and things went downhill from there

Test for echo

2024-03-06T01:39:56Z

I'm going through the long process of getting things set up again after experiencing a significant computer issue.

Once I've confirmed that this has shown up on both journals, I'll follow up later with more details.

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Back in MY day...

2023-01-18T17:27:12Z

When I first move to the lower mainland back in the 80s, I hadn't a friend to my name in my new location. My folks had let me move back in with them to give me a chance to get back on my feet, and Dad took a copy of my resume in to the office to see if he could at least get me some summer work at the Railway. That summer job lasted 31+ years.

The point is that I had no friends, but around that time I bought my first Amiga, and later got my hands on a 1200 bps modem. I did what any 20-something person who was new to dial-up would do at the time, and got my hands on a blurry, multi-generational photocopy of local BBS numbers. I went through the list, crossing out entries where confused people would pick up the phone at the other end, and made note of the numbers that actually connected me to something interesting. "Interesting" as in not being like 90% of the BBSs back then that were running the same software, with essentially the same dead forums, and same one-player games.

One of the numbers that worked was for the BBS belonging to the local computer club. Yes, those were a thing. That one seemed to be a pretty active and friendly BBS, and I got to chatting with some of the members. I learned that one of the members of the club lived a couple of blocks over from me, and that we both had an impressive library of Star Trek novels. Naturally we arranged to meet in person so that we could compare titles and swap books. One thing led to another, and he ended up pulling me into joining the local computer club (where I subsequently became their Amiga software librarian - but that's another story).

The club was an eclectic mix of folks of all ages and OSs. While a lot of the activity in the club involved helping computer newbies to get past the initial learning stages, we would also bring in our personal computers to show off the geeky and nerdy things that we did in our spare time.

There was this one older guy in the club - probably a few years advanced from where I am now - who was one of our MS DOS users. He didn't have much use for the Macs and Amigas, but if you wanted to see a gleam in his eye, all you had to do was ask about his latest antics in Lotus 1.2.3. Honestly, I found it all to be kind of boring and quaint, but I indulged him with the usual long-suffering patience of somebody who regarded the other as something of a computer dinosaur.

I was working on a report for work yesterday that required historical, daily metrics that were built around the calendar date and not the reporting date. In a similar situation, I'd managed to derive a calendar from the report data itself, but it was not a particularly elegant solution. Yesterday, I managed to figure out the logic to recursively build a base calendar of arbitrary length without touching any of the source tables. I thought, "This is so cool, and so elegant. I need to show somebody!"

Then it occurred to me that I am, and will always be the only person who actually cares about this.

I've become that old guy who gets excited over Lotus 1.2.3. scripts.

In retrospect, the stuff he was doing actually was interesting, and I wish I'd been a bit more attentive and sympathetic back in the day.

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Computer Repair 101

2021-02-01T04:16:11Z

This is a follow-up to my post the other day where I mentioned that I was going to order some new hard drives to replace the one that was generating errors in my mirror. What I didn't show in that picture was that my boot drive was running at at about 95% capacity, and had been for the past couple of years. I would clean it up and get it down under 90%, but it would invariably start collecting clutter again.

On Saturday I put in a curb-side order for a new SSD boot drive, and two new data drives. I decided to replace the 256GB boot drive with a 1TB one, and the pair of 2TB data drives with a pair of 4TB drives because they were on sale to the point where they were practically giving them away.

Since I know that someone might ask, the SSD is a Samsung 860 EVO, and the mechanical drives are WD Blue.

My plan was to ... somehow clone the smaller boot drive over to the bigger one and then copy the data across from the failing RAID to one of the new drives, which I would let Windows mirror overnight.

Almost a full day later, I now know how to do it the next time, and can shave off oodles of time. I spent much of the day going through tutorials and installing various free tools before I finally found the combination that did what I needed.

The data drive should have been easy, but it ended taking almost as long to deal with as the boot drive. I mirrored over the data readily enough, but I couldn't get Windows to extend its partition to use the rest of the unallocated space on the disk. A couple of help sites recommended a free piece of partitioning software, but when I tried to get it to extend the partition, it got to the stage of expanding it and then did the equivalent of a shrug, and suggested that I should buck up for the pro version.

Frustrated, I bounced from help forum to help site before I finally found something useful on a Microsoft forum. The poster had the same problem as me, and the person responded asking them to confirm that it was set up as GPT and not MBR, since MBR would not let Windows 10 extend past 2GB. Sure enough, my drive was set up as MBR.

