive operation).

The first successful mounting revealed a greyed-out volume on the drive, but at least it was correctly named. When I unmounted the disk and plugged it back in, after another long period of gut-wrenching time and hard drive operating noises, the volume correctly mounted. Finder saw the volume and I could access files per usual. Over the course of the evening, I recovered all of the data and have since proclaimed this drive to now be my property since I resurrected it using nothing but the sweat of my brow and my unending benevolence. I may use it to toss unnecessary DVD rips onto, so that my Apple TV has some more content later on. I plan on allowing my inner acoustics geek to invent a special shock mount for the drive, perhaps some floating mechanism, so that the drive maintains some level of usability. I suspect that the shock therapy may ultimately prove fatal.

Nevertheless, I saved the expensive data recovery costs and was rewarded with a home-cooked dessert following dinner. Plus, I got to see some of the baby Preston photos which were only stored on that hard drive. I will admit that baby basset hounds are potentially the cutest puppies possible. They are, in fact.

Try this hard drive fix at your own discretion. It worked for me but it may not work for you. If you mess up, everything could be irreversibly lost; so evaluate how important the data is to you on your dead hard drive and consider if the repair cost is worth it. If you don’t have $3,500 to spend, don’t plan to have $3,500 to spend, or don’t care terribly much about the data to begin with—my fix is just for you. Enjoy.

It’s not business as usual so far this July. Summer freshmen orientation at VT has me doing some Apple stuff day-in and day-out. It’s a pleasant change from the usual lab work but, after a week and a half of this stuff, I miss the usual lab work, I miss those tests, and I miss those acoustic epoxies.

But, I’m able to carefully watch le tour since there are several free video feeds. Now that much of Becky’s move has been accomplished, I’m also able to get back on the bike as opportunity presents itself. And, thankfully so, because I’ve been getting antsy from watching tour coverage and from feeling my legs turn to gelatin.

And, the SHOCKING news this year is that one of the main contenders has tested positive for EPO and his entire team pulled out this morning. This happened last year when some of the testing procedures were more lax and when the cycling community really hadn’t taken any critical step to begin preventing its use. 2008 presents a new slate for cycling—the attitude towards doping is significantly less ambivalent. Major team sponsors pulled their funds last fall and this spring in response to the doping issues while the teams themselves realized that not only could they be pulled from the popular events for testing positive but the corporate future of cycling could be irreversibly shattered. It’s nice to race bikes but cycling relies on advertising and sponsorship to get by. Imagine Budweiser pulling its support from American football or Coca-Cola backing out of NBA investments. That would strike fear into the hearts of even the most grossly oversized linebackers.

Ricardo Ricco was the stupid, spotlight-obsessed doper this year. What’s worse is that he has a natural predisposition towards high red blood cell count simply due to genes, which is what EPO tries to enhance. If you have one get-out-of-jail-free card, why bargain with your Monopoly mates for a second one? Why not, instead, work towards some hotel installments? Too much investment in antidotes inevitably means you’ll drown in a new poison. Anyways. If you’re going to get caught doping, why not get caught with some ridiculously large volume of EPO in your system? Like blowing a 0.44 breathalizer for a DUI, some of these cyclists should go out in flames with a 50/50 blood/drugs concentration.

While I’m happy with my current cycling performance, it would be nice to have off-days where I still crush the locals in the Wednesday race ride. So far this summer, I’ve been doping up on cinnamon sugar secretly embedded into my morning bagel and 2% milk in my morning coffee. I hear the combination unlocks a wild red blood cell flourish, an easter egg feature Mother Nature didn’t want you to know about. It seems to work, too. When I commute in the morning, I race past other cyclists and sneer at their mountain bike tires and visor-mounting helmets. And those panniers?! What a joke. I need neither saddlebag nor messenger pack—with a basic application of duct tape, I can semi-permanently adhere my laptop, cellphone, chargers, and textbooks to my body and keep the aerodynamic loss to a minimum.

Fin.

While the toughness has steadily escaped my cyclist’s legs, it seems to have migrated to my hands. Nearing 2 weeks of being off the bike means a certain type of atrophy has settled. Instead, my exercises have been structured by the good people of IKEA. Their wordless instructions, while easy to look at, have taken a toll on my hands, giving my palms a soreness and having destroyed one Phillips screwdriver.

Becky & the great puppy, Preston, now reside in Blacksburg, where I am far more capable of spending time with them and also more capable of exposing them to the permeating smells of my fresh-brewed coffee. In the pursuit of a less collegiate-like environment, Becky wished to get lots of furniture which previously wasn’t around. So, who else to turn to but IKEA? Ironically enough, IKEA furniture is the norm around the better-maintained college residences, but it’s at least a far cry from the mix-match of your parent’s furniture. I have to say, the place is looking good, and uniformly covered in birch veneer.

