pleased precariously

I went to sleep last night in sort of a bad mood.. Happens occasionally when I’m bored before sleep. I have such a hard time falling asleep generally that when I’m bored and tired (but unable to fall asleep), I tend to find myself in a vaguely dissatisfied state. Like I want to do something but don’t know what. And unfortunately when it’s rather late there’s not enough hours to dig myself out of the bad mood (by doing something) before it’s really too late.

Woke up this morning at 4am and again at 7am with insanely negative dreams still in my head. Irrational, jealous thoughts. The subconscious is a cowardly part of the mind. It only kicks you when it thinks you can’t kick back. It never expects you to wake up during the barrage.

*le* it’s bad when you wake up in an emotion
*le* it really sets the day

indeed.

the big international evolution conference call this morning. 7am local time. the only thing that’s making it bearable is that i’m still in bed. having the laptop back is great.

in a few hours i’ll be driving charity over to the oakland fbi to pick up their stuff. resolution indeed.

so, it turns out that only one of the laptop batteries is dead (the laptop just won’t charge the one on the left until the one on the right is fully charged, and the right one was/is dead.)

dicksize had some serious issues with ad0. for some reason its partition table had been changed (either by the fbi’s incompetence - both disks on the primary ide channel were set to “master”, bios bugs, or both) to show a single partition of 19G, instead of a single partition of 80G. needless to say this sucked, since /home was at the end of the partition. yes the machine’s name is dicksize. don’t ask me to explain.

anyway, lots of hair pulling ensued. ran disklabel, stored off the old offsets/sizes, ran fdisk to blow away and recreate the (properly sized) partition, then ran disklabel again to re-enter all the offsets/sizes, ran bc to calculate the size of the /home partition, entered that.. prayed, wrote out the disklabel to ad0, and ran “mount /dev/ad0s1g /home”, and it worked. yay. my mp3s and email and lots of other things are still around.

the mac seems to have come up just fine. i’d be impressed if they could have taken it apart enough to gain access to the drive, honestly. the mac cubes simply were not meant to be user serviceable (i should know, having upgraded the cpu/graphics card some months back. that was an ordeal.)

couple more machines to test (the sunblade, the rack mount smp box, jason’s old canonware.com, the windows box).. fun fun fun.

then i get to start moving hardware around and ridding myself of some of the equipment i have now.

So the thing I’ve been excited about (for over a week, actually) is that I’ve known all my gear was coming home. I didn’t (until the day before yesterday) know that it was actually in the bay area, or when/where I could pick it up.

Leila and I drove over today to the Oakland FBI office and picked it all up. On the way over I started feeling really nervous… anxious. Bizarre feeling. I’d been excited all day, almost like the day before Christmas. But on the drive over it became a distinctly unpleasant feeling. Started feeling almost sick to my stomach. No idea why. Leila had to start back seat driving (which was handy, I almost rolled right through a red light.) I just didn’t feel together at all.

We took the elevator up to the 11th floor, walked through a metal detector and told the cute woman behind the thick plated glass that we were looking for special agent X. SA X came out and met us and took us across the hall, past a dolly carrying 3 of my machines and Peter’s solid state disk, and into a room that contained lots of boxes labeled “EVIDENCE.”

I was handed a list of all the hardware in the room, and we went over piece by piece, box by box. Everything on the list was there. I noted some damage to a couple of the cases, and was told how to file a claim (which I’ll do on Monday).

Lots of miscellaneous other things to note, now that I’m home. My 2 shark DNARD machines are not here (I’d completely spaced they’d taken them), the laptop’s hard drive wasn’t re-installed properly, so I had to take it out and reconnect it (I’m typing this post from the laptop now.) Also, neither of my laptop’s batteries appear to be charging. They were fully discharged 2 months ago. Is there some chance they’re dead forever? I really don’t want to shell out the money for two more batteries…

Anyway, I’m home, all the computers (well most) are home. Now I just have to remember what it was like to have all this stuff around. Strangely, I’m not completely happy. Of course there are other circumstances which are at work here, but even without them I think I’m not as happy as I should be. I mean, all my stuff is back. I guess I’d envisioned a more dramatic conclusion. Leila asked me if I’d found the whole thing anticlimactic, and to a certain extent I did. It was such a big deal to me, and was just another day at the office for them. I wanted them to be sorry. I wanted them to acknowledge the fact that they’d fucked up. I wanted them to acknowledge the discomfort they’d put me through. I guess that’s too much to ask.

Amusingly, SA X brought up the photographer. They said “she wanted to be here, but she couldn’t be” or something. I said “well, she knows where to find me.” “I doubt her fiance would approve” was the response. Too bad. I think it’s awesome she even heard about the post, though.

So, it’s over. There’s no more story here. You 10,000+ people a month can stop coming to look at the surreal story post. I was, and am, innocent of any wrong doing.

—

Some photos from today. The office earlier today (at around 1pm local time.):

Me outside 180 Grand Ave, Oakland (home to the FBI):

Me inside the building, just outside their office:

Half of my gear:

The other half:

Me going over the list with the SA assigned to help me out:

My gear back at home:

fini

I can barely stand it