I've decided to try to lose weight -- a nearly impossible-to-lose amount of weight. And I've decided to be public and brutally honest about it.

Me at about 305 lb.

How I Got Here

I'm just a quarter inch under six feet tall, and when I reached my current height around age 20 I weighed 165 pounds, which is right smack in the middle of the mythical "ideal weight" charts.  If you were draw a line between that point and the 283 pounds I weighed on my last birthday, it would be equivalent of adding about the weight of a nickel (5 grams) every day.  If you've ever tried weighing yourself daily, you'll know that the readings often go up or down by hundred times that amount on successive days.

Of course the process wasn't quite as linear as that.  There were periods where I plateaued, others (usually after some kind of injury) where I suddenly put on five pounds or so that stayed on. But the point is that the underlying trend is tiny on day to day basis. So tiny as to be imperceptible. And it's very difficult to monitor a trend that that's too small to see, and if you can't monitor it it's nearly impossible to control it.

And in fact there wasn't much objective reason for me to try hard to control it. My blood pressure was generally OK to good.  My cholesterol was OK -- low LDL and sky high HDL.  The only red flag was the distribution of the fat I was putting on.  My limbs are quite lean; nearly all of the fat I put on is belly fat. That's important because the fat that accumulates around your organs, the so-called "visceral fat", has been implicated in a number of inflammation-related diseases including diabetes and dementia.  But aside from the location of the fat I was putting on I could have been the poster boy for "Health at Every Size."   Until December 27 of last year. 

Diabetes

I was driving home from Christmas dinner at my sister's house when suddenly my hands stopped working; it wasn't a cramp exactly but my fingers would not ungrasp the wheel.  The following day I went to the emergency room where I had a random blood glucose reading of 349 -- normal would be 100-120. They gave me a shot of insulin and immediately I felt better than I had in years.  Which is interesting because it shows how feeling "OK" isn't necessarily something you should put much stock in. "OK" can be what "lousy" feels like after you've got used to it.

Diabetes runs in my family so the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes was no surprise.  I went home with a prescription for metformin, a drug which prevents high blood sugar by inhibiting the body's conversion of stuff it has lying around (like lactic acid) into glucose.  Metformin is the mildest diabetic medication there is, and it's unique in that it cannot cause low blood sugar.  As long as you can manage your diabetes on metformin, you don't have to take onerous daily precautions to avoid dangerously low blood sugar.

This was an opportunity for me; despite my large size I've always been active.  Even being in my 50s and weighing nearly three hundred pounds I can get on a bike and ride thirty miles, or hike for four or five hours over rugged terrain.  My doctor says I'm "robust" for my age.  So I set out to manage my diabetes with an aggressive regime of exercise, and initially it paid off.   One of the most useful yardsticks for how well you're managing your diabetes is called "Hemoglobin A1C"; it's a measure of the cumulative effect of high blood sugar over the past several months.  When I visited the doctor in mid January I weighed 281 pounds (about 30 pounds under my maximum body weight ever) and had a super-high A1C of 10.5.  When I followed up three months later I still weighed 283 pounds, but my A1C at 5.8 was just a hair above normal.

I'd also joined the Y and found I could easily burn about a thousand calories an hour on an elliptical machine, but the real foundation of my diabetes control strategy was simply walking.  Whenever I walked for two hours or longer my blood sugar levels would drop back into the normal range -- low 100s or even under 100 -- and stay there for the rest of the day.  

Setback my Exercise Regime

Although it required a high level of commitment, it looked like I'd come up with an effective long-term strategy for managing my diabetes. Then I slipped on the ice crossing the street on one of my walks and injured my knee. 

That actually happened in February, a month and a half before my excellent April checkup. Despite hurting my knee I continued to burn 3000-4000 extra calories a week, but over the course of April my knee deteriorated fast. By the start of March walking more than a few steps had become painful and I could only walk with a cane. I had essentially become almost entirely sedentary.

This turned out to be almost like an experiment. I had super-high A1C (10.5) in January. In April after three months of intensive exercise my A1C was practically normal (5.8).  Then after three months mostly sedentary my A1C crept into the moderately high range (6.5). Surprisingly I'd also lost about seven pounds. Of course some of that could be muscle, but my experience in this period suggests what may be the problem with the idea of losing weight by exercising.  When I stopped exercising a lot of my appetite went away.  A big sandwich that a few months ago I'd have snarfed down without even tasting now looks like way too much for me to tackle now.

Why I've Decided to Lose Weight

Thanks to a combination of steroid injections and and physical therapy I can now walk for about 45 minutes before my knee starts sending warning signals.  And despite the inactivity imposed on me by my knee injury, my A1C remains well within the therapeutic target range for diabetic patients.  So being forced to be sedentary isn't exactly a health crisis.  The problem is that my knee limits many of the activities I enjoy.  I can't hike, or bike for very long and I can't kneel to paddle my canoe. Even if my knee get better, the writing is on the wall: my orthopedist tells me I have arthritis in both knees, and from the increased strain I'm feeling in my "good" knee I can tell I don't have a lot use left in either knee. At least not at the levels of stress they've been getting. And I've been having other inflammation-related health problems which are almost certainly related to central obesity (i.e., visceral fat).

