mahiwaga

His opponents on both sides of the aisle are trying to make hay with Obama’s comment about the “typical white person” who is afraid of black men. But they miss the point entirely. He’s not throwing his grandmother under the bus, as some are wont to say. He’s not trying to insult white people. He’s merely illustrating an unfortunate truism about American culture, which Chris Rock touched upon a long time ago:

When I go to the money machine at night, I ain’t looking over my back for the media. I’m looking for niggers!

In America, the darker your skin is, the more you are feared. It sucks, but it’s true. It’s not just white people who do this. Brown people do it to. Even black people can be conditioned to be fearful of black people.

Because black people hate black people, too. Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people don’t like about black people.

But everyone is trying to hide behind the facade of political correctness. I can hear it now. I’m not a racist. How dare you call me a racist? But by definition, if you partake of American culture, you’re a racist. Even people of color can be racist.

The first step to recovery is recognizing the problem. Americans, especially white people, but including many people of color, continue to pretend that there is no problem, that racism is some relic from the past (even though fifty years ago, it was still legal to segregate.) People keep trying to pretend that we have a level playing field, and that anyone crying “racism” is merely playing the race card and trying to leverage their skin color for an unfair advantage.

Barack is keeping it real. The majority of American History has been hostile to people-of-color, and to pretend that this history is over and done with—that this history has no ramifications on the present—is to stick your head in the sand.

It is interesting that Arthur C Clarke recognized that physicians are more likely to be atheist. The first story of his that I ever read was “The Star” which describes a Jesuit astronaut coming upon the blasted remains of a civilization that once orbited the star that supposedly went nova in order to announce Jesus’ birth. In other words, the Christmas Star. The question asked is, how could God destroy an entire civilization just so that the shepherds and the Magi would know where Jesus was born?

What is funnier is that I was introduced to this story by a Jesuit priest who mentioned it during Scripture class, back when I was a freshmen at a Catholic high school. I never understood the nature of faith and doubt until I met the Jesuits. Faith and doubt have the same relationship that light and shadow have. Without light, there can be no shadow. Without doubt, there can be no faith. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something. Seriously.

And in a moment of synchronicity, a real supernova seems to have anticipated Arthur C Clarke’s death.

So I used to have an array of external hard drives attached to my Mac Mini by Firewire. Most of the hard drives were encased in Venus DS3s. Like many Firewire 400/IEEE 1394a hard drive enclosures, it’s based on the venerable but reliable Oxford Semiconductor 911 chipset.

But hard drives continued to get faster, bigger, and cheaper, so eventually I disconnected them all and settled for a single 250 GB Western Digital My Book Premium Edition. Mostly because all those hard drives made the room unbearably hot during the summer.

The other reason, though, was that one of the drives was notoriously unreliable. I think it may have been overheating, but it had the tendency to simply just go off-line at the most inopportune moments. In retrospect, it may have been because I had all these external hard drives with the same GUIDs, but I haven’t checked.

I ended up resurrecting the Venus DS3s when Fry’s had a sale on 320 GB PATA hard drives for $70, making the use of Leopard’s Time Machine feasible.

For the most part, this worked without a hitch. Except, quite mysteriously, Time Machine would barf and abort in the middle of a backup, and until I figured out how to fix it, I would end up simply just reformatting the backup drive.

Eventually, I started wondering whether there was something wrong with the firmware. And this is where all hell breaks loose.

I discovered the Oxford Firmware Uploader through Google (naturally) on the DATOptic Inc Support Page, which also happens to have a copy of the most up-to-date version of the Oxford 911 Firmware.

The uploader is a Java program, and apparently does not work out-of-the-box on an HFS+ case-sensitive volume. After unstuffing the archive, you have to rename the “Data” folder to “data”. Eventually after several hours of my life which I will never get back, I figured out how to reflash the Venus DS3 and it seems to have worked without a hitch.

Feeling overconfident, I decided to upgrade the firmware on my My Book, too. This was a big mistake. The Upgrade Program, a custom version of the Oxford Firmware Uploader, doesn’t even run, at least not in Leopard. So I decided to be clever and use the Oxford Firmware Uploader instead. Although it gave all appearances of actually working, what it really did was kill my My Book.

Luckily, Google led me to this fix. While the screenshots are from Windows, the Mac OS X version is pretty similar. Except I had to use the SST39xF400A instead of the SST39xF200A. I don’t know if this is because of my particular My Book and when it was released. I’m not sure how to check this in advance without actually disassembling your My Book. My method was simply to screw around with the Uploader until something worked, which is certainly not for the faint of heart, especially if you have important data on that drive.

After a dozen or so hours of my life completely wasted, I finally got Time Machine up and running again. So far, it hasn’t failed again, but I have no idea whether or not the updated firmware even makes a difference.

Still, I can’t believe Western Digital actually still has their update online. This thing is a steaming pile of crap that will almost certainly kill your hard drive.