Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

So yesterday on one of my four drobos all of a sudden one of the lights went red. Usually this means that the drive may have gone bad (I’ve replaced one already). When I went to check on the drobo in the dashboard though, in this case it was showing that a drive was not in that bay when there clearly was one. So I took the drive out and reinserted it back into the drobo and the drobo recognized the drive again. But after I did this drobo began the process of re "protecting my data." The drobo messages reminded me that I could continue to use my files while this protection was going on but that I shouldn’t remove any drives during the process. I had an estimated time of recovery of about 32 hours. I love my drobos by the way and have been very happy with the job they do storing my photos.

So this morning I got up as I always do and went to upload some photos to flickr (my to be uploaded photos are kept on this drobo). Unfortunately, when trying to access that folder I got the following error message: "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." And so that’s why you’re seeing this screenshot this morning instead of new photos from me.

It looks like the drobo is still in the process of recovering (it says 22 hours remaining though and I feel like it should be further along as it’s been about 16 hours already) so I don’t want to try and reboot it or anything — but I can’t access any of my photos on this unit which is worrying me a little bit this morning.

So the first place that I like to try to go to start troubleshooting things like this is in community help forums. I often find that simple searches in community forums can often help you find the answers that you are looking for. Basically what I want to know is this. If I reboot my drobo during the recovery process (because I think it is stuck and has hanged somehow) will I risk losing data.

The problem with drobo’s community forum though is that you can’t read it without first registering with the site by giving them your email address and clicking on a confirmation email back from them. Personally I hate those kind of policies. Half the time the confirmation email ends up in your spam folder, sometimes you never get it, other times it takes an hour to get a simple email confirm. But because I need the help I went through that registration process. When I got into the system I checked off that I didn’t want their newsletter or other spamy sort of things and then went to upload my avatar (which I could not because I got an I/O device error on the same drobo). It asked me for my flickr ID which I thought was kind of cool and I put in thomashawk but got an error saying that they didn’t recognize my flickr ID. Oh well.

So I’m all ready to finally access the support forums but when I try to go into them I get still another screen denying me access. This time it wants me to put my *serial number* into the drobo system before I can have access. WTF? Are you kidding me? Why in God’s name should I be required to enter a serial number in order to access a help forum? That’s about the lamest thing I’ve ever seen. What, are they worried that people that don’t really own drobos are going to troll the forums talking about how to fix drobos? I can think of no reason why I would need to enter a serial number in order to access these forums.

So that’s were I am now. I crawled under my desk to try to see if I could ready the serial number anywhere on the back of my drobo but I can’t. So after I finish this blog post I’m going to need to go get a flashlight and crawl around under my desk some more to try and see if I can read it anywhere on the unit. Wherever it is printed it must be pretty small. Hopefully I actually get into the forums and hopefully I’m able to get this drobo back online at some point today and upload some new photos to Flickr so you don’t have to keep seeing this lame screenshot above.

Update: it turns out the serial number is actually on the bottom of the drobo on a sticker. I lifted one up while under my desk and got it and am now in the forums. Hopefully I get this one resolved soon.

Update: I searched in the forum and found this thread. which seemed to indicate that if a protection was hanging that I could shut down the drobo and restart it. So I did that and now all of my data is back. The drobo is no longer protecting my data though and the top bay (where there is a 750GB Seagate drive) is showing red and empty again. I think I may be having issues with this drive and will probably need to replace it. I’ll order another drive today and see if this fixes the problem. It’s great that I was able to find an answer to my question in the community support forum, but I still think it’s really lame that you have to enter a serial number to access it. I can understand the email verification to protect against spam, but even here I’d think they should let you browse, search and read the forums just not post to them without verification. But the extra step to require a serial number is lame. It prevents people who don’t own drobos from researching them. The less barriers to information the better I say.

Anthony Citrano decided to do some high ISO night shooting Friday Night on the Santa Monica Pier but quickly found himself in a confrontation with your friendly neighborhood photo police. According to Anthony, a confusing interchange took place between him and the photocops between what he could and couldn’t shoot on the Pier even though he was clearly shooting for personal non-commercial use.

From Anthony:

“He then led me a short distance to a second security guy who explained that it’s OK to take pictures of “people, etc.” but I could not take pictures of park “things.” He described it as “private property” and “you see, everything you photograph in this park, it’s copyrighted.” I replied, “yes, copyrighted by the photographer.”