Google: Converting MBR to GPT in windows.
Google: Converting MBR to GPT in windows without losing data
Google: Converting MBR to GPT in windows without losing any data

After much digging, I discovered that one of the earlier tools I'd tested for cloning would also let me do that with a couple of mouse clicks. Sure enough, ten seconds later I had a GPT disk, and less than a minute later I had my data partition expanded to give me access to the full storage capacity.

I ended up having to clone my boot drive three times before I finally got it right. The first time I cloned it, the main partition and unallocated pace were not adjacent, so Windows would not let me extend the partition without converting the disk to a dynamic disk that would not boot.

After much research...

I cloned it again, but I told it to arrange the partitions in a different order so that the main partition and unused space were next to each other. I extended the partition and ... the computer refused to see it as a bootable drive.

After much more research...

I finally found a good article on pcmag.com that gave detailed instructions on how to clone your boot disk to a larger disk, and which two pieces of free software would do it for you.

Their process worked flawlessly on the first try, and when I swapped out the new SSD for the old one, my computer recognized it and booted into Windows. Not only do I have 77% free space on my boot drive now (versus 5%), but this new SSD is noticeably faster.

I just need to let my mirror rebuild overnight and I'm good to go for a few more years (until something else breaks).

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Uh oh

2021-01-30T17:41:54Z

Well, this is sub-optimal.

This is why I have mirrored drives. I've ordered a couple of replacements that I will pick up today or tomorrow. These are 10-year-old drives, and if one is failing, the other probably isn't that far behind. It could last another decade, or it could go next week. When atara's drives failed, they went in rapid succession and we almost lost all of her data. I managed to coax enough life out of one of them to salvage everything.

Since the price of storage has come down so much, I decided to expand a bit as well. Double the storage; double the catastrophe when it fails.

I've also ordered a new SSD for my boot drive. The one I am using is the same age as the hard disks, and it's only 256MB. It's been running at between 90% and 95% full for the past couple of years. I'm going to clone it over to a 1TB SSD, and once I get that booting up reliably, I'll work on backing up the data drives to their replacements.

It looks like my Sunday plans are laid out for me.

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On-line Shopping Frustration

2021-01-06T19:02:30Z

I didn't think my monitor was going to break out of its power-up cycle this morning. It blinked off and on for almost five minutes before it finally switched to an epilepsy-inducing flicker and settled down. Once it has come out of sleep and settled down it looks great, but it takes longer to fix itself each time it comes out of stand-by, and I doubt it's more than one or two sleep cycles from not recovering.

It's a shame, because other than that, it's been a good monitor. On the other hand, my Dell monitor is almost twice its age, and it's still going strong.

I ordered a replacement monitor for pick-up today. It's a bit bigger than my old one, but the pickings get a bit slim as the sizes get smaller. I have a bit of wiggle room (but only a bit) on my desktop to move things around some to make it fit.

Trying to find a monitor was an exercise in frustration, though. I wanted to order it from a smaller business to support them during the lock-down. Each time I found one that I liked, though, by the time I got the search narrowed down to my local store, I discovered that it was not available either on-line, or at that particular store. After a few failures, it started to feel like an e-commerce version of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

Me: Hi, I am interested in a monitor. I see you are offering this one that has fantastic reviews.
Store: Great choice! That's one of the best models we carry, and it's on sale too.
Me: Okay, I'd like to have this one.
Store: We're fresh out of those, sorry.
Me: How about this other one?
Store: Sold the last one this morning.
Me: Well, my third choice is...
Store: Gonna have to stop you right there.

Eventually I found the buried options to tell it that I wanted to narrow my searches to only one of their stores, and that I did not want to see any that were out of stock. The one I picked is as good as any of the others I was looking at, but it cost a little more than my first choices. Not horribly expensive, but a bit more than I'd planned to spend.

I mean, we can afford it, but that doesn't make me not a cheap bastard.

On a side note, when the smaller store hit me with its first "sorry, that's not in stock" on my initial choice, I searched for the monitor in Google and discovered that WalMart was selling it for less. On a whim, I selected it on their site, and they came back with, "Oh... that one. Yeah, it's sold out."

When I was out for a walk yesterday I noticed that there was a ring around the sun. I didn't expect it to show up well in the picture, but it came through better than I had anticipated.

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My monitor is on the blink.

2021-01-05T16:43:50Z

Literally.

