Got this EP for free from GooglePlay (thanks kind overlords!). I have not listened to any LUDAAAAA before. However, I must say I was pleasently surprised by it. Much more musical than I expected, although with pretty familiar melodies and beats. LUDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA has a pretty interesting cadence that keeps things interesting, although I wish the lyrics were less about how rich he is. Because fuck rich people.
2.5/5 - Easily digestible hip hop. Not bad, but nothing really special about it.
Been a while since I listened the this album, but everything Mastodon does is incredible. This album is by far their most technical, with tight, short songs that flop around like a dying animal in the jaws of a cougar on a mountainside.
4.0/5 - Great, but a tad inaccessible to really achieve total greatness (like Leviathan or Crack the Skye). Also, the concept (dying on a mountain) makes the lyrics a bit too trippy for my tastes.
So, Blood & Banjos was a kickstarted album that I backed... probably a couple of years ago. I don't know when, but a CD showed up at my house one day and it turned out to be this. Thus is how most of my kickstarter rewards go.
Anyways, I love unique metal interpretations. In this case, black metal combined with bluegrass, which has the awesome genre tag of blackgrass (blue metal just doesn't have the same jingle jangle). Thus, I expected to get banjo leads of black metal rasping vocals and blastbeats. However, the album doesn't play out like that, really, at all. Instead, you have a fairly good bluegrass-y baseline with blackened death metal interjections (and a healthy dose of Gothenburg riffage). More often then not, the parts aren't integrated, and it makes for something more akin to an early Opeth album than a progressive amalgamation of the two styles. I mean, of course it is a concept album (about a guy killing his wife and unborn child after being corrupted by Satan, and then fighting the village, and then he battles Satan for redemption... I mean, it's metal, come on). However, the last track truly starts to combine the two styles, and it is pretty great; plus, it is an epic in every sense of the word, since it's over 14 minutes long! Great capper, and the album builds to a pretty sweet culmination before the acoustic outro kicks in to cleanse the palate.
3.0/5 - It's good, especially for a cheap kickstarter project (I know the creators made no money off of this thing, since you can download it for free now!). The finale is truly impressive with the blending of styles, but the rest of the album doesn't quite get there. Still a worthwhile listen if you like some metal, and some bluegrass, and want some peanut butter in your chocolate.
This album is somewhat interesting, in that it was released as two discs that could fit onto one disc length... which is bold. The longer first disc is the melodic side, and the second, shorter half is the more metal (cathartic) side. Sense any cliches yet?
So I've actually met the pretty boy vocalist for the melodic (Illusion) half of this album, when he was fronting a different but almost identical sounding band called Tesseract. And that points out the main flaw of this album: it is pretty standard fare melodic djent. You have the djent-toned rhythmic guitars, soaring melodies, and ethereal soundscapes, combined with a few breakdowns and screaming vocals. It's well done, but man the style has been WAY overdone (even by 2012 when this album was released). I suppose it's pretty heavy on the melodies... but still firmly djent.
The Chaos side is harsher, but honestly the more boring listen. While the first half employs some interesting dynamics, the second half feels a bit one dimensional in comparison and suffers for it. It honestly needed to be heavier somehow.
3.0/5 - Just a good album, slightly above average for the style. I'll probably come back to a couple of songs on the Illusion half.
Holy frenetic album, Batman! Destrage is like a more technical version of Every Time I Die, which is to say, screaming, singing, growling, noodling, and breakdowns just jammed into songs seemingly at random (although much more coherent with familiarity)! While this style of frantic ADHD composition is certainly an acquired taste, this album really grew on me after a few listens (and was rather off-putting at first! The singer is almost grating and takes some getting used to). Although, you still have to be in the mood, or else it's like ear shrapnel.
All in all, the compositions are fascinating, with styles thrown into a blender (a nice, like a Vitamix) and blended into a concoction that somehow works. Although the base (in this case, metal for banana), as with every good smoothie, is the backbone that makes it all come together.
