My Fast Drive Gets Slower Then Faster

benchmark

I’m in love with my new computer. It’s really fast. That was the plan.

I spec’ed out all the components. That doesn’t mean I have a through understanding of all of them.

For instance, my boot and program drive is an SSD (solid-state drive). With no moving parts it’s light years faster than a conventional hard drive. That’s why the system boots in under 20 seconds!

The SSD comes with a companion program, Samsung Magician. I looked at it when the system was first installed, not since. It didn’t seem important. There was no indication the drive would change with age.

I fired it up today and was surprised to see my SSD had slowed in all categories! Random writes went from 70,159 I/O operations per second to 53,047 IOPS.

There are optimization routines listed within Magician. I tried those and installed a waiting firmware update to my drive.

Oh my!

Random write speeds are up over 100%! Other speeds are up too, though not as much.

Will I notice the difference? I’m not sure. Disk i/o is one factor of many, but it’s among the most important.

Woody Allen Instead of New York

My dad didn’t feel well last night. He’s fine now… in fact he was fine by the time I woke up. But not well last night was reason enough not to go to New York City. We’ll try again Monday.

That left us with a full day to fill and not much to fill it with. Helaine suggested going to the movies – specifically Scoop, the latest from Woody Allen.

That in and of itself is pretty amazing, because Helaine feels there’s something inherently wrong with patronizing an auteur&#185 who sleeps with his former stepdaughter. Point well taken. It’s tough not to find that skeevy.

At one point I was enough of a Woody Allen fan that when I saw Love and Death and didn’t enjoy it, I returned the next night to find out what was wrong with me!

This movie was a somewhat predictable, mainly enjoyable, little film shot in London and the English countryside. A de-glamorized Scarlett Johansson was wickedly sexy.

I had to ask ‘who he’ about Hugh Jackman. Give me an “L” for loser on that.

The story begins with Johansson’s trip to the stage – an audience member called to be magician’s assistant for The Great Splendini (Woody Allen). While ‘inside’ the magic trick she meets the freshly dead newspaper reporter Joe Strombel (Ian McShane).

He’s looking for a reporter, but Scarlett’s a journalism student – close enough. She ends up the recipient of a huge story of murder and money. That’s the scoop in Scoop.

If that was all there was it would have been a cute little movie.

What upset me (and I’m using upset as opposed to bothered, because upset conveys deeper angst) was Allen playing his ‘standard’ character, now an older man… oh hell…now an old man.

I remember him with Janet Margolin in Take the Money and Run and with Diane Keaton in nearly everything else. He was nerdy, dweeby, unattractive, but always got the girl. In this movie, the only way he gets the attention of the ingenue is by assuming the role of her father!

Maybe I’m more concerned for me than Woody? There’s a tendency to use the lives of others as our own benchmarks. Even though he’s a good 15 years older than me, I somehow saw him as a contemporary.

All this aside, it was an afternoon well spent for my wife, mother, father, me and the one other person in the theater for the 3:40 PM showing.

&#185 – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors (or, more rarely, producers or writers) who are considered to have a distinctive, recognizable vision, either because they repeatedly return to the same subject matter, or habitually address a particular psychological or moral theme, or employ a recurring style, or all of the above. In theory, an auteur’s films are identifiable regardless of their genre. The term was first applied in its cinematic sense in Fran

Magic On The Pacific Ocean

Aboard the Norwegian Star

No land in sight. We’re heading north, moving at 21 knots, on schedule for San Pedro/Los Angeles Thursday morning.

I wasn’t going to post tonight, but… well, you’ll see.

In the meantime, as long as I’m writing, I might as well say I was disappointed with my choice of photos from Cabo San Lucas. It’s a little difficult to change things without full time Internet access (I have been writing the blog offline and then uploading the entries and photos all at once). When I get home I will post more from Cabo, which was beautiful.

We had dinner this evening at one of the six theme restaurants on the ship. La Trattoria is the Italian restaurant. Unlike the others, this one has no surcharge. Unlike the others, this is in a converted buffet area.

The buffet lines are hidden behind curtains. The chairs are covered with dark slipcovers. The menu is traditional Italian. The sky was beautiful through the large windows.

I had a meat/cheese/spinach lasagna. As has been the case with nearly all the food, it was excellent. My dessert was an Italian cheesecake.

With dinner over, Helaine and Stef headed to the casino while I headed to our cabin to read… and nap. I played Hold’em the first few days, but I was very disappointed in the rake, quality of dealing and play… and especially disappointed that the Hold’em area was in a room squirreled away from the main casino.

While playing the second day, I was beaten on a large hand by someone who was playing a 9-5 offsuit. That’s a terrible hand, but he had every right to play it. His full house beat my full house. I took this as a sign and stopped playing.

Considering how much I enjoy Hold’em, you can understand my dismay – but it just wasn’t fun, and this bad beat solidified that.

OK – on to the reason for this entry. We decided to see a magic show tonight. The venue was the Spinnaker Lounge, where we saw Dave Heenan last night. This magician, Matt Fallon, was performing some close-up magic.

Let’s pause for a moment. I have a theory about magicians and those who are driven to be one. In high school these are not the most popular nor most athletic. My guess is, when David Copperfield was growing up, he was quite the dweeb. The same goes for most of the magicians I’ve known or seen.

Penn and Teller are dweebs – though they admit it and use it to their advantage. There is little pretense of being mystical bunny pullers.

I make no claim of being anything but a dweeb myself. There was no chance of my being name most popular while a teenager.

I sat in the second row with Helaine and Stef, snapping off photos as I obsessively do. The show was entertaining – the tricks puzzling.

Everything was going fine until he had three people pick cards and then chose someone from the audience to put him in a straitjacket.

That was me!

I tried to do my best to help a fellow performer. That meant I did as I was told and wasn’t too curious or anxious to bust his trick (Not that I could. I just didn’t try).

The trick’s culmination was his stripping off the straighjacket while revealing the three cards. The third was revealed when he pulled off the straitjacket and his shirt! The card was attached to his bare chest.

Thankfully, I was off the stage by then.