Category: Musings

Intel Optane in HP Desktop

I was using an HP Pavilion Desktop that had the Intel Optane SSD synched with a Toshiba SATA drive. The customer just bought it 4 weeks earlier and had gone through the Office 365 add and other data recovery jobs to get all the working files and Outlook going. The move was from an older slower Win 10 machine to this faster one.

It stopped booting and displayed the HP messages to try different function keys for Recovery, Setup and the like. Once HP was contacted and the standard tests done, the RMA was made to ship it back to them to fix. Great service, but what about the data.

The Optane SSD and the Toshiba HD normally synch so that often used data is cached in the much faster solid-state memory. There are complex software algorithms to keep the data safely on the disk or SSD. Then the power blinks.

At that point, the data on the spinning disk and the data in the SSD cache cannot release each other from a fatal embrace made by the synch keys no longer matching.

The faux RAID feature of the Optane is used to pipeline the data to each volume; be it spinning or SSD. Its driver must already be in the Windows 10 install media used to recover the machine. But there is one last impossible problem.

Your data cannot be accessed until Windows installs on the drive. It refuses to do so when the install process runs. It will also destroy the drive contents as it installs.

The machine must have a healthy Windows 10 environment running before the RSTSetup resetting software, which brings the drive back into volume and data synchronization, can be run.

There is no tool to do this prior to Windows 10 installation attempts. Failure is due to the Optane and hard disk refusal to be altered until their volumes are synchronized.

Data is lost. That is bad. The inability to save it somehow is even worse.

Bernard Lambert – November 25, 2020

The Truth Is …..

Truth should be simple and lasting. Well, I can hope. I can listen. I can think about it. I can seek many sources of information. I can do everything in my power to gain insight into everything I need to survive. It gets complicated in a hurry.

My first concern about truth is time and timeliness. While we cannot get back a minute of time while in the pursuit of truth, we spend it lavishly. Some just wait for it. Some just chase it. All spend a considerable amount of time finding the truth. Learning of it late or when it is no longer relative allows the truth to disappear into the moras of lies in circulation.

My second concern about truth is simplicity. When the only paper document you get with a product or service is a legal agreement in thousands of words, we have successfully evaded the truth. The hate mongers on the Internet build sites just to peddle discord and are successful because of the ease of having such a large audience. None of them offer simple truth.

We have come to a time where civility has been stripped away from public behavior. So far as the individuals who are demonstrating and protesting are concerned, they have been civil. The bad actors amongst them have caused all of the damages. Obviously the truth is being seen by millions of eyes and each of us has a different opinion of what the truth is even then.

While we observe things this political season, let’s try to keep truth lasting and simple….somehow!

Bernard Lambert – September 7, 2020

The Angst

I just put a young man on a plane back to his hometown. Our meeting was four days earlier where I found him sleeping in the alley behind my home. My dog had barked all night because of his presence. I asked if he was all right. I also asked him to move on. Initially he did but he returned in the evening.

The next day in the morning he walked by in front of my house and I asked him about his circumstance. He had worked until the pandemic closed his work. He had played out all his string. No money… hadn’t eaten in days. He was in trouble.

I brought him in, fed him, and got him access to get cleaned up and a place to sleep. The next day we got clothes and a phone for him. His had been destroyed. All the email and apps hooked up ok.

His desire was to return home to the midwest where he was from. He knew from checking the Internet that a plane ticket was $149. He wanted to go right away. The bargain fares were days away. We plied the net and found a Friday flight.

On Friday , the two hours after dropping him off to get checked in, I got a voice mail from the young man saying he was getting on the flight home. His mom and dad will be happy.

I asked him what he had learned in his year away from home. He realized that the network of support you have around you is vital. He never thought he would get in the position he was in.

The vigor of youth meets the wisdom of experience.

Bernard Lambert August 29 2020

At a Bad Time ….

The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.

I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”

Covid-19 & Work From Home

For a three weeks we have been working from home. My wife and I are both doing this. We have a excellent garden, well stocked larders, freezers, and refrigerators. We both have a substantial amount of work on our horizons. We are both healthy. We wish that the shelter-in-place was not necessary. We wish others could do as well in light of the layoffs so many have experienced.

Our agreement on the issue of the perils of everyday life, especially the present day’s newest ones, is that we have always been so aware of what could go wrong, what we were able to overcome, and how in the end we survived, that we are very much less concerned for ourselves than most folks.

This does not mean we are not concerned for ourselves and for others. Our concern is for the people that have not ever worried about the perils surrounding them and how they remained oblivious to the danger. This current crisis is going to interfere with their life. How will they react? The greatest danger may be their awakening!

The 70’s Miniseries

I just finished watching the miniseries The Seventies produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.  They also did The Sixties.   It reminded me of what I grew up in and what went on around me.  I highly recommend these.

The presentations provoked thoughts that had remained dormant for these many years and renewed how my present life was formed.  I played in a band, I protested, I played sports in school, I went to concerts, I enjoyed all the youthful experiments in drugs, marijuana, sex, music, cars, motorcycles, and cohabitation.  Our ideals were dismissed roundly in the early years.  Many things have made it into the mainstream.  The real loss has been our youthful optimisim. 

While I remain optimistic about our lives in this world, I am convinced that there are large capable forces at work erasing and diminishing the hopes of the 60’s and 70’s.

Please comment on this subject.

 

BLL 2019-09-26

Core Competency…REALLY?

I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.

The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools. The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.

The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.

As I began the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.

Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent.

The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years. It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused. It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.

Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.

While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.

One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.

Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.

The corporation was grown by acquisition. It was not grown by innovation. Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves. Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.

When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organizations hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.

Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency? I know! Pass the buck.

What My Cover Letter & Resume Should Say

The resume is too long. Yes the resume is long because I have worked for decades and all of it is relevant.

When using the Internet for collecting job offers one places resumes and cover letters on myriad sites. The fond hope is that carefully crafted work fits the requirements of the individual looking for talented people.
Unfortunately in this day and age the process is layered with several people or web forms prior to getting to the actual individuals that can judge one’s abilities.
This brings to mind thoughts of what I would rather have said when wordsmithing the erudite cover letter and resume.
What follows is a mixture of venting and fun at the expense of the reviewer of my submitted products. It is in the form of their response followed by my response.

1.  The resume is too long. Yes the resume is long because I have worked for decades and all of it is relevant.

2.  An inventory of skills is just a list of “buzzwords”? No you idiot they are the actual hands-on devices, applications, and systems used in my experience.

3.  The form of the resume is not in the correct “person”.  May I point out that the form is not in the correct person’s hand?

4.  There are too many jobs in a short time frame.  Yes consulting work runs a few months to a year or so; seldom longer unless hired into the organization.

5.  There needs to be more narrative.  Wait a minute. You just complained it was too long.

6.  The content is too technical.  Duh! Who is reading this?

7.  I do not see any relevant experience.  Could you if I gave it to you in any other form? A documentary maybe?

8.  There are only successes shown in the resume.  What?

9.  You should have a professional write you a resume.  Would you recommend your secretary?

10.  You should have a professional write you a resume.  You were right…….and the massage was fantastic!