Recently my Samsung monitor started experiencing problems when it comes out of sleep. The back light cycles on and off regularly when it first powers up, and when the back light goes out, the power light goes out with it.

The first time it did this, it only happened a few times, then it flickered badly for a number of seconds before returning to its normal behaviour. It started doing this on Friday, and each time it wakes from sleep it takes longer and longer to break out of the cycle. It blinked for about a minute and a half this morning before it finally resolved itself to flickering for another 20 seconds.

I suspect that it's probably just a capacitor going bad, but it hardly seems worth the cost to repair it when new monitors with similar specifications are selling for remarkably cheap these days.

I'll probably just go with 1920x1080 again since I've been happy with that resolution to date, and those are far and away the cheapest ones out there at the moment.

The problem is that once I peeled back the lid on monitors, it became apparent that I haven't been paying attention to the market since I built this system ten years ago

(In other news, my desktop computer is almost ten years old! Well, pushing nine anyway.)

Once I started researching monitors, I fell down a rabbit hole that I didn't know existed. Do I want to go with an IPS, TN or VA panel? Each have their pros and cons.

Am I a hardcore enough gamer to want G-Synch, or is FreeSync good enough for my needs? My video card has DVI out - does it even support these different synch modes? I'll need an adapter since virtually all monitors now use DisplayPort.

So many questions.

Meanwhile, my monitor is literally on the blink.

atara bought some very cool puzzles from a Kickstarter and they arrived just after Christmas. Here is an in-progress picture of it. I won't post the final picture because the real fun starts after the puzzle is done, and I don't want to spoil the surprise for anyone else who buys one of these.

In addition to being a fun puzzle with a very cool twist, there was a lot of thoughtful design that went into this as well. The pieces were stored in good-quality resealable bags. Aside from the box cover, there were also two more reference pictures inside so that as many as three people could work on it without fighting over the box for reference. This thing was built from the bottom up to be easily re-gifted after completion.

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Why I kinda stopped

2020-08-15T05:13:42Z

I read something on Reddit this evening that gave me a flashback to the time when I decided that I was no longer going to help build computer for anyone other than immediate friends and family members.

A co-worker came to me because he had a friend who was looking for a new computer, and he told her that he knew a guy who was good with computers.

He gave me a list of her requirements, and her desired budget. I spent a few hours researching parts, and managed to put together a pretty capable system that would fill all of her requirements with some headroom to spare, and still came in a bit under her budget. I printed off the parts list for him and he took it to her.

A couple of days later he was back with the list and a few questions - neither unexpected, nor unreasonable since this person was looking to lay out a fair bit of money for a new computer, and they wanted to feel comfortable with the choices I'd made for them. She preferred to go with a more expensive brand for one of the parts, but since it still came in under her budget, I swapped out the part on the list and sent him away again with the new manifest and cost estimate.

He came back a couple of days later because she was questioning my choice of an AMD processor rather than an Intel. She preferred Intel, and she was concerned that AMD might not be compatible with [some trivial bit of software that did not care what processor it ran on] I explained that there was a significant price difference, and even if I went with a slower Intel processor, the motherboard with that socket was also more expensive. I did up a modified list for him with the Intel solution - I'd had to make compromises on almost everything (HD, Memory, speed...). When I gave him the list, I assured him that nothing in her original requirements indicated that she would benefit from an Intel chip, or suffer for having an AMD processor.

A couple of days later he was back again. He said that she was still reluctant to go with AMD, and she didn't understand why she had to give up so much to get the Intel one, but if I could assure her that it was somehow better, was 100% compatible and would never cause any problems down the road...

I stopped him before he was finished and said, "No."

"You mean 'no' it won't cause any issues down the road?"

I replied, "No, I'm not going to build her computer. She 's going to blame the CPU for every problem she has going forward. If she installs a game that's not compatible with the sound card, it's the fault of the CPU. If her power supply smokes, it's the fault of the CPU. If her monitor dies..."

He reluctantly agreed that I was likely right, and he let her know that "something came up and he can't build this for you after all".

I feel like I dodged a technical support bullet.

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Please learn to computer a bit

2020-05-12T20:55:47Z

"Quick question for you: I have an old laptop with Windows 9.3 on it, and it won't let me upgrade to Windows 10. Probably because it is too old. If I buy a new laptop and an external hard disk, would I be able to install Windows 10 on it? I don't need it for games, so that's not an issue."