I've decided that the only way I can continue to enjoy the things I used to enjoy is to lose weight.  A lot of weight.  Around least fifty pounds I'd say, although half-again that would be even better. The problem is that losing this much weight is statistically improbable, and keeping it off for more than a few months is nearly unheard of.  And, although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, there is no scientific evidence that diet and exercise can achieve sustainable weight loss. But I'm going to give it try anyway.

Right from the outset it's a virtual certainty that I'm going to fail.  I have certain advantages that most people attempting this don't have, but realistically my chances of success are something like 5-10%. But that's OK. One of the things I learned in my professional life is not to be afraid of failure. The real problems with failure are taking to long to acknowledge it, stubbornly refusing to learn from it, and being so afraid you get too timid to take risks.  And after all, what am I risking here? A couple of years of effort surely.  A chance that I might come out of this a little bit heavier.  

On the other hand even if I fail I may get a window of opportunity in which I can strengthen my knees and extend the time I can enjoy strenuous physical activity by several years.  One of the keys to being a "successful failure" is finding something useful you can take out of a project that doesn't meet its goals.

Why I'm Sharing This

I've also decided to be very public and open about this.  Normally I keep this sort of thing to myself because I'm an introvert. That doesn't mean I'm shy or socially awkward, it means I don't particularly enjoy being the center of attention.  But weight management is something a lot of people struggle with; it makes people feel like failures.  I, on the other hand, am not afraid of failure.  In this case not even a tiny bit. I don't think it'll mean I'm a bad or contemptible person.  

So although it's contrary to my usual inclination, I'm going to share my personal successes and failures. I intend to take one almighty hell of a whack at this thing, and if I fail I'll move on and take whatever useful I can from it.  I also intend to be brutally honest about what it's like to attempt this, in the hope that other people who are trying (and perhaps failing) can take some comfort in my experiences.

WBR: A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)

I thought I'd say a few things about David Linday's seminal 1920 sci fi/fantasy novel, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. This is a novel which immensely influential for many important 20th Century writers and critics. J.R.R. Tolkien was an admirer, and C.S. Lewis was clearly deeply influenced by it. Even literary critic Harold Bloom fell under its spell; his one attempt at writing his own novel was a sequel called A FLIGHT TO LUCIFER.

Here are the opening 13 lines (note -- A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is in the public domain):

On a March evening, at eight o'clock, Backhouse, the medium—a fast-rising star in the psychic world—was ushered into the study at Prolands, the Hampstead residence of Montague Faull. The room was illuminated only by the light of a blazing fire. The host, eying him with indolent curiosity, got up, and the usual conventional greetings were exchanged. Having indicated an easy chair before the fire to his guest, the South American merchant sank back again into his own. The electric light was switched on. Faull's prominent, clear-cut features, metallic-looking skin, and general air of bored impassiveness, did not seem greatly to impress the medium, who was accustomed to regard men from a special angle. Backhouse, on the contrary, was a novelty to the merchant. As he tranquilly studied him through half closed lids and the smoke of a cigar, he wondered how this little, thickset person with the pointed beard contrived to remain so fresh and sane in appearance, in view of the morbid nature of his occupation.

This opening gives an almost entirely misleading impression about what is to come. It sounds like the start of countless Victorian and Edwardian adventure stories, but this is nothing of the sort. Faull and Backhouse along with a number of other nicely-drawn characters from the first chapter simply disappear. The novel moves on to the enigmatic gentlemen Maskull and Nightspore, and then for the bulk of the novel just Maskull alone.

Looking at a manuscript opening like this I'd immediately pull out my red pen. It's inefficient to introduce the readers to characters in the opening when those characters are going to immediately disappear, especially "point of view" characters. And generally you want to let readers know the kind of story they're in for -- at least in genre fiction, where you generally take the reader by the hand and show him he's come to the right place. And there are other things you expect from a science fiction adventure too: a dramatic structure with a readily identifiable beginning middle and end; a protagonist with motivations and problems who deals with a series of rising complications and ultimately resolves them.

What you get in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is none of these things. It is not dramatic, it is epic, episodic and nightmarish. It's a long and difficult slog because so much of what carries you through a conventional, dramatically structured novel just isn't there. Chief among these are characterization and motivation. Maskull has no real reason to visit Arcturus other than a vague interest; once he gets there he goes from place to place, not because he has any reason to, but more in that he has no compelling reason NOT to. Maskull reminds me of Mersault in Albert Camus' THE STRANGER, who also does appalling things for no particular reason.

It's almost as if Lindsay sat down to write a commercial 19th C adventure yarn and ended up writing an avant garde novel. It's possible; first novels do have a way of getting away from their authors. A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS anticipates much of later 20th Century literature. Practically the entire Existentialist lexicon could be indexed to this book; it's chock full of absurdity, despair and rudderless anxiety. Even Maskull's confusing inconsistency could be put down to lack of what Existentialists call "authenticity". 

