Adrian Bacon

Well, it’s been quite a year. I’ve had some huge disappointments, and there have been some priceless moments.

It’s all been a huge learning experience, which makes for a nicely aging Adrian.

So, what’s in store between now and when I turn 34 next year? I don’t know. I’ve got some personal projects that I want to work on, and a couple of issues I’ve yet to work out.

Given what’s transpired this past year, I wouldn’t mind a bit if I had some “breathe” time to just process.

I’ve just done a whole post talking about the past year without specifically mentioning anything… Well if you know me in real life, you’ll know what I’m talking about, otherwise, you’ll need to get to know me in real life because that’s just how it is.

For some of the stuff I’m working on, you’ll hear more about it later when I’ve got it closer to being ready to publicly talk about.

Till then, watch this space.

1. Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
2. I’m not into working out. My philosophy is no pain, no pain.
3. I’m in shape. Round is a shape. Pear is also a shape.
4. I’m desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets.
5. Do you think illiterate people get the full affect of alphabet soup?
6. I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
7. Ever notice when you blow in a dog’s face he gets mad at you, but when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window?
8. Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
9. You have to stay in shape. My mother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 now and we have no idea where she is.
10. I have six locks on my door, all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three of them.
11. One out of every three Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of two of your best friends. If they are OK, then it must be you.
12. They show you how detergent takes out bloodstains. I think if you’ve got a tee shirt with bloodstains all over it, maybe your laundry isn’t your biggest problem.
13. Ask people why they have deer heads on their walls and they tell you it’s because they’re such beautiful animals. I think my wife is beautiful, but I only have photographs of her on the walls.
14. A lady came up to me on the street, pointed at my suede jacket and said, “Don’t you know a cow was murdered for that jacket?” I said, “I didn’t know there were any witnesses. Now I’ll have to kill you too.”
15. Future historians will be able to study at the Jimmy Carter Library, the Gerald Ford Library, the Ronald Reagan Library, and the Bill Clinton Adult Bookstore.

Note: This article has been in my archives since last year. I thought with all the rumors swirling around about new Apple hardware coming out this month, I’d push it back up to the front of the line where everybody can read it again – Adrian.

I was reading a post (via GeekNews) about Apple hardware, and it just hit me that Apple does have a huge gaping hole in their product line-up (at least they do from my perspective).

The Missing Mac

They need to sell a desktop system between the iMac and the Mac Pro. Right now, they don’t really have an in-between system. You’re either a home user and an iMac will do you just fine, or you’re a Professional and you get the Pro products. What about a Home Power User? Some one at home that would use some fairly major league computer horsepower?

Since I’ve purchased my Macbook Pro and started using it as my main computer for web, email, pictures, video stuff, and other things I’ve come to the realization that it’s fine for all that, but more often than not, I end up leaving it home in the mornings because the night before I started it working on some big video encoding job, or something similar to that kind of usage (I’ll talk about that when I’m ready to) and it wasn’t finished yet, and I had no easy of of pausing it long enough for me to put it to sleep and start it back up when I got to work.

I have a need for dedicated 24x7x52 processing power at home to work on big jobs. In my mind, an iMac does not cut it for such a need. At home, I do a LOT of video work, audio work outside of just my podcasts, programming, and other stuff that most people would consider high performance computing at a crazy level. I’m talking big processing guns, like several 8 core Mac Pros at least.

What I want to do with all that processing power is fodder for another post (if you know me at a personal level at all, you’ll know that I’m as hardcore of a geek as they get, and the programs I write for me at home are hard for a lot of people to understand at a technical level), but several years ago, I had several personal projects I was working on that at a computational and mathmatical level had entered the realm of brain busting. I put them to rest because I decided that then modern computing power was not sufficient for what I was trying to accomplish. Fast forward to now, I still don’t think modern computing power is sufficient, but I’ve gotten some new ideas and want to try them out.

This is the problem. Mac Pros would be great, but because this is a personal project, I just can’t justify spending that kind of cash. Even if I scaled my hardware needs way back (at the expense of execution time), the entry level Mac Pro is out of my budget.

What I need (and I Apple hope fills) is a desktop that sits right between the iMac and the Mac Pro. Something where I have a box that I can stuff 3 or 4 hard drives in, put in my choice of PCI Express video card in, put a Core 2 Duo or a Core 2 Quad (or the extreme variety) and for $1500 to $2000 have a dual or quad core Mac desktop based on the Core 2 Desktop processors.

Apple could take their existing Mac Pro case, put an Intel desktop motherboard in it, and give us the choice of video cards, processors, ram, and storage. That would probably cut a solid $800 or so right out of the cost, and I’d get something relatively affordable and relatively high performance enough to quench my processing needs for my personal projects.

Alas, Apple is not likely to do that, so I’ve been finding myself at Newegg.com scouring the site for parts to build myself a desktop computer that I can dedicate to long term processing projects. I would love to run OS X with this, but alas, that won’t be the case either if I build it myself…

I can either get the Mac Pro and stay with OS X, or go with a Windows box and save several hundred dollars.

I wish it didn’t have to come down to that.

About a year ago, I purchased four Seagate 750 GB hard drives (model number ST3750640AS to be exact) for a storage upgrade I was performing at the time.

Right out of the gate, one of the four was DOA. I went through the process to get a new replacement through the supplier I originally purchased them with, and when it came in I was up and running.

For about 6 months, everything hummed along and was fine and dandy. Then, the replacement drive failed. I went through the RMA process with Seagate and got a factory refurbished replacement drive, which thankfully also came with the same 5 year warranty as the drive it was replacing. Everything was fine for about a month.