He seemed confused by that. So I asked, “is it a question of the subject matter of the photograph? that’s the basis of the policy?” Yes, he said, that’s the policy. “Otherwise, you need to sign a waiver and show ID.”

I asked how they determine what I’m photographing. Do you review the photos? “For instance, your colleague said it was `family’; how do you know who my family is?”

He did not have an answer for that, so decided instead to move on to a new line of reasoning. He said that “if it’s for commercial use” I would need to sign. Then – acting quite relieved – I said, “oh cool, then, because this isn’t for commercial use. So, can I go take some shots?” But still he said no, that I would need to sign the waiver if I wanted to take pictures of “park property.” I was confused, and told him so: You just said that the waiver was required if the images were for “commercial use”. They are most definitely not for commercial use. So why do I need to show ID and sign a document?”

You can read more about Anthony’s run in here.

Remember kids, stay in school, do what adults tell you. Cameras don’t kill people, people kill people.

Photography is not a crime.

Pacific Park photo by Anthony Citrano.

Update: The L.A. Weekly has picked up on this story and is running a post on it as well right now.

The Register published a story yesterday regarding President-Elect Barak Obama’s experiment with a public suggestion box over at change.gov. Change.gov is a sort of government suggestion box where people can ask questions or offer suggestions to the newly elected President that supposedly he’s going to consider. Users on the site can vote suggestions up or down. And the top suggestion amongst the thousands offered to the new President. Yep, you got it, people wanna get high, legally.

From the Register:

“Obama’s Change.gov site will close down its internet suggestion box today, after a week of taking suggestions and opinions on the new administration’s executive policy from the web public at large. In standard Web 2.0 fashion, users can vote up or down on existing entries — the theory being that the best schemes will rise to top.

Barring any massive last-minute changes, the tip-top idea will be best summarized by the philosopher/poet Chris Tucker in his cinematic role as Smokey: “I’m gunna get you high today, ’cause it’s Friday; you ain’t got no job…and you ain’t got shit to do.”

There are lots of other interesting ideas that the general public has come up with including suggestions for bullet trains and light rail, ending Govt sponsored abstinence programs, creating a more green country, etc. But top of the list is legalizing pot.

Barack Obama of course is the first President who has admitted that he smoked pot in the past and actually inhaled frequently because “that was the point.”

With the budget woes that are currently facing the country, certainly legalizing marijuana could provide for a windfall of Government revenue. It was largely the need for tax revenues that got the government to end the prohibition against alcohol back after the Great Depression. In an interesting editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle last week the tax benefits of legalizing marijuana were raised once again with the argument being made that the State of California could possibly address our current budget woes by a tax on the popular drug:

“The marijuana crop is valued at $13.8 billion annually – nearly double the value of our vegetable and grape crops combined. Our state is the nation’s top marijuana producer. Indeed, the average annual value of our marijuana crop is more than the combined value of wheat and cotton produced in the entire United States.

According to government surveys, 14.5 million Americans use marijuana at least monthly but both the producers and consumers of this crop escape paying any taxes whatsoever on it. While precise figures are impossible given the illicit nature of the market, it is reasonable to suggest that California could easily collect at least $1.5 billion and maybe as much as $4 billion annually in additional tax revenue, if we took marijuana out of the criminal underground and taxed and regulated it, similar to how handle beer, wine and tobacco.”

It will be interesting what our new President has to say about legalizing marijuana if he has the political gumption to actually broach the subject. Certainly almost 100,000 people on the internet have. One person though who it looks like doesn’t support marijuana legalization is Obama’s pick for Surgeon General, Sanjay Gupta.

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about Netflix’s new Watch Now service being, well, out of service, last Saturday night. A couple of folks called me a cry baby for being a bit worked up over having my Friday Night Lights episode pulled out from underneath my eyes right at a very tense part of the show (ok, so how tense can Friday Night Lights get right?). In the post though I worried that Netflix’s Watch Now technical difficulties last weekend might be a harbinger of things to come.

Unfortunately it looks like this Saturday night Netflix’s Watch Now service is dead once again. Note to Netflix, if you want to screw around with your servers, do it on a Monday afternoon when nobody’s watching TV anyways. Saturday night is of course probably just about the worst time for Netflix’s service to go down.