Sound like fun? Well, at the time the word of mouth must have been disastrously bad: it sold fewer than 600 of its original print run, and I'd bet the very few of the original purchasers made it all the way through. But if you don't give up, the balance between frustration and fascination gradually tips toward fascination. A mere decade after it's publication it took C.S. Lewis three years to locate a copy; but even though in his correspondence he's clearly aware of ARCTURUS's limitations, its impact upon Lewis's own fiction is almost hard to overstate.

Now a lot of fans of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS have written various keys to its enigmatic meanings, but the point of these writer's book reports isn't to discuss meaning, or even literary value; it's to look at lessons we can draw about *method*. But I don't think there's a lot of lessons to draw about method from this particular book. Its language is competently composed, but frankly I think that this book's virtues as a work of imagination are somewhat exaggerated by its admirers. Take the following:

The floor itself was like a magician's garden. Densely interwoven trees, shrubs, and parasitical climbers fought everywhere for possession of it. The forms were strange and grotesque, and each one seemed different; the colours of leaf, flower, sexual organs, and stem were equally peculiar—all the different combinations of the five primary colours of Tormance seemed to be represented, and the result, for Maskull was a sort of eye chaos.

At first this passage seems impressive, but if you really examine it you find it's only just that -- seemingly impressive. The "densely interwoven trees" etc. are fine as far as they go, but then Lindsay punts on the description. In so many words he's essentially telling us that the what Maskull is seeing is indescribable. I suppose a little of this is inevitable when describing an alien landscape, but I find that when this kind of handwaving is incessant it quickly becomes annoying.

This is not to say that the work lacks imagnation -- far from it. Imagination runs riot on every page, but mainly in the realm of ideas rather than sensation. In the chapter quoted above Lindsay gives us a character of a third gender:

He found himself incapable of grasping at first why the bodily peculiarities of this being should strike him as springing from sex, and not from race, and yet there was no doubt about the fact itself. Body, face, and eyes were absolutely neither male nor female, but something quite different. Just as one can distinguish a man from a woman at the first glance by some indefinable difference of expression and atmospheres altogether apart from the contour of the figure, so the stranger was separated in appearance from both.

See? It's the old handwaving trick again. You can't call this "unimaginative", but it strikes me as undisciplined; not fleshed-out as it could be.

So how did this clumsy and difficult text become the most influential underground speculative fiction novel ever? Where does the fascination come from? I think it's the experience of being in the hands of a totally uncompromising author.

Some bad writers like to think of themselves as uncompromising; they hide the fact they don't know how to engage readers by pretending they're not interested in catering to the unwashed masses. That's just craven, self-righteous posturing. But Lindsay is a different animal. He is sincerely obsessed with debunking anything you might believe lends your existence meaning or significance. This pig-headed skepticism, chapter after chapter, begins to take on the color of integrity. 

Which brings me to what I think is the lesson of this novel: the difference between the things that produce accessibility and the things that produce power in writing. 

I think we can lump much of what makes a piece of writing widely accessible under the heading of "technique". Imagine a writer of crude fan-fiction. At first what he writes is only interesting to fans of the franchise. As he gets better at prose style, plotting , structure and characterization, more people who can read his fan-fic without scorn. Eventually many can read his work with actual enjoyment.  His work becomes more accessible to the general reader, albeit starting from the opposite end of the spectrum that inaccessible highbrow literature does.

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS may be the most inaccessible published novel I've ever read. And although this opinion will offend fans of the novel, I think it's because the novel is crude. Which is not to say it's stupid or unimaginative. It's just that it's prose style is at best serviceable, and it lacks things like structure, plotting, and characterization that help readers through a long story.

On the other hands A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is immensely powerful. That's because the writer has something to say to practically every human being. Whether you're an ethical egoist, an altruist, a sensualist or a legalist, David Lindsay wants you to know you're just wrong, wrong, wrong. Even even if you insist on disagreeing with him, at least you have the pleasure of seeing him shoot holes in the opinions of other people you disagree with.

So power in writing, I think, comes from having something to say that's meaningful to readers -- at least some of them. A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is a book for perhaps one in a million readers, but I believe it will always find those readers.

Should *you* read A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS? I'd say its practical value to a science fiction author is debatable; but I definitely think it is a must-read for fantasy and even more so horror writers. That's not a guarantee you'll enjoy it, but it's worth studying the way Lindsay imbues the landscape and its inhabitants with immanent meaning (albeit only to debunk that meaning).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA

Title: A Voyage to Arcturus

Author: David Lindsay

Published: 1920

Pubisher: Methuen & Co. Ltd., London UK

Edition Reviewed: ISBN 978-1480258426

Word Count: 93,000

Writer's Book Report: John Scalzi's FUZZY NATION

ONE LINE SUMMARY REVIEW: *Fuzzy Nation* is a "reboot" of a classic 1962 sci-fi novel which competently re-engineers the story to modern standards of technology, storytelling, and political correctness but which falls short of the original's charm and emotional impact.

