Watcher

I always feel like an outsider looking in.  An observer.  That's not a whine or some kind of depression fueled cry for help.  When I'm with people I'm genuinely more interested in hearing more about their lives.  But, it's actually a statement based on the fact that I don't understand most anything.

People have problems that I don't even see as problems.  There are so many causes that people take up, but I honestly don't know who they're fighting, or why.  They do tend to lead to counter causes that I equally don't understand.  Feminism, masculism, racism, globalism, socialism, capitalism... none of these things mean anything to me.  It's all triumphalism.  I don't mean to say that these things don't exist, or don't have validity, but these fights don't apply to me.

I like social media as much as I dislike it.  I get to see how my family and old friends are doing.  I also get to see the opinions of many different people on all sorts of subjects.  But, this the point that I don't understand.  So many people seem to try rile me up for their cause.  Asking for contributions, trying to convince me of their righteousness.  Many times it's a call for somebody to do something or that something needs to be done.  Or, worse, that mankind needs to change.  And, ridiculous in the belief that mankind will change.

What gets me is the "somebody needs to do something" part.  Why can't it be you?  Why does somebody else have to do something for you?  Not that I don't want to help people, but why is there a belief that the world is wrong and I'm right?  Why are there so many insults?  Why does everyone think that everyone else is stupid?

I've seen happiness, pain, the goodness of people, and the evil in people.  We all have.  The evil I've seen still hasn't convinced me that mankind needs to change.  I still maintain the unprofessional opinion that everyone is good.  In fact, I actually like everyone.  Everyone.  There are people that have hurt friends and family, yet I still can't hold a grudge.

There is one particular day in school when I was a kid that I do remember.  I was friends with everyone, but this one particular friend... I saw him as one of the toughest kids.  Toughest kids.  He was strong and couldn't be rattled.  He talked back to teachers, he was tough.  This day, however, he cornered me in a hall while walking back into the school from recess and just broke down.  He cried right in front of me.  His little brother had swallowed poison and he was so worried his brother wouldn't make it through the day that he broke down in front of me.  I didn't know what to say or do then and I still wouldn't know now, but I stayed there with him until he was ready to face the world again.

My family also fell on hard times when I was about that same age.  I still don't know the entire situation, but I do know money became very tight and that they lost their house.  My family was very good friends with another family.  This other family had no responsibility to anyone but themselves, but out of the total goodness in their hearts, they gave my family a place to stay.  A place to stay until my parents could get back on their feet.  My parents never blamed anyone else for their troubles, and I'm sure they thanked their friends a million times.  My parents never took anything from anyone, but they did work, and work hard to get out of their hole.  Needless to say, for my parents, the work became easier and easier and they are now entering retirement living pretty comfortably.

I never looked back at this time with any kind of bad feeling.  I actually have good memories of this time.  The two families followed their own paths, but I know they are still friends.  I don't talk to the two girls who became something like sisters to me and my own sisters at that time as much as I probably could, but I still consider them great friends.  And, I still look up to their parents almost as fondly as I look up to my own.

I don't know what any of this has to do with a new generation taking up fights that other generations have already fought like it's something new.  Maybe it's because I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly and there is so much more good that I don't feel these fights are necessary.

I hold no "ism" in my heart.  Everyone is created equal and deserves the right to pursue their happiness.  They don't have the right to be happy, nor do they have the right to try and stop anyone else from pursuing happiness, but they have the right to pursue happiness.

The current trend (yes, trend) of calling racism on everything is insane to me.  It's not in my heart or brain to see that skin color makes a person.  I definitely have seen racists, though.  I know Al Sharpton furthers a racist agenda.  I also know that you will not win me over with James Woods pushing the fight even further as he does the same exact thing that he accuses others of doing.  These two men are both pushing agendas that I don't want to be a part of.

The recent (fake) feminism fight is not coherent to me.  It seems to be pushed by hatred and greed.  It's also caused a backlash of men and women who push back.  This counter fight is less coherent to me.  Stop letting people push you around and deal with it.  Quit being pussies.  That's my advice to both sides.

Atheism has seen quite a surge in popular culture recently.  I don't care if someone believes in God, or many gods, or no gods.  I just don't care.  I don't understand how atheism has become a religion itself.  Guys like Richard Dawkins are out to prove the falsehood of God.  Why?  We can all tear apart the literal translation of old religious texts, but too many people, religious and not, seem to miss the message.  The message that you are not the most important thing in the universe.  And, if you want to interact with other people, try to do something good.

