joker.iki.fi

Joker.iki.fi and most of my home office network, which all depend on the highly fault tolerant (read: old box with redundant disks, RAID5 copied to USB disks) file server, suddenly started to show mysterious symptoms of unavailability today. The box runs Debian stable and has been running without problems for I-can’t-remember-for-how-long. When logged in as root, the problem was obvious, every command that wasn’t a bash builtin, crapped out with an I/O error.

Crashed root filesystem disk, you say? NO. I thought so first, but I have a habit of fscking disks which fail, because - well, I don’t know, I just do it. I rebooted the server into a single user mode and everything got back up again. I mean everything. Low level fsck of the disk reported zero problems and everything is back to normal.

I have never seen anything like this, typically I/O error is a clear sign that something is very much wrong with the disk or the controller but no matter what I do (did some hard core read/write tests), the disk just keeps on going… Since I have everything on backup and this is not a production system by any means (just my personal server), I’m going to keep the disk running, let’s see what happens. If it would have been a prod server at work, I would be reinstalling it right about now.

My guess is that it’s the SCSI elves. Nasty little buggers.

I wonder how many hours per public presentation the people who speak for a living spend preparing? I’m speaking soon in here and couple of smaller seminars and I think I’m spending a godless amount of hours to prepare for the presentation. Mentally it’s ok, I consider myself quite a good speaker and I’m not afraid of big audiences, but the time spend on powerpoints and graphics is just mindboggling.

I guess most of the time people just reuse everything they present. I’m a bit of a perfectionist in here since I always try to gather all the input from previous presentations on the same topic and try to optimize, always giving the latest insight.

Now, back to powerpoint.

If I need to describe myself with one word, one which would characterize my whole being, that word would be “worried”. I constantly keep worrying about everything. It’s not that I’m every day depressed about state of the world or biting fingernails over safety of my family or possessions. It’s more like this constant little feeling that “eventually, everything may get all fucked up”. It’s tedious.

It’s been like this all my life. There’s a positive side to this and it is the fact that being constantly worried of something tends to drive one towards “going the extra mile” to make sure things will work and everything goes well. There has always been a little devil on my shoulder which tells me “look, you need to ace this exam / project / relationship / task, because otherwise you will suffer in the end”. That sounds positive, but there is a dangerous tint of perfectionism there on the side, which can create a lot of stress if there’s suddenly many things that need to be done well in parallel.

In Gibson’s Neuromancer, they had the technology to electrochemically modify the operation of neurons in the human brain to turn on and off addictions and to control the perception of everyday emotions. I hope technology like this would be developed during my lifetime. I would like to know what it would be like, maybe just for one hour, not to worry about stuff.