DETAILS:
I've never read anything before by John Scalzi, but given that he is the object of the Rabid Puppies hatred and Sad Puppies deep ambivalence, I thought I'd check out *Fuzzy Nation*, his "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's classic *Little Fuzzy*.

Why reboot a classic sci-fi novel? Well there's the commonplace problem of technology outstripping sci-fi for starters, particularly the original's lack of personal digital information and communication gadgets. In the original Jack Holloway consults books on microfilm, develops movies in a darkroom, and can't reach characters by videophone because they're away from their houses. This is all very anachronistic to a generation that grew up with databases, cell phones and personal computers.

There's also the issue of contemporary tastes in politics. The planet Zarathustra in the original was clearly based on South Africa of the early 20th Century. The names of some of the animals even sound slightly Dutch-ish (e.g. "Veldbeest"). The outcome of the original novel's dispute over the "sapience" of the Fuzzy species seems incomprehensible to modern political sensibilities. If the Fuzzies turn out to be people who were living on Zarathustra before humans came, most modern readers would assume that this means humans need to clear off the planet. But in the implicit politics of H. Beam Piper's universe humans can still run things and exploit the mineral and biological wealth of the planet, they just have to work *around* the natives, while they *run the natives' affairs for them*.

This is the politics of paternalism; of "white man's burden". That might not seem strange at all to a reader in the early 60s who had grown up on Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, but to a modern reader that attitude is almost inexplicable. So while "politics" may be a dirty word, it's not unreasonable to tweak the unexamined imperialist and paternalistic assumptions of the original in order to reach modern audiences.

So far so good, but the place where this re-imagining falls short is re-tooling the story for modern tastes in storytelling. The original novel's Jack Holloway was a larger-than-life archetype of frontier self-sufficiency, an upright and elderly but still-sharp prospector and sometime gun-slinger. The new Jack Holloway is a young and crooked lawyer eking out a living prospecting after being disbarred and alienating just about everyone he meets. Why re-imagine Holloway this way? Because conventional wisdom is that flawed and somewhat unlikable characters are more interesting. While this is fine as well as it goes, it's a bit simplistic because what really matters is what you do with the character.

Scalzi hits another writing-workshop bullet point by giving his picaresque Holloway greater agency in the plot outcome than Piper's Holloway has. In the original Jack Holloway plays a key role in initiating the events of the novel, but by the story's third act he is largely sidelined and the main action is resolved by deus ex machina -- a major no-no according to polite canons of literary taste.

So in outline form Scalzi's story looks like a major upgrade to the H. Beam Piper version. But fleshed out, it doesn't quite measure up to the classic. Why? Because while Scalzi is a fine writer, he's just not as good here as H. Beam Piper is. A story like this takes a tremendous amount of exposition; in Piper's version this imbues the setting with a kind of Golden Age wonder but in Scalzi's version it simply weighs down the narration and dialog.

What's more while Scalzi's version is unquestionably more competently plotted, there's a lot more to care about in Piper's version. Piper stocks his story with memorable and vivid characters where Scalzi's supporting cast is sufficient to move the story forward but forgettable. Piper's version is, underneath the charm, a serious sci-fi attempt to address the question of where "human" rights come from. In Scalzi's version this is merely a plot point.

And H. Beam Piper's version scores over the Scalzi version in this one respect: character arc. The classic H. Beam Piper protagonist is a self-sufficient, rugged individualist, but in many ways *Little Fuzzy* subverts this archetype. *Little Fuzzy* was conceived at a time Piper had moved to Paris, where he missed his friends and his marriage began to fall apart. *Little Fuzzy* is really about the the tension between self-sufficiency and loneliness.

So it misses the point the reconstruct *Little Fuzzy* to give Jack Holloway more agency in the fate of the Fuzzies, because it's not really about the Fuzzies. It's about a lonely old man who adopts a family and through them develops new friendships. That arc is what gives the *Little Fuzzy* its powerful emotional impact. Scalzi's Holloway starts out the story as as secretive, manipulative schemer and ends as a successful, secret, manipulative schemer. It's sufficiently entertaining, but not particularly moving.

*Fuzzy Nation* is a cute and entertaining book that is utterly inoffensive to standards of literary taste or politics -- standards that I generally endorse. There's nothing wrong with a book being adequate and inoffensive, but that's not what greatness is about. A great story is timeless. It's been over fifty years since the publication of *Little Fuzzy*, and despite being dated in several respects it still stands up. Will people still be reading *Fuzzy Nation* in 2070? I doubt it. They'll be reading *Little Fuzzy*.

A Fish Story

I finished a hot and strenuous garden project for my wife today, so I decided to reward myself by taking a late afternoon fishing trip.

I've recently noticed a pond on the map a few miles from my house. It's not well known because it is almost completely surrounded by private property; but there is small bit of water frontage on a busy road with a few parking spots. So I put the canoe on the cartop and when I arrive I'm in luck; it's a sunny Sunday afternoon, but there's only one other car there. I launch the canoe.