I also don't see how science and religion are even mentioned together.  I hear so many people that f***ing love science, but don't do anything scientific.  They read the scientific things others have done just like me.  Science can't disprove religion, science is not about disproving religion, and science shouldn't even care about religion.  On the other side, I have seen how the many advances in science have strengthened a belief in God.  This type of religious person sees science as the gift, or work of God.  Anyway, I'd like to keep religion and science separate, because they're not related.

These are a few of the current issues that amaze me.  None of them have any place in my life.  I am more curious about what the beginning of this universe looked like.  I want to know how it ends, if it ends.  Will all these tiny stars just expand into nothingness further and further until the universe is a dark, cold, boring nothing?  The beginnings of the universe and life confuse me and make me nervous to think about.  The fact that all this light could eventually drift so far away that it is only dark makes me sad and lonely.  My feeble mind can't even comprehend how long forever is.

Maybe all I'm saying is that haters will probably, most likely continue to hate, but what makes us so special that we have haters?  Why are there haters?  Why does anyone care so much about what everyone else is doing?  The more I learn and the more I listen, the more questions I have, and the dumber I feel.  My suggestion is to stop letting words hurt you.  Stop asking for contributions.  Leave me alone and pursue your own happiness.  I'll gladly support your happiness, as long as you just let me pursue mine.

Corrupt Hard Drive

About a month ago, the hard drive in my wife's desktop pc failed.  I booted up her computer and it took longer than normal for the BIOS to do its thing.  It returned a message saying there is an error with the hard drive and hit F1 to continue.  So, I hit F1.  It should've went to the Windows bootloader but instead told me there is no system disk.  My wife has all of her pictures on this hard disk, so I got a little nervous.  First I made sure there was no USB devices in any slot that the pc might be trying to boot from, and that there was no disc in the DVD drive.  Reboot.  I get the same thing.

I shut the computer down and open it up.  I start investigating and changing jumper settings, switching cables, and moving connections around.  Every time I boot, it's still the same thing.  I started to get a bit worried at this point because my wife has experienced a hard drive failure in the past.  She always means to make backups, but she never gets around to doing it.  The one thing I have going for me at this point is that I can hear and feel the drive spinning up and there is not clicking or any other scary noises.

I am in no way affiliated with any of the software I mention here, but this is what I did next.  I went to my wife's laptop and downloaded the latest Puppy Linux.  Puppy saved me in the past with one of my own hard drives.  Then, since I have no blank CDs, and because I was feeling a bit lazy, I downloaded Unetbootin.  I installed Puppy to USB stick using unetbootin.  So convenient!

Now, back at the desktop, I connected a new (formatted) hard drive and the old drive with all the photos.  I plugged in the USB stick with Puppy on it and turned the computer on.  Of course, I have to set the computer to boot from the USB stick.  I get the same message about the disk error but, this time Puppy runs from the USB stick.  Normally, Puppy boots pretty quickly, but this time I can hear that it is trying to read the failed disk.  It's actually a good sound.  It really was taking a while so I walked away for a few minutes to play with the cats.

Upon my return I see that Puppy has finally booted to its desktop.  I shift my focus to the bottom of the screen where Puppy will show the drives that can be mounted.  There is an SDA, the new drive, an SDB, the USB that Puppy is on, and there is also an SDC.  It read the drive!  But, for how long will the drive be operational?  I start copying files from the old drive to the new one.  It's not fast enough!  I don't want the drive to fail mid process!

Well, I completed the transfer of all my wife's files and photos with no errors.  The drive didn't even seem to have anything wrong with it.  Although, it is a re-certified drive from a company in Singapore I've never heard of.  Anyway, after copying the files I wanted to see if I could try and get the old drive to boot Windows again.  I run "ntfsfix" on the drive and it completes successfully.  This command will set a few things on a corrupted ntfs filesystem that will, hopefully, allow Windows to boot again.  It also forces Windows to run a complete and thorough "chkdsk" scan when it does boot.

I shut down the computer and make the old hard drive the only drive.  Turn the computer on.  I get the same disk error, and the same system error where the Windows bootloader should be.  Well, there are other options for me to explore further, but I think the drive has run its course.  I was able to get the things off of it I needed to, there's no reason to push the drive to absolute failure.  Now to make two or three backups of all of it!