3.5/5 - Incredibly well executed for the style, and quite interesting... it is just a bit too overwhelming and exhausting to give higher praise. This Dillinger Escape Plan meets Every Time I Die hasn't been my cup of tea since the early to mid oughts, but if you like that style then listen to it now! It's the best I've heard in quite a long time.
After the overblown insanity of Blind Guardian, I figured I'd go listen to a nice stripped down EP from The Decemberists. This EP is outtakes and leftovers from their 2011 album The King is Dead (which I rather enjoyed), and it doesn't fall far from the tree in terms of sound (i.e., folk-country meets REM). First tracks are good swinging folky tunes, while the quality falls a little on the latter half. Nice straightforward music.
3.0/5 - Nice little EP, but I'll probably just go back to the main album for this sound if I want it.
This was a fun album to go back and listen to after a few years. While this is pretty similar to Beyond the Red Mirror, it is less dense because the orchestration is gone and replaced with synths and guitars. The vocal harmonies are still mindblowingly epic, layered, and complex... and still catchy as hell! I honestly don't know how Hansi Kursch comes up with this stuff, it's incredible.
The album in general is quite good, with a strong start and unbelievable finish with the knockout 1-2-3 combo of Bright Eyes (one of their best songs ever), Another Holy War, and And the Story Ends (one of the best album closers ever). The story is ridiculous and convoluted, but as I said previously... I'm here for the music, and it is top-notch.
4.5/5 - Excellent album, almost a classic. Blind Guardian does things with music that no one else does. Cheesy concept album, but that kind of comes with power metal.
Anybody heard of these guys?: https://m.facebook...ups/755592381137433 (m.facebook.com)
Appear to be a sort of syndicated Arctic Entries. And Anchorage has a chapter, I guess.
Tempted to see what they're about on the 4th.
Their main site, that they haven't really updated: http://anchorage.nerdnite.com/ (anchorage.nerdnite.com)
Oh, Blind Guardian. Their brand of power metal is like an incredibly complex cheese. If all you've eaten is sharp cheddar, you probably won't like it: the dozens of layered vocal tracks on top of the dual guitar attack on top of drums mixed with an electronic drum machine on top of bass on top of two 90-person choirs on top of three international symphonies is akin to eating all the French cheese varieties whose names you can't pronounce and having them paired with fine wine. However, if you're like me, and have listened to so much music that you demand complexity or uniqueness in your music, it is a delicacy that cannot be passed up. Thus is the newest Blind Guardian offering.
Naturally, it's concept album, and, in fact, a sequel to their highly regarded 1995 album Imaginations from the Other Side. I honestly don't know what the fuck the story is, and I've even gone to listening to each album back to back to try and immerse myself in it more thoroughly! Something about the realm of gods... and another realm via a red mirror... and a holy war... In any case, the story is secondary to the music, which is just impossibly dense and mostly incredibly catchy and brilliant. No one does epic like Blind Guardian. Unfortunately, because there is SO MUCH going on, the mix is peculiar in a few ways (vocals, choirs and orchestras are pretty high in the mix, leaving other aspects a bit muddy). It is an album that can only be enjoyed via headphones, the higher fidelity the better. Otherwise the intricacies just get lost.
4.0/5 - Great album. All in all, this album took me a while to get into, but after a few listens, I think it's a winner. It's overlong, a bit overblow, and probably too dense with a mix that doesn't help (but may have been necessary, given the complexities). Probably their best since A Nightfall in Middle-Earth, and on par with Imaginations from the Other Side.
Since I listen to A LOT of music, I think a lot about formats and such. This (www.angrymetalguy.com) is a pretty great summary of mp3's. I might start cataloging my favorites in a lossless format after all, even if mp3's are mostly okay ;)
BUT STILL NO PONO FOR ME
Coworker 1: "So, at the McDonald's drive through, the lady asks me, 'Would you like anything else, sir?'"
Coworker 2: "Yeah?"