Since this is a just a few miles outside of Boston, I've brought my "urban fishing" tackle box, which is stocked with small "panfish" lures. City fishing isn't about catching trophy fish, it's about catching anything at all. So I tie on a tiny 1/16 oz "rooster tail" -- it basically looks like an allergy pill with a hula skirt. It also features an oval brass tag that spins around as you retrieve it. In my experience this is practically the only thing besides earthworms that catches anything in urban ponds.

I make my first cast about twenty-five feet downwind and along the shoreline, retrieving past the edge of a bank of weeds visible from the surface. I immediately get a strike. At first I don't believe it; having a fish strike on your very first cast of the day is  a once-in-a-blue moon event. But sure enough I reel in a pumpkinseed -- a kind of sunfish. That's no surprise; practically the only thing you get in these urban ponds is sunfish (bluegills and pumpkinseeds), yellow perch, and very rarely a smallmouth bass. The surprise is this is the biggest pumpkinseed I've ever caught. It's longer than my hand (why would I bring a tape measure here?), so it's over eight inches long. That makes it close to trophy weight. but it's late Sunday and I'd have to find an official weigh station that was open. Anyway I'm doing catch and release so I throw him back.

By the time I finish dealing with the pumpkinseed the wind has blown me to the north shore of the lake. I make my second cast and immediately get another strike, and this guy puts up one heck of a fight. I'm fishing with 4 lb test monofilament, so I have to set the reel's drag very, very low. It takes me a long time to land him. He's a juvenile largemouth, only eight or nine inches long, but spunky. Now I'm starting to think I should have brought the big lures -- this little guy is exactly the size the tiny rooster tail lure is meant to attract.

Now obviously I don't continue to get a strike on every cast, but every place I go in the 100 acre lake I catch fish. Mostly tons of black crappie. Some of them are quite big for crappies; a pound to a pound and a quarter I'd say. And all over the place I'm pulling one yellow perch out of the water after another. They're all on the small side, about 4-5", I think because they all get eaten while they're still minnows.

Before coming here I'd picked out a very fishy looking spot on the map. It was a place where a brook emptied into a bay which in turn opened by a narrow neck onto the main body of the pond. A spot like that is perfect for a predator to hang out and wait for dinner to pass by. But I don't even bother going there, and when I tell you why you'll think I'm crazy.

You see I love fishing, but I hate catching fish.

I like the setting -- out on the water where it's quiet. I like the time, usually in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is low, the sky bright and the breeze light. But most of all I like the process. I rig up my line, study the terrain, decide on a spot where I imagine a hungry fish may be lurking. Then I pick a target beyond that. I become the target. Plop! The satisfaction of a perfect cast.

Now I am the lure pretending to be something else. Help! I am a wounded minnow. Please don't dart out of the weeds and swallow me. Help! I'm a cicada who has dropped out of the tree onto the water. Please don't come to the surface and gobble me up.

And it's not that a perfect day fishing doesn't at some point involve catching something. Ideally I catch just enough to maintain the pretense that I'm not out here wasting my time. One fish is a good day. Two fish is a great day. But three fish is just another good day. Four fish and it's time to go home and cut my losses.

I just don't like the killing part. So I catch and release, killing only the fish I can't unhook cleanly. When I catch a fish that won't survive I immediately kill it and bleed it. But that's my least favorite part of fishing. Even catch and release can get fiddly when it doesn't go well. None of this catching business is as simple and satisfying as the fishing is.

So I find myself in the canoe becoming increasingly apathetic. Oh, something's nibbling on the lure. I'll just keep reeling in. If it wants the bloody thing let it do the work. Then I find myself casting and thinking, "God I hope nothing strikes." When I hear myself thinking that, I decide it's time to head home. I won't say this was a bad day; like they say a bad day fishing beats a good day working. But there was too much catching for my taste.

And now this pond has now ruined all the other ones around my house. Next time I spend a day not catching anything, it won't be because catching fish is hard, it'll be because I deliberately went somewhere I wouldn't catch anything. The pretense of purpose will be gone.

So I'll come back to this pond, but rigged for big fish. Very big fish. That will be perfect. I'll know the fish are there, but I'm just not catching them today. But someday I might.  In fact I think I'll go to the bait and tackle store tomorrow and see if they have a lure that looks like a puppy who's fallen into the water. I imagine working the lure: Help! I am a golden retriever pup who has fallen out of the boat.

Movie Review of THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

I saw the second HOBBIT movie last night and on the way out I heard a man tell his companion, "That's got to be the worst movie I've ever seen!" Now I think he must be reacting to the fact that this movie is only one third of the story, and ends abruptly on a somewhat awkward cliffhanger. THE HOBBIT 2 is certainly is well-made movie with an excellent cast (Martin Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch AND Stephen Fry), and absolutely top-drawer production values. It is brisk paced and unencumbered by exposition, the bane of many fantasy stories.

The place where it falls down is in the writing.