Does this Windows 9.3 laptop have a picture of the Microsoft Apple on its lid?

Seriously guys, I don't mind offering tech support and assistance with computer questions because that's what friends do, but I am begging you to meet me partway on this and learn at least a few computer basics.

I guess people who know something about cars would sympathize.

"Quick question: How do I replace the carburettor in my diesel Jetta?"

"My car stopped in the middle of the block and now it won't start. The whirr thing makes noise when I turn the other thing, but that's all."
Did you run out of gas?
"How would I be able to tell?"

Apologies to the folks following me on LJ if you see this one twice, but I was having some issues with the API on DW (they made a security change and I missed the announcement).

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Drive not found

2019-01-08T14:34:09Z

My first hint of a problem was when I tried to save an image to Rarity and Windows politely informed me that the drive did not exist. Yes, my various drives are named after ponies.

I noticed that while Explorer showed the drive and all of its folders, all the files were missing. This has happened before, and I was pretty sure that the drive would disappear entirely after a reboot. It did, but after the reboot I also noticed that my RAID mirror had fallen apart. Its component drives were listed under separate letters again, and one had more free space than the other.

The size difference was not especially large, so I don't think the RAID degraded that long ago. I suspect it happened when I installed the last Windows update. There's been some issues with some of the later updates, though this is the first time I've been affected -- assuming it was the update. It's possible the RAID has been broken for longer than that; I don't pay that much attention to my drive letters.

I took my computer apart, blew out the dust, checked all of the cords inside and moved the missing drive over to a different plug. I'm hoping that it was just a loose plug, and that the controller itself is not going because that never ends well for anyone. Once I had it all reassembled, I did some searching for how to non-destructively rebuilt a RAID in Windows 10. It's surprising how tricky it was to find the answer. Search after search would yield results like:

Q: How do I rebuild my RAID in Windows 10 if I have to replace one of the drives?
A: Windows 10 does not support RAID.
Q: What do you mean? I had a RAID before it degraded on me...

Q: How do I rebuild a RAID in Windows 10?
A: Select the Add Mirror... option.
Q: What if I can't select that because it's ghosted on the menu?
A: Windows 10 does not support RAID.

I knew it could be done because we'd had to do it on atara's machine back in the summer. I knew that it was just a matter of telling it to add a mirror, but I needed to know the steps that would make that option available. Eventually dismounting and remounting the drive, and a few other bits of sorcery opened up that option, and I started the long process of rebuilding the mirror.

It took hours. I started the process at around 16:00, and by the time I went to bed it had finally cracked 90% complete. When I got up this morning Pinkie Pie was properly mirrored again and ready to go back to work.

Other than a scare when I re-flashed my BIOS last year, this machine has been very reliable, and has been performing very well. As much as I envy atara for having a machine that can run circles around mine, I'm not feeling constrained enough by its performance to want to endure the headache of rebuilding it all again from scratch.

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Does not compute

2018-08-06T15:54:44Z

I've had "update LJ/DW" on my to-do list since the start of July, but I am both busy and lazy.

I think the last time I posted about it here, the plan was for me to retire on the first of September, so by that schedule I would have been in my pre-retirement vacation time by now.

After much wheedling, negotiating and shameless begging, my director convinced me to stay until the end of the year. On the one hand it would have been nice to start my retirement while it was still summer, but there is a benefit to completing a full year. Even if I don't (and I won't) get a decent bonus this year, the pay raise I got at the start will make this my highest-paid year with the company, and will have a direct impact on my pension (which is based on best-five years).

atara's computer blew up the day before her birthday. When I say it blew up, what I mean is that it went to sleep and never woke up. A mushroom cloud of blue smoke out the top would have been a more satisfying way for it to end, but I guess it decided it was time. That computer had a spotty start, and a bit of mid-life trouble as well, so I am surprised that it lasted for as many years as it did. When I was building it, I let some of the blue smoke out of the motherboard when I accidentally plugged her CPU cooler into one of the USB receptacles (seriously guys, why would you make the plugs the same?). Fortunately she had enough working USB plugs remaining for all external ports, and other than that one presumably no longer working, the machine seemed otherwise fine (other than smelling bad for the first week or so).