Coworker 1: "I asked her, 'Can I have some warmer weather, please?'"
Coworker 2: "Ah."
Coworker 1: "And she's like, 'What?'"
Coworker 2: "Okay?"
Coworker 1: "So I ask her again, 'Can I have some warmer weather?' And then she just laughs, and says, 'Okay, sir, have a nice day.'"
Coworker 2: "Some people can roll with the punches... some not."
Coworker 1: "I guess." (walks off, then, speaking to Coworker 3) "So, at the McDonald's drive through..."
This last holiday season, our boss^3 got us all Beanie Babies. Which I thought was kinda fun.
It was also very entertaining. As they all came in one morning, they each came in to a different Beanie Baby on their chair. I enjoyed watching my coworkers either:
I did the only thing I could think appropriate: put my pink flamingo on the corner of my cubicle wall, facing the walkway, so it could watch everybody go by.
Over the course of the next 9 hours, I watched as the rest of the Beanie Babies slowly made their ways to the top of everyone else's cubicle walls. Now everybody in IT (or at least the programmer area) have little animals that the rest of the company tries to ignore every time they come to our cubes.
I should awkwardly stand next to it, grinning and pointing, and just say, "Flamingo."
I work with probably the same mix of people when it comes to unexpected things. Those who would awkwardly look at some strange gift, those who immediately move it aside, and of course the ones who proudly display whatever new weird shit comes there way.
I fall proudly in the last category. One of the nice things about being the latter is eventually people realize what you're doing and intentionally bring you weird shit. Currently around my desk is a broken coffee much that says "Classy and Sassy", a small stuffed eagle, a plastic King Cake baby, a sticky jelly eyeball, a diary with Rorshach from the Watchmen on the cover, a framed photobooth picture from a holiday party where I convinced a bunch of people to grab random objects from the hotel lobby, a shitty hand drawn picture on a napkin of a coworkers feet under the wall of a bathroom stall, a couple large nerf guns...
Yeah all that stuff isn't mine, it's just showed up over the years and it sits in my cubicle in the main office area. I also have one of the most prominent and visible cubicles as it's on the end of the row right by the main walkway, and the walls are only about 4' high so all my stuff is pretty visible.
Heard a story on this paper on NPR: http://papers.ssrn....bstract_id=2466040 (papers.ssrn.com)
From the abstract:
Research shows that evidence-based algorithms more accurately predict the future than do human forecasters. Yet, when forecasters are deciding whether to use a human forecaster or a statistical algorithm, they often choose the human forecaster. This phenomenon, which we call algorithm aversion, is costly, and it is important to understand its causes. We show that people are especially averse to algorithmic forecasters after seeing them perform, even when they see them outperform a human forecaster. This is because people more quickly lose confidence in algorithmic than human forecasters after seeing them make the same mistake. In five studies, participants either saw an algorithm make forecasts, a human make forecasts, both, or neither. They then decided whether to tie their incentives to the future predictions of the algorithm or the human. Participants who saw the algorithm perform were less confident in it, and less likely to choose it over an inferior human forecaster. This was true even among those who saw the algorithm outperform the human.
Is SimCity homelessness a bug or a feature? In which some people take their video game WAY too seriously. This is an article about a guys 700 page book about this.
Also read the comments. The guy in the first few comments is a master level troll.
http://motherboard...-a-bug-or-a-feature (motherboard.vice.com)
Sadly, everything games, gaming, or boardgame related is blocked at my work, otherwise I'd try to track this down, but this reminds me of another fun case study someone did with Sim City. The guy also studied for a while, and figured out the perfect balance and/or repeating grid to effectively fill every inch of the map, and have that megalopolis be self-sustaining up to 50,000 years in game time.
FULL STOP. Found it: http://www.vice.com...-who-beat-sim-city (www.vice.com)
From the article:
Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place. [...] There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness--suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle--this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
It took me a while figure out what was going on: https://www.youtub...watch?v=qoLS9We9hl4 (www.youtube.com)
This pretty much just made my day at work. Except our lame IT lady just told me I can't download and play while I'm actually at work, on my actual work computer.