There's a reason that writers struggle with exposition. Exposition does so many important things in a novel. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but occasionally a caption helps you understand what you're looking at.

One of the advantages of film is that if actors are good we see many things intuitively without the need for elaborate exposition. As with the LotR movie THE HOBBIT 2 takes advantage of an excellent cast to bring minor characters to life. Unfortunately the one character the movie fails is Bilbo, and this is entirely the fault of the writers. They've reduced him to almost a secondary character.

THE HOBBIT is a deceptively simple book. Despite its literarily disreputable fantasy genre, THE HOBBIT is a finely crafted novel about Bilbo's personal journey from being a parochial prig to becoming a wise hero. Tolkien plays him off the secondary characters with considerable dexterity, but this sophistication is lost in a movie that's all about impressive but silly action set pieces.

Take Bilbo's interaction with Cumberbatch's motion-captured Smaug. The writers get Smaug's character right, and the movements and presence of the dragon are awe-inspiring. Yet somehow this scene falls short. In the book the threat of the dragon isn't merely physical. Smaug *tempts* Bilbo. That gives the book scene a whiff of horror which is missing from the movie, and this is entirely the fault of the writers, who don't seem to care much about what's going through Bilbo's mind.

The most controversial element in this film is the addition of the non-canonical chracter Tauriel. She is in the movie to provide a corner for a love triangle with Legolas and Kili, of all people. This didn't bother me. Tolkien had a deeply romantic streak in him that didn't make it into print in his lifetime. He was a man with his own personal mythology, and central to that mythology is the love story of the mortal Beren and the elf-maid Luthien. The love of a mortal for elven-kind is one of those crypto-catholic motifs that lurk in the background of Tolkien's works; it's all about the love between the flesh and spirit. The non-canonical scenes between Tauriel and Kili might well be the most Tolkienian aspect of this movie.

The weak leg of the triangle is Legolas, who as conceived of by the writers is little more than a pretty killing machine. There is at once too much of Legolas in this movie, and at the same time not enough. A movie *about* the adventures of Legolas is an intriguing idea. A movie *almost* about Legolas is not.

I think Christopher Orr from The Atlantic nailed this movie in his review when he called it a work of fan-fiction. But I don't take the position that fan fiction is somehow contemptible. Tolkien created a new mythology. For a mythology to live other people must embroider it, even add to it. Orr has it precisely backward. The problem with the movie's addition to Tolkien's canon isn't that this they are fan-fiction, but that they are commerical fan fiction. Tolkien's cultural promise won't be fulfilled until his work is in the public domain, if that ever happens.

THE HOBBIT 2 is not a bad movie, but the writers don't have enough confidence in Bilbo to let him carry the story. THE HOBBIT doesn't get much respect from LORD OF THE RINGS fans, and it is evident in their treatment of the source material that the writers don't love THE HOBBIT the way they adore LORD OF THE RINGS. They're less interested in telling the story of THE HOBBIT than they are extending LORD OF THE RINGS.

That's too bad, because THE HOBBIT is a very good novel in its own right and deserves the same loving treatment.

Writer's Book Report: TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis

Anyone who has seen either the 1969 John Wayne or the 2010 Coen Brothers' movie adaptation knows the essentials of TRUE GRIT's plot. 14 year-old Mattie Ross's father visits Fort Smith Arkansas for some horse trading, and is shot there by Tom Chaney, one of his hired men. Mattie herself goes to Fort Smith to collect the body and settle her father's accounts. For Mattie, this involves hiring Rooster Cogburn, a drunken, trigger-happy US Marshall as a bounty hunter. She wants him to cross over into Indian Territory, track Chaney down and bring him to justice. And to Cogburn's surprise and irritation, headstrong Mattie follows him into Indian Territory "to see the deed done" herself.

Here are the first thirteen or so lines of the novel:

---

PEOPLE DO not give it credence that a fourteen year-old girl could leave home and go off in wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces he carried in his trouser band.

Here is what happened. We had clear title to 480 acres of good bottom land on the south bank of the Arkansas river not far from Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas. Tom Chaney was a tenant but working for hire, not shares. He turned up one day hungry and riding a gray horse that had a filthy blanket on its back and a rope halter instead of a bridle.

---

Right away we see one of the defining strengths of this book: its observant, eccentric, forceful narrator. Many have noted that the book is narrated by a fourteen year-old girl, but I believe this is incorrect. The narrator is over forty years old and referring back to events in her youth. She has a lot in common with her younger self though.

Portis gets right to work on establishing the narrator's voice. Notice "do not" and "did not". One of the remarkable things about this book is the near total lack of contractions. This is one of Mattie's quirks, and it even bleeds over into her recollection of dialog -- a subtle touch I thought. Mattie is judgmental. Right in the first sentence she is telling us her low opinion of the public's ability to see the truth.