Her water pump malfunctioned a couple of weeks shy of its warranty period. Her machine had begun behaving erratically, and occasionally blue-screening for no reason. All of her fans were working, and the water cooler was clearly running, but the behaviour really gave the vibe of a CPU that was overheating. I had her install a program to display the core temperatures, and then I immediately shut off the computer because the CPU's temperature gauge was cranked up to 11. I removed the cooler, cleaned off all the old thermal grease (it looked fine to me) and reapplied a fresh layer. When we fired it back up, the water pump audibly fired up, and the computer overheated again the moment she tried to do anything that stressed it.

We took it in for repairs, and the tech immediately identified that the pump had gone bad based on the sound. Fortunately it still had a few days left on its warranty period, so he replaced it with the closest match they had in stock and it worked fine ever after.

I suspect that my questionable build job, and the overheating took their toll on the machine. The day before her birthday, it refused to wake up from sleep. The status number that the motherboard displayed suggested that it was a memory issue, but no amount of removing/replacing/rearranging the sticks had any effect. The computer simply got itself into a cycle of power-up-down-up-down, displaying the same error most of the time. A few on-line resources suggested that under powering the motherboard could cause that error as well, so we got a new power supply and tried that, but other than half-booting into Windows before blue-screening and lapsing back into the power up-down-up cycle, we saw no appreciable difference.

My suspicion is that the CPU went bad after enduring abuse over the years.

We hadn't really planned on getting atara anything fancy for her birthday, but in the end she got a new computer for her birthday. We drove down to our favourite computer repository, ordered all of the parts, and then paid them to assemble it for us.

And then because I am not one to leave well-enough alone, I decided that I maybe it was time to break my own computer.

The first thing I did was scavenge the memory out of atara's old computer. It won't work in her new one, but it was compatible with mine. It's not the same brand as the memory that I have, but it's the same style and clock speed, so I assumed it would probably work. It did. I figured that while I was doing that, I should probably check on a few other computer issues. I checked the state of all my drivers, removed a few pointless things from the auto-start list, and did some general clean-up. Finally I checked the version of my BIOS...

... and discovered that it was still running on the original version that came with the motherboard back in 2012. I checked with ASUS and discovered that there had been a few dozen revisions over the next couple of years to address a number of issues. I am always a bit nervous about flashing the BIOS, but I've never had it go wrong so I decided to play the odds. I downloaded the most recent stable version, copied it to a USB stick, booted up into the BIOS and followed the instructions from there.

They had repeated warnings as I went along. "Are you sure you want to do this?" "Are you REALLY sure you want to do this?" -- Yes, it actually did that. Naturally I said "Yes" to all prompts, and then things went south from there. It spent a couple of minutes copying up the new BIOS from the USB and then restarted.

That is, it tried to restart, but what it did was come up with a blank screen and sit there with no activity. No lights, no fans, no activity. I left it for a minute or two until I was pretty sure it was genuinely not responding and then I did a forced re-start. Again, it just sat there with no activity. I wondered if maybe it was having a problem with the default monitor, so I swapped plugs with no effect.

On a whim, I powered it down and then unplugged it from the power for a few seconds. When I plugged it back in, it started the power-up process and then finally displayed a message on the main monitor that it was now flashing the BIOS, and that I was strongly advised not to shut it off during that process. I guess a hard power cycle was what it had needed all along.

The fact that I am typing this from that computer lets you know that I got it working again. In fact, at the moment it's working like new. Maybe it's just my imagination, but between the added memory and the new BIOS, it seems more responsive than ever.

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"Do you smell something burning?"

2018-05-31T00:53:12Z

I was not doing anything unusual this evening - in this case sitting back holding a cat on my chest with my feet resting on top of my computer case while I watched a video.

About midway through the Video, atara began complaining that she smelled something burning, and after sniffing around the room, she declared that it smelled the strongest right by my computer. Just as she said that, the sound cut out on the video I was watching. It was pure coincidence, but to be safe, I put down the cat and leaned over to sniff by my computer. There was definitely a burning smell in the area of my tower. It smelled more like burning toast than burning components, but to be safe I decided to shut it down and have a look inside.

Everything seemed in order, though it was a little dusty inside. I last cleaned it about a year-and-a-half ago, so I figured it was probably due again anyway.

I am happy to report that my computer is much cleaner now, runs quieter again (the radiator for the water cooler was plugged up a bit with dust), and everything is working perfectly.

The smell, it turns out, was blowing in from outside. I've been meaning to clean it for awhile now, so somebody's neglect for their toast had a net positive effect.