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games/v2 (archive.org)
In 1993 I caught my sister convincing my parents to purchase Oregon Trail at the Fairbanks Fred Meyer. Requiring parity, X-Wing, a Star Wars space combat simulator, made it onto the conveyor belt. But that's not what this story is about.
Everyone in my household eventually dabbled with Oregon Trail. The over sized box was torn apart and the discs within were inserted successively into the old Gateway machine that replaced an aging Apple product. After my sister had her fun, I commenced with playing the shit out of it - and left a trail of bodies in my wake. As the game became too easy - repeated expeditions fine tuned to maximize survival - I intentionally ramped up the difficulty with my own cruel rules.
Only the strong survived. Disease and "food" was the Darwinian method for parsing out the weak and feeble. The Trail was the great judicator.
I think I quit playing when I completed my ultimate goal - survive to Oregon sans a family. So many times my parasitic wife or children would survive cholera and starvation, reaching the promised land a shell of who they once were, but alive. Those fruits of the west coast were to be mine alone.
However the best part - and main catalyst for remembering all of this - is that my mother would also play. The game stored information beyond high score. When your quest failed (as mine so often did, under such despicable conditions), the game left a headstone where you finally capitulated. Mommy stumbled upon the fabled Butthead Expedition, and Butthead's tombstone. She was at first appalled the developers had such crude tastes at world buiding, and then laughed after unearthing the true nature of my game play.
Edit: starvation.
Oh man. That is delicious.
For my sister, I'm not sure if she just didn't much care for computers, or if I just depleted the oxygen in the "Interest in Computers" wing of the mansion of our childhood. I think she got more interested when she figured out she could talk to her friends on email/IM, but by then I had already annexed a corner of my parents' office and was running multiple workstations and servers.
Pre-Internet, though? Pre-Internet was a different story. I think it was... 96? 97? When we first got the Internet. Pretty sure I'd been watching my Dad, my grandfather, and my uncle play Sierra, Lucasarts, and other assorted adventure games since ~90. Watching playthroughs nowadays, I'm fairly sure I had no clue what was going on. Maybe that's why they let me watch them play Leisure Suit Larry until my incessant questions would drive them to madness.
As far as making our own games, though: X-COM and Daggerfall were the shit. We played a lot of some others (Heroes of Might and Magic comes to mind), but they didn't lend themselves nearly as well to emergent gameplay.
In X-COM you could create your team, give them the names of your friends and family, design your secret underwater base, organize and manage research and development to defeat the imminent alien invasion. A single player game, but you would look on with anxiety as an alien headshotted the one crew member named "Josh" from across the map. I didn't own the game, but my friends did, and until they got an N64/Goldeneye we would play X-COM from the time I went to my friends' house until their parents would come downstairs, exhausted looking, and tell us all to go to bed. Eventually, as we figured out that the game's difficulty would accelerate and make the game impossible after a few in-game weeks, we would just play to see how long we could survive. My friend would usually drive the mouse/keyboard, and inevitably we would always send in the characters named after our younger siblings first. There were many,many times somebody would leave the computer room crying over the outcome of a turn, or if they wouldn't go back to the last save when they were still alive. It didn't matter that you could just rename the new hire to replace the lost sibling. It was that you intentionally walked them into a nest of greys with plasma pistols rather than tactically eliminating them first.