Anyways, I’ve assembled more IKEA furniture in the past 3 days than I care to remember. However, at the moment, I remember it with great clarity and wish to healthily rehabilitate myself from the experience by quickly elaborating on the individual efforts. The list proceeds in my own construction sequence.

MALM queen bed. I’ve done this one before. It was far easier to put this bed together than other, significantly smaller pieces of furniture.

LILLBERG sofa. This was practically assembled for us. Open up one box for the frame and legs and then toss on the cushions with covers. A quick spray of Scotch Gard seals the deal. Despite being the cheapest sofa on IKEA’s line-up, it is remarkably sturdy, comfortable, and appealing.

JOKKMOKK dining set. Do you have 15 minutes in your spare eveningtime? Great. Then, go watch an episode of something on adultswim or play a dozen rounds of Snood, because there’s no possible way to assemble the JOKKMOKK dining set on your own in anything less than 60 minutes. Yes, the table is a piece of cake to put together, but your hands will not relish the number of dowels you must hand-hammer in place nor will they appreciate the inordinate number of screws to be screwed for the set of chairs. Luckily, the final result is a solid set of furniture and the chairs can withstand the force of me pounding the seat, which is probably a few thousand psi, judging from my past performances at carnival sledgehammer game attempts.

EXPEDIT huge bookcase. Two people are almost certainly necessary in constructing this enormous bookshelf. It’s so monotonous that you’ll forget that you missed two meals assembling it. A sincere recommendation—secure this to the wall, otherwise it will attack in your sleep.

MALM annoying-large dresser. The screws, dowels, attachments, and various small metallic pieces come in a bag large enough to contain a loaf of bread. It’s disheartening, yes, but a challenge for someone hoping to build character. If you’re not into making your sons or daughters mow the lawn to enrich their character, then, in order to make up for that lost potential, lock them in a room and tell them their freedom comes at the price of assembling this beast. Two weeks later, you’ll have either a.) a teenager ready to tackle the world & a nice-quality dresser in tip-top shape or b.) an embittered corpse and a self-fashioned coffin from the dresser components.

MALM bedside table. Take the torture of assembling the MALM annoying-large dresser and only digest 30% of it. Pretty much the same effect.

VIKA GRUVEN desk. This almost seemed like a joke to put together in comparison. After 9 screws the tabletop is done. After a few patient minutes, the legs are ready to go. The product is one handsome shadowbox desk with some shelf room on the legs.

BILLY bookshelf. The theme of this piece is: so much solid wood that all other IKEA pieces appear to be veneered chipboard. Take a minute to pencil the center line for the backboard nails, otherwise you’ll punch through the board or harm the shelf on the other side. IKEA, unfortunately, does not provide any method for doing this in their own instructions, so it must be on your own initiative. But, if you forget, hopefully, the books will hide the errors you sowed and your own Becky will forgive you the mishap.

BEKVÄM kitchen cart. Continuing the theme of solid wood, the tabletop alone could resist the punches of a thousand samurai. My Phillips head screwdriver met its greatest nemesis here and was buried respectfully in the village dumpster. The kitchen cart was eventually completed and now serves as a proud levy for when the kitchen plumbing bursts.

LACK coffee table. I have 4 regular, square LACK tables myself, one which I modified for my own LACK-table-purposes. Even though they are ridiculously cheap and made of fair-to-poor material, the birch veneer looks really nice and clean. Plus, these tables can really hold some weight. My own LACK tables can take me standing on them to replace a lightbulb, so I have equal hopes for the coffee table. Who says you have to pay the big bucks for quality furniture? Schwels and Grand Piano do, but not IKEA. Thankfully.

BOLLO outdoor table. Take it out of the box. And why does this thing come with instructions? No, that’s not an acceptable reason.

Somewhere in there was also a RIGGA clothing rack and a small bathroom shelf from Target whose instructions used numbers and arrows and all sorts of confusion. IKEA instructions are notoriously simplified so as to provide attractive furniture at low cost to even the most illiterate of our society.

The move continues, yes, but the excitement of seeing a living space come together as furniture is assembled and set in place, well, that excitement is worth the sore hands and dead tools. Even more dramatic, I, Ryan Harne, am actually becoming a “dog person”. That’s a story in itself, so hang tight for further developments. In the meantime, I’m going to go watch some DVD-tv with a puppy.