It was at that time that a second of the four drives failed. Since I was outside of the 90 day return period with the original supplier, I had to go with Seagate’s RMA process and ended up with another 750 GB refurbished drive, that also came with a 5 year warranty.

Everything seemed OK for a month or so, until the refurbished drive that replaced the replacement of the DOA drive failed again, the picture of which you see to the above left, with the serial number magically Photoshopped out. I’ve once again gone through the RMA process with Seagate to get another refurbished replacement drive. You would think that at some point they would give up and just send a new drive instead of one that obviously had previously failed, has been “worked on” and failed again.

During all this time, a third drive out of the original four has starting popping up SMART errors every couple of weeks. I predict that I will be getting a replacement drive from Seagate for that one before the year’s end.

Now, I should point out that I have a superb back-up scheme (when you have as much data as I do, it really helps to make sure you have at least one copy of everything you don’t want to lose on more than one physical device).

Now, seeing the number of problems that I’ve been having, it’s been pointed out to me by others that know of the ongoing situation that perhaps there’s a problem that is germane to my particular system that is causing my drives to die really fast. I haven’t totally ruled it out, but, I doubt it.

You see, the computer that the drives are in, has a Maxtor 300 GB drive that has been in there for a couple of years, a 500 GB Maxtor drive that also has been in there for a couple of years, a 1TB Western Digital Green Drive that is newer, but has still been in there for a while (I bought it right when it came out), and another Maxtor 1 TB hard drive that has been in there for a while as well.

None of the other drives have failed, two of them are more than a couple of years old and have been in that same system for a while, the two terabyte drives are newer than the 750s, but have still been in there since at least June of 2008 or longer.

Another reason I don’t think it’s my computer that’s causing the failures is because I’ve seen this same thing happen with a bunch of 300 GB Seagate hard drives that a friend of mine had. He went through about a year or so where all he was doing was replacing hard drives, and he had nine 300 GB drives. Ironically enough, he can now buy three new 1 TB drives and merge his current collection down into three drives, or once Seagate actually starts selling their new 1.5 TB drives, do it in two drives. Kinda scary having that much data on one device. I digress.

At any rate, Seagate in my opinion is seriously hurting their reputation here. Their only real saving grace is that they are the only drive manufacturer that offers a 5 year warranty for both new and replacement products. That and they seem to be the only game in town that is even being kind of aggressive in pushing out really huge drives, which for storage nuts like me, is desirable. Now if they can just get the failures under control, they’d be ready to totally stomp everybody else in the storage arena.

So, how about the audience? Has anybody else had any recent large drive failures? How about any shining examples of stellar up-time in a big drive? Hit me up in the comments on the website.

Update: A Seagate rep has contacted me and we’re playing phone tag, I’ll have more details later.

Update 2: I talked with the Seagate rep who originally contacted me and Seagate wants to resolve the issues I’ve been having. I have to give them Kudos considering that I wasn’t expecting much more than a refurbished replacement drive. So here’s the deal: I have to send them the serial numbers of the four drives that I have, and they are going to replace them with new drives. I’ve also been given access to a higher level of support if I have problems with the newer drives as well.

As a point of interest, the Seagate rep let me know that Seagate recently moved their tech support back into the US from India, so if you’re having problems, by all means call in, you’ll get a guy that speaks understandable English (this by the way is one of my pet peeves when it comes to customer support… I don’t care where the call center is located or who is answering the phone, but I must be able to communicate and understand the other person without struggling).

Update 3: I’ve sent the serials to the Seagate rep.

Update 4: The replacement drives have been shipped.

So that’s the experience so far in a nut shell… I’ll obviously be posting updates as things develop.

I was just reading the latest I, Cringely column, and Bob makes a great point. You can’t manage what you can’t understand.

I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve been at over the years where my boss should not have been my boss, simply because he/she did not understand my skill set or what I did… In recent years it’s been better, but what Cringely writes is true.

Ben invited his mother over for dinner. During the meal, his mother couldn’t help noticing how beautiful Ben’s roommate was. She had long been suspicious of a relationship between Ben and his roommate and this only made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between Ben and the roommate than met the eye. Reading his mom’s thoughts, Ben volunteered, “I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you, Allison and I are just roommates.”

About a week later, Allison came to Ben and said, “Ever since your mother came to dinner, I’ve been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. “You don’t suppose she took it, do you?”

Ben said, “Well, I doubt it, but I’ll write her a letter just to be sure.”

So he sat down and wrote: “Dear Mother, I’m not saying you ‘did’ take a gravy ladle from my house, and I’m not saying you ‘did not’ take a gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.”

Several days later, Ben received a letter from his mother which read:

“Dear Son, I’m not saying that you ‘do’ sleep with Allison, and I’m not saying that you ‘do not’ sleep with Allison. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now. Love, Mom”

“What happened?” asked the hospital visitor to the heavily bandaged man sitting up in bed.

“Well, I went down to Margate at the weekend and decided to take a ride on the roller coaster. As we came up to the top of the highest loop, I noticed a little sign by the side of the track. I tried to read it but it was very small and I couldn’t make it out. I was so curious that I decided to go round again, but we went by so quickly that I couldn’t see what the sign said. By now, I was determined to read that sign so I went round a third time. As we reached the top, I stood up in the car to get a better view.”

“And did you manage to see what the sign said this time?” asked the visitor.

“Yes.”

“What did it say?”

“Don’t stand up in the car!”