Daggerfall was a bizarre game, but it was one of the first sandbox games and for the computers we had it was at an incredible scale. As a DOS / early Windows game, it contained ~15,000 towns with ~750,000 unique NPCs (not that they were all unique, most were just procedurally/randomly generated). I mean, you could follow the thin story missions, but they were boring, formulaic, and you had to read. Instead, it was much more fun to just roll a new character and pick a random town on the map to terrorize. We would roll characters, and see how long we could survive, or even get past a single dungeon. However, at some point we figured out the user interface for the character building screen was broken, such that even though the "increase stat" button would disappear when you couldn't "increase" it anymore, you could still click the button and it would increase your selected stat. With god-like abilities at level 1, the game was effectively broken as the game couldn't decide what level of difficulty you were at, or what random events you would be presented with that would try to drive the story. As such, rather than contend with the game, the game we made was to enter a town naked (it was one of the few games where stripping all items from your character would result in a nude avatar, male or female), and just go nuts. The first step was usually finding the brothels where the pixelated naked woman sprite would face you no matter where you were at in the room. After giggling at that and getting in a lot of trouble, you would just start pickpocketing. Eventually, despite your godhood, the guards would somehow catch wise of your ill deeds and chase after you. Either you killed wave after wave of guards with your bare hands, or, you paid the fine and/or served your time in jail (which would permanently effect your reputation). Once you're out, quick-travel to the next town, and start pickpocketing again. Or let the guards kill you, and start over.
I couldn't tell you where I got them, or when, but I still have X-COM and Daggerfall on CD.
My sister was also famous in her family for her semi-crude names left on headstones. Her goal was always to kill off everyone in her wagon as soon as possible. It was to her great dismay that the game wouldn't let you leave without buying any food. But you could buy 10 pounds of food and immediately dump it.
Is anyone else profoundly disturbed by the fact that a major motion picture was successfully censored by cyberterrorists? Because I honestly cannot believe how this has turned out, especially given that the FBI has concluded it was North Korean actors that were responsible for the attack (www.npr.org).
A little. I'm honestly more concerned with China (intelreport.mandiant.com). North Korea's hack makes for good news, but China's capabilities are far greater.
So, taking down another long-standing complaint. Two things were happening:
I've now got a sort of image proxy going on idkfa. It will rewrite the img tag in your post, and rewrite it so that it goes through a slapped together proxying service. The image's width and height with be recorded, and will be used to hard-code the width and height of images prior to loading, stopping the browser from reflowing each time a new image would load.
So, I implemented this around December 15th of last year. This meant that as part of the idkfa database, I was storing the images that would be captured using this proxy mechanism. This meant that the idkfa database would grow along with the number and size of the images used.
Cut to a few months later. First, I run out of files on my backup server (you would think 45 million would be enough). I fix this, only to find that it was masking another problem: I was running out of space almost every week. I know I wasn't adding *that* much more information to the applications I was backing up, but *something* was killing my storage over time.
Turns out, it was this. Storing 89MB of information each day (GIFs aren't the most efficient format), this slowly ate through my 60GB backup partition.
I've now changed my backup routine to only store a week's worth of idkfa backups. Still, though. Small changes, vast consequences.
In one of our modeling programs, we found some sort of overflow bug that probably hasn't been reported before. We sent trouble tickets in to Autodesk and they said that was brand new for them.
For whatever reason, because our file size was so large, when booting the program it would hang up. It filled the ~80gb open on my hard drive in about 10 minutes.
Fun times.
idkfa's hosts are being weirdly draconian about what they consider "spammy" posts. My post about RAID arrays was apparently too much for it. It was irritating enough that I did something about it.
I've implemented a sort of weird workaround. It more or less just encodes/decodes data before it passes things along, and the process *should* be invisible. Except for the back button. The back button kinda doesn't work. And you'll see a flicker of the data as it is encoded. But otherwise, business as usual while I figure out how to fix this more permanently.
SPDCA: RAID Arrays
So, I built a new computer. Records show I started writing an upgrade log, detailing for whoever cares my learnings/progress in getting a new PC built. However, from the looks of it, I abandoned it to play Diablo 3. Because I had a new computer. And it could play games. And then I decided I needed to get a new phone. It's like I don't own my technology, but rather, it owns me.
