Yesterday, I was wondering about Process in my early morning readings, today I’m looking at cause & consequences…

The magic number: 7.01 and how to get prepared for the worst…

Yesterday, I was wondering about Process in my early morning readings - in the flow I came to speak about Fischli & Weiss, 2 swiss artists who did the ‘How To Work Better’ a kind of process manifesto.
They also did a film most of you have certainly heard about: ‘Der Lauf Der Dinge’ (aka The Way Things Go). The video - which I loved so much since I first saw it in the Marc Bretillot’s course back in the days when I was in fine art in ESAD in Reims - is described as follow:

Film stills from Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987); on Youtube there’s a short extract and a link where to buy your own copy.

Inside a warehouse, a precarious structure 70-100 feet long was constructed from various items. If this is set in motion, a chain reaction ensues fire, water, gravity and chemistry determine the life-cycle of objects and things. So begins a story about cause and effect, mechanism and art, improbability and precision.

Well … yesterday, my beloved MacBook suddenly died. I mean it freezed, and then refused to boot, displaying a folder with a question mark. That seems to be a very well known issue with a certain type of Seagate hard drive with a firmware revision 7.01 - if you are the happy owner of a MacBook, I encourage you to check your serial numbers.

3 screenshots on how to retrieve your serial number. In the background a nice trick from lifehacker: Keep A Scratch Pad Of The Day, I am also a moleskine-geek which I think is a good way of envisionning vital data backup

Myself, I have been lucky enough to see the early reports about this Seagate harddrive issue and I had luckily time to backup the faulty drive. I nonetheless lost a few files and a few precious hours of rest, I also stressed a bit but I can’t help but think there‘s definitely some sort of zen to practice: learn to (better) let go and let’s things go the way things go… but as I deeply appreciate the precepts from the chinese tactician Sun Tzu (see KD01k The Art Of war), I also like to keep things ready for the worst: all I have to do now is to replace the dead and faulty seagate harddrive (there’s a PDF from Apple documenting the procedure to remove and replace a hard drive from a macbook - nothing too scary once you know how it used to be in the recent past) by a spare new Samsung, taken from a mini Porsche LaCie drive I bought in November (just in case) and re install everything back in its order.

KD01k - ‘The Art Of War’ the original text written in 3000 BC by Sun Tzu and his disciples is designed according to its own structure; a generative design principle is applied with a set of rules based on statistics and ponctuation.

* Marc Bretillot website Cullinaire Design et autres façons.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under electronest, generative, memory, offline, thinking loud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.