Mattie's also a sharp observer, but in a particular sort of way. She tells a story like she's testifying in a civil trial, obstinately slipping her opinions into the hard narrative facts. Yet Mattie doesn't tell us how she felt about her father being murdered -- her actions will make that clear enough. She does tell us her father was "robbed" and goes on to inventory the items stolen: his life, his horse, $150 "cash money" and two California gold pieces. This after he had been kind to Chaney, given him a home which, admittedly, was an old cotton house but "had a good roof". Note also the inflated way she lists the items in the inventory, using conjunctions rather than commas.

This is quite a skillful approach to characterization. Portis doesn't milk the situation for bathos; we're already inclined to sympathize with a 14 year-old girl whose father has been murdered. Instead, he takes the cover of our sympathy to paint a girl who is not entirely likable. Mattie is a bloodthirsty, bible-thumping pill -- a pious girl, yes, but one whose Christianity makes up for what it lacks in forgiveness and cheek-turning with a double-helping of retribution and sharp dealing.

One of the best ways to paint a character is to present him early on with a choice. Portis does this by having the sheriff offer Mattie a choice of who the "best" US Marshall would be. William Waters is the best tracker, a half-Comanche with an uncanny ability to "cut for sign". Rooster Cogburn is the meanest, a pitiless, fearless man who drinks too much. But the best in the sheriff's opinion is L.T. Quinn, a fair-minded man who never plants evidence, and is a lay preacher to boot. "Where can I find this Rooster?" is Mattie's deadpan response.

This bloody-mindedness is the secret of her appeal. She knows what she wants and how she intends to get it. Mattie steps into the story and takes charge, and from the moment she gets on the train to Fort Smith she is a force to be reckoned with. I wish more authors would learn that lesson. Too many manuscripts try to gain our sympathy for the protagonist by having bad things happen to him in the first chapter. Then they follow with the obvious, logical reaction: the protagonist feels bad, sometimes for pages on end. I don't like to overgeneralize, so if you can make that work, more power to you, but don't ignore the other possibility, of having the protagonist take forceful action. The combination of misfortune and competent reaction more readily produces sympathy than misfortune with passive suffering.

One more thing to take note of here is subtle dialect that slips into Mattie's highly "correct" narration. Her father is "shot down" and robbed of "cash money". Later we'll see lots of use of regional dialect both in dialog's grammar (excepting contractions) and in words (skim milk is "bluejohn").

Another interesting thing Portis does is with backstory. There's almost no backstory in the opening -- unless you count Mattie's recounting of her father's death, which she did not witness and therefore tells us about rather than shows. Portis presents the characters to us and puts them to work fully made. Then, when Rooster and Mattie are deep in Indian territory, we get a surprising detour into Rooster's backstory.

Rooster's background is unsavory. During the Civil War he was one of Quantrill's Raiders , a vigilante group which perpetrated atrocities against Union-sympathizing civilians. After the war he robbed a US army payroll. Later he robs a high interest bank in Nevada, which ironically leads to him being hired as a US Marshall. Rooster sees distinctions in his behavior which justify it. The high interest bank is practically a criminal itself -- it should be a criminal, therefore robbing it isn't robbing an honest citizen. The army payroll? Well, that's Yankee money.

One thing that must be said is that it's a lot easier to get through backstory introduced late. We're already committed to the story, and presumably interested in where the characters came from. But still, it slows down the story, and we don't need it to follow the action, so why put it in? I think this is a case of Portis spending attention span to achieve something else. Tom Chaney is a depraved man who kills for no good reason. Ned Pepper, the outlaw Chaney throws in with, kills when it is to his advantage. Rooster Cogburn kills when it is to his advantage and he doesn't consider the victim respectable. Mattie is out to kill for revenge, although she calls it "justice".

Portis places each of these characters along a continuum, and each is marked by violence -- literally so. Chaney has a powder burn on his face. Ned has a mutilated lip from being shot in the face. Rooster has a dead eye. Mattie will, by and by, receive her own mark of violence. After he climactic confrontation, she is attacked by a snake (note the allusion in a Bible reference-laced novel) in a pit (entrance to the underworld?). It's sly and deft bit of symbolism that you're free to ignore if you want to take the story as a simple adventure. It manages this is a relatively short manuscript length, I estimate about 70K words.

I think what makes this story such a favorite of writers is how it works on more than one level; as a straightforward adventure, as a ironic, even cynical satire, and as a mythic story of retribution and loss of innocence (which the hard-headed young Mattie shows flashes of). That's how two movies can be made from such a short book that are so different from each other, yet both are unusually true to the book.  The '69 preserves more of the book's scenes but gives the story a more upbeat ending.  The Coen brothers version adds some macabre scenes, streamlines others, but restores Portis' ironic and bittersweet ending.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

TITLE:  True Grit
AUTHOR: Charles Portis
PUBLICATION DATE: 1968
EDITION REVIEWED: Kindle Ebook, ISBN:1408814005, Aug 28, 2007 Overlook Press

OpenSUSE 11.1/Vista/Ubuntu Part 1: Choosing and Installing OpenSUSE

I've decided to write about my usage of OpenSUSE and Vista on my new machine. In this post I'll discuss choosing and installing OpenSUSE.