Anyhow. As is always the case with building a PC, there are always things. I say things, and anybody who has had to slap a computer together from component parts will have an idea what I'm talking about. No matter how well worn the path is that you are following, how popular or standardized your methods, there will always be something that causes you to sink an incredible amount of time. It's the nature of the game, and in some cases, the journey is more rewarding than the destination, but more often than not, your things will be annoying as shit.
I'll spare you the details of my first two weeks with the computer. Describing the tweaks one does to a workstation to make it "right" is like telling somebody about an incredibly affecting, emotional dream you had, the kind you wake up from a changed man/woman, but in reality and in its retelling it is actually boring as hell.
I maintain, however, that mine has a sort of cautionary tale element to it. Sort of like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner... but about drive redundancy.
Anyhow. One of my things was getting a RAID mirror set up on my computer. I have an SSD for my boot drive, and two HDDs I wanted to serve in a 2-disk drive mirror for performance and having some redundancy in the event one disk goes before the other (I have backups aside from this, but in this instance, my redundancy is about reducing down-time).
Initially, setting up my RAID array, I went through my motherboard's built-in hardware RAID setup. This setup is ideal, as the operating system does not have to care about the RAID setup, the maintenance of the array, or really anything. The RAID just works at a low level on the system, and I can potentially have multiple operating systems have partitions on the RAID array and everyone just plays nicely.
This, however, failed miserably. Absolutely miserably. No matter what I would do, whenever I enabled the RAID driver Windows would refuse to boot. I would disable the driver, and it would boot back up happily. I thought to myself: Well, damn. I have a buggy RAID controller in my motherboard. Buuut, everything else seems to be working okay... I'll try out a software RAID configuration.
In a software RAID configuration, the operating system controls the disks according to its own rules, sort of "manually" maintaining the RAID array by reading/writing to both disks of its own accord (and not relying on a lower-level function to do it for the operating system).
Trying that, I found out that Windows 7 Home Premium does not support this kind of RAID, and that to support it I would need to upgrade to a version of Windows that cost twice as much. Fuck that, said I, and I tried to go back to getting the motherboard hardware RAID working.
A few dozen iterations of knob-twiddling and subsequent frustration, I was ready to give up. No amount of BIOS, firmware, or driver upgrades would get Windows to boot into the proper mode.
However, magic happened. Much like you are guaranteed that things will happen during PC building, something magic happens. This is when, despite all of your efforts at troubleshooting, something magically starts working, and you have no idea why. For someone who operates on the assumption of a knowable universe, this kind ofmagic is infuriating. And also worrying, for the reason that eventually, all magic eventually ends.
The magic was that the RAID array started to work. Magically. My RAID array appeared as one drive, and I could hear the clicking of two disks, not just one. I thought to myself, Maybe I didn't give it enough time? After all, RAID arrays take some time to build. Maybe the underlying hardware wasn't "ready," and just didn't know how to tell me.
Then two months passed. I got complacent. I started doing real work, where it mattered whether I lost what was on the drives. I did the thing I should not have done. I relied on the magic.
And tonight, the magic ended. I was playing Borderlands, and Windows reared its ugly head, minimizing everything I was shooting at. Windows claimed "You no longer have a genuine copy of Windows! Please buy a genuine copy of Windows!" To that I also said Fuck that, given that I can see my legitimate registration key sitting on shelf. I investigated. Then investigated some more. It's been a number of years since I ran Windows at home, after all. There's bound to be odd things I haven't seen since Windows XP. Plus, I know that Windows ties all sorts of things in its "registration" process to the underlying hardware, and between recent driver and Windows updates, maybe something had changed in its consideration of that. Either way, I decided I would attempt a restart.
After restarting, my RAID array came up as two drives. This is bad. This is very bad. Once a disk goes into a RAID array, it should not come out unless it has failed. If a drive that was previously RAID comes out of the RAID, and an operating system like Windows sees it, and mounts it, you have basically destroyed your RAID (because you can almost guarantee that Windows did two slightly different things to both drives, making them no longer identical mirrors of each other).