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Frustration

2017-05-07T20:59:51Z

The basement file server has been driving me to drink lately. It was rock solid when I was running it under Windows 7, but when I upgraded it to 10 (to try and address some network issues between it and the upstairs machines), it became unreliable. The networking is rock solid now, but the basement machine has issues.

It would run for about a week at a time before locking up and requiring a power cycle. I did some clean-up and repair, and got it to the stage where it could go for about two weeks at a time, but unless it was restarted in that time, it would eventually die again.

One of the last fixes I did was to set up a reboot script to restart the machine every Sunday morning. Yesterday the machine was working fine, and this morning I had to trek down to the basement to restart it. When I checked the logs, I saw that it had not restarted this morning like it was supposed to. I checked the schedule I had set up, and I caught my mistake there - I had not given it sufficient permissions to run when nobody is logged into the machine. I changed the settings, and I'll look in on it again next Sunday.

The issue seems to be one of resource exhaustion. A small handful of services are slowly chewing up the system resources until it does not have enough left to create a login session. I did a bit more Googling this morning, and I discovered that the swUSB process I had assumed was a Windows process is actually part of the drivers for the RealTEK LAN device I'd had hooked up to the machine when we first set it up. I was using that device until sometime after the swap to Windows 10, and I am thinking its drivers did not like the update.

I replaced it with a better ASUS device awhile back, but I guess I neglected to uninstall the RealTEK drivers. A couple of sources I read mentioned that their driver had a serious memory leak, and since it is one of the culprits that always comes up when the system runs out of resources, it was an easy hit.

Another process that keeps coming up in the list of resource-hogs is SMSvcHost.exe. It is a legitimate service (I checked to make sure it hadn't been replaced by a Trojan), but when I poked around at what it does, it did not seem especially critical. I have disabled the service for now to see what kind of an impact that has, but so far I have not noticed any difference. If I start seeing errors and warnings in the system logs about it, I'll turn it back on.

On a completely unrelated note, while I was puttering around the house this morning, I got to mulling on old friends I had in the Lion King fandom community back in the day, and it occurred to me that I have lost touch with all but a few of them. Some of them were very talented writers, and we would often bounce our stories off each other for comments and critique. One writer was a giant in the community, whose fan fictions spawned a whole genre of fan fictions of their own. When I say "he", it was actually a collaborative team. This one writer did most of the work, but he often paired up with others in the fandom to produce the stories.

I was never a huge fan of his work, but I was also not his target audience. They were very popular with the 13-21 age group, in part because each of his stories was as much an emotional roller-coaster as it was a tale. While I admired his work, and never really begrudged him his popularity... well, ok. Maybe a bit, but who isn't a bit jealous of the popular kids now and then? Anyway, I always felt that his writing was top quality, but I also found it to be somewhat manipulative. He was a master of wresting emotion out of his readers.

Anyway, he started on a fairly ambitious writing project with a mutual friend, and as he went, he often sent me chapters to review. For some reason he respected my opinion. For the most part I did not have much feedback, other than pointing out areas where the prose became a bit too purple, or minor issues like confused attributions and the like.

Then there was the chapter.

He sent me several chapters to read through, and I dutifully read through them, making minor notes, suggesting small revisions, and rolling my eyes at obvious emotional tugs here and there. Then I got to the chapter where he excruciatingly killed off one of the main characters in a very long, emotional orgy of sadness. I could tell that he had poured a lot into this chapter, because it really stood out from the others he had written. He had obviously given it a lot of thought. It looked like the chapter he had been waiting to write.

The problem was that it did not fit. It seemed to have no place in the story other than to make the readers sad. Other than that character falling out of the story from that point forward, nothing changed. It did not inspire any action on any of the others in the story, nor did it even affect the overall plot. Everybody else in the story continued on as if nothing had happened, other than expressing their sadness that the character's passing once or twice in the next couple of chapters.

When I gave him feedback, I fear that I may have been a bit too ruthless. I told him that the chapter was wonderfully written, but that it was just an interlude of pointless pathos. I asked him to explain its purpose in the story, and pointed out that if the chapter did not exist, the story would not actually change at all. He offered up some justifications for the chapter, and I pulled out the passive-aggressive card and said, "Well, it's your story; include or exclude it as you choose. You asked for my opinion, and I gave it."

In the end, he removed the chapter, but I think it hurt him to do it. I do feel a bit bad about that in retrospect, since it didn't really hurt anything by being in there, and I can't help thinking that I overstepped a bit by calling him on it. He stopped sending me stories for feedback after that. I guess I can't really blame him.

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