The photograph above is what my screen looks like right now. On the plus side Netflix does seem to offer a toll-free number to contact them (866-579-7113). On the negative side that toll-free number has been busy for the past 20 minutes. Netflix’s customer service number on their website has also been busy for the past 20 minutes as well. Of course nowhere on Netflix’s site is any indication that they are having these technical difficulties but a quick Twitter search confirms that I’m not the only one who’s not going to be able to watch my Friday Night Light’s tonight.

As much as I love me my Netflix Watch Now, I’m beginning to worry a bit that their service may end up being a whole lot worst than your cable or satellite provider. At a bear minimum Netflix ought to post on their website that they are having problems with their service. Or if this is going to be an every Saturday night sort of problem, maybe they ought to think about hiring that Frank Cares Twitter guy from over at Comcast so he can get chummy with all the people complaining on Twitter about this outage right now.

Update: I was finally able to get through on the customer service number. I just spoke with Benjamin over at Netflix after being on hold for a bit and he told me that in fact the service is down for most of Netflix’s customers right now. He said that they are working on the problem but has no ETA. He said that he wasn’t able to offer a credit rebate for the down service because Watch Now is a bonus feature for Netflix subscribers.

Today marks the first day that Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection is publishing on WordPress. After over four years publishing on Google’s Blogger platform I made the switch today over to WordPress. Aaron Brazell did the transfer for me for which I’m extremely grateful. Aaron is a pro and I’d highly recommend him should you have any web work that you might need done.

I’d also like to especially thank both Google and the Blogger team for providing me with the Blogger platform for so many years. The Blogger team was also very helpful with helping me to move my blog and as part of the process they fixed a Blogger limitation which limited transferring comments to 5,000 (turns out I’ve got 21,896 comments on my blog over the past four years).

The main reason that I moved over from Blogger to WordPress was due to comment spam. My blog has been very heavily hit by comment spam over the past year especially and without a tool like Akismet or an easy way to search and bulk delete spam comments Blogger wasn’t working for me in that regard. I am excited also though to begin working with all of the interesting tools and plug ins that seem to thrive in the WordPress Community.

I still need to do a few design tweaks to the layout of my new blog, do a little work with my archives and photos, get my blogroll back in place, etc. Aaron’s going to help me with some of this stuff in the next few days. As part of the change I decided to go with a white background instead of the dark blue background that I’d used for so many years. I originally picked the dark blue background because I thought photos looked better against a dark background, but over the years I had a lot of complaints from people who told me that it was harder for them to read my blog on a dark background. I wanted something that was super easy to read with the new blog and something that was very, very simple so I’m using the very basic plainscape theme. I also redesigned and added a new masthead to the blog.

Today I’ll probably spend a lot of time both exploring WordPress, as well as figuring out what cool new things, widgets, etc. that I can add to my blog. If anyone has any suggestions on features, widgets, etc. that you think I should be using feel free to let me know. Keep in mind though that I’m going for a very simple look and feel with the new blog design. I’ve got FriendFeed posts linked up to my blog posts already. I still need to add a FriendFeed badge as well which I’m hoping to be able to do later today.

Let me know what you think of the new design. Like it? Hate it? What improvements would you like to see on the blog or suggestions would you have for it?

Earlier this evening I attended a peaceful protest over the death of Oscar Grant. The protest was large, with almost 1,500 participants and seemed very organized. Speakers advocated protesting against the killing of Oscar Grant but urged protesters to do this peacefully. The protest ran from 4pm to 7pm.

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums spoke at the protest as did hip hop star Too Short. The protest, which started at Oakland City Hall, marched from City Hall down to the Alameda County Court House where protesters demanded the resignation of Oakland District Attorney Tom Orloff. Several more speeches were given down at the Courthouse, including one by Oscar Grant’s football coach.

After the speeches at the Courthouse, the protest again marched back to City Hall where the protest continued for about another hour.

After 7pm about 100 or so of the original protesters were still hanging around 14th and Broadway and there are reports of trash can fires and broken windows in that area. Bart was also briefly closed while the rioting was going on. According to KTVU, 18 people were arrested including 2 for possession of molatov cocktails. I suspect the violence may still be going on in downtown Oakland as I still hear helicopters hovering over head.

Most all of the retail stores down in the protest area had supportive Oscar Grant signs in their windows. Several were boarded up in anticipation of tonight’s violence.

Yesterday former BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle was arrested for the New Year’s Day shooting of Oscar Grant.

If you’d like to see my set of images from tonight’s protest you can see them all here.