I investigated. I investigated some more. I restarted a bunch. I started going down the original hardware RAID path I did back in September, and ended up at the same fail-booting loop I was in before. I was distraught.
My saving grace was that I turned off the "Automatically Restart After Fail" option. You can do this by holding F8 before you get to the "Windows loading..." screens. This means that even if you Blue-Screen-Of-Death, the machine won't immediately restart, clearing the message on the screen. The message that I saw was about as helpful as any I'd seen: a bunch of hexadecimal codes that mean nothing to a human being. I happened to take a picture of that screen with my phone, and moved on.
I started getting desperate. I started researching to see if there was some known problem with my motherboard. Or if there were more updated version available from the vendors (looking at Intel, rather than MSI, in hopes that an update to a BIOS/firmware/driver might help).
In my desperation, I went here (www.intel.com). And while I normally don't pay a whole lot of attention to the admonitions on driver download pages (as they are mostly the vendors divulging all legal liability for their product), I happened to notice a familiar hex code: 0x0000007b
Don't ask me why I recognized that. It doesn't mean anything to me. It's like any other number. But it stuck in my mental craw, and forced me to read what it said:
If your RAID controller is not enabled, enabling the RAID controller is not recommended or supported when a SATA hard drive is the boot drive. Enabling the RAID controller might cause an immediate blue screen with the error code, 0x0000007b, followed by a reboot. To enable RAID, reinstall the operating system.
A memory stirred again. There was something strange I found with my motherboard. My motherboard has a strange design to it, in that almost every human-configurable component has a redundancy to it. For instance, it has two onboard BIOS memories that you can switch between at will. They do this, because the more you fuck with something, the more likely you will wedge something. In this case, it is certainly nice to be able to restore to a previous known good state rather than having to start over from the beginning.
I had noticed when initially putting my stuff together that my motherboad had not one but two SATA controllers (this is the hardware that interacts directly with your hard drives, and can do interesting things with them, like RAID mirroring). For the SATA ports 1-6, they go to an onboard Intel controller. For the SATA ports 7-8, they go to an ASMedia controller. At the time, I didn't understand the reason for this. Maybe if a controller failed, the other one could be used? No, because they have different numbers of ports, and you wouldn't be able to boot with the same configuration... (shrugs)
It was something I had initially discarded as one of the board's redundancies. But, reading that information from Intel, now I see why. Intel's controller, if configured for RAID, will completely shit the bed if you end up trying to boot your computer from a SATA slot that is not configured in a RAID array (but is still connected to your Intel controller).
Because I boot from an SSD, and because that SSD is not part of any RAID array, the Intel controller threw an unrecoverable hardware error whenever Windows would try to load the RAID driver. Why does the Intel controller do this? Why would they not just provide a nice error message when this happens? Or at least a warning when you try? I don't know.
Figuring this out, I switched my SSD over to SATA port 7, running it through the ASMedia SATA controller. I booted it up, and everything was just fine. My drives, still incredibly wedged in terms of RAID mirroring, at least still had their data on them. Even though Intel sort of screwed me when it came to underlying hardware configuration, they did provide a nice tool to migrate existing data from a known drive at he same time you were creating a RAID mirror from it. Currently, it is chugging away, and is supposedly at 7% completion to rebuild itself.
So, my question now is: what magic has been going on these last 2 months? If both drives had come up, but the first drive looked completely different than the second, I would guess that I was simply operating outside of RAID and I didn't notice. However, both drives were within ~5MB usage, which meant that they were nearly identical at the time they came out of the magical RAID.
This is something I will probably never know. It might bug me a little, and for a little while. But now I can sleep better, knowing that magic died a little tonight, and that the discreet, knowable universe inched a little bit forward.
You didn't happen to install windows updates on or around 9-10 DEC, did you? Because microsoft fucked up HARD on a patch around that time that hit Win7 SP1 that borked the Windows Update functionality. Some folks are also reporting issues with the Windows Genuine error from that same pooch-screwing Windows patch.