Introduction: I Want 64 Bits

When I got my new dual core, 2.53 GHz laptop with 4GB of RAM, it came with a 32 bit operating system: Vista Home Premium 32 bit.

Now nearly nobody really needs a 64 bit operating system these days, not yet. But since I need simultaneous access to multiple operating systems, short of carrying more than one notebook around, the simplest answer is to use virtual machines. Modern operating systems are RAM hungry, so to run these multiple virtual machines, I plan on bringing the RAM up to 8GB as soon as it becomes less than insanely expensive. For now 4GB of RAM will be enough.

Now I should note here that the copy of Vista as installed on this machine dutifully reports all 4GB of RAM, which normally 32 bit Vista does not. 32 bit Vista normally can't use all 4GB of RAM because it is using some of that address space for other things. I was surprised to see all 4GB available, and double checking I confirmed that it was, indeed 32 bit Vista. It must be the case that Vista has been configured with PAE (Processor Address Extension) enabled. This extends the virtual address space, leaving room in the address space for all the physical RAM and Vista's other memory address uses. So I have plenty of RAM to run three or four copies of Windows XP on virtual machines if I want to, and performance isn't bad.

Still, I expect that virtual machine performance would be better under a 64 bit operating system rather than a 32 bit one and I expect to upgrade to more RAM later so I can allocate enough memory to run larger virtual machines. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't provide an 32 to 64 bit upgrades for users with 32 bit Vista that comes with the machine. To find out whether 64 bit makes a difference, I'd have to shell out for a brand new license. Rather than do that, I decided to install 64 bit Linux. But which one?

Choosing OpenSUSE over Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu as my main operating system for the past several years. Before that I'd used Debian (which I'd downloaded over a modem in 1996), than SUSE, and after that Mandrake (now Mandriva). I'd been a happy KDE user before switching to Ubuntu; there are still some KDE features I missed, but after a couple of years I'm pretty satisfied with Gnome.

Given this, it was logical for me to go for Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit, however I ran into a problem with the installer: it showed only a white screen after booting. Using the Alt-F2 keystroke, I brought up a shell window and saw that Ubiquity, the Ubuntu installer, was running. A little Googling showed that others trying to install 8.10 on recent hardware had the same issue. One of the answers was to give the installer boot argument "vga=771", which is hexadecimal 0x303. To make a long story short, this is supposed to tell the kernel that the display is 800x600 with 256 colors. Unfortunately, this didn't work.

Now I am generally happy with Ubuntu, but there are certain things about it that have been thorns in my side over the years. One is that every time there is a kernel update, it seems to break some hardware I use. Oddly enough, the stock Debian kernels seem to be OK most of the time. So I wasn't looking forward to solving this one. Perhaps there was a problem in Ubuntu's 64 bit kernel.

So I decided to research who had successfully used Linux on my laptop model, the Asus F8VA-C1. It turns out that OpenSUSE is reported to work completely with this hardware. I'd been happy with SUSE before it became part of one of the Evil Empire's satellites, so I decided to give OpenSUSE 11.1 a whirl; in the meantime I'd get a chance to look at developments in KDE.

Installing OpenSUSE

I personally hate distro reviews that focus on installation, which is the least important aspect of an operating system... provided it works. However there were some noteworthy occurances in installing OpenSUSE 11.1.

I opted for the net install of OpenSUSE, rather than downloading the full DVD, figuring I wanted to install a minimal system. SUSE's install screen is a beautiful, emerald green, not that it matters. The installation process, while tarted up in all kinds of GUI makeup, is in function and spirit not far removed from the ancient Red Hat text based installers of the late early 2000s.

The net install is probably a mistake, unless you have your own repository to install from. On the plus side, the display on the laptop was being driving correctly, and the wifi card was dectected and configured flawlessly. The download speed was extremely erratic. Sometimes a seven megabyte package would download in under a minute, then a 100K package would take two or three minutes. Then the downloads stopped entirely, and (using the Alt-F1 key) I got a shell console and figured out that the wireless card had somehow become unconfigured. Bizarre. I manually restarted wpa_supplicant and things resumed at their snail's pace. So netinstall is not for beginners.

Finally, the installation process simply halted. The net install runs like this: download a package, install the package; download another package, install that package; repeat for 2000+ packages in a basic installation. For some reason, after it downloaded grub (the boot loader that starts the operating system at power up), it installed it, hanging at "100%".

Bugger this. It'd taken about four hours to reach this point, and I wasn't going to spend another four hours to get to the same impasse. Instead I downloaded the DVD installation. After going through the same preliminaries, I was surprised to find that the DVD install took just as long; it was downloading the packages over the network. Apparently I'd missed an option about whether to use the local copies or to download, and it chose to download by default.

In any case, it was late at night, after spending hours on the net install, so I decided to let the net install run all night. If the wifi didn't turn off mysteriously, it should be done in the morning. In the morning, I discovered that the installation process was hung.... once again on grub, the boot loader. Switching to a command console and running "top", the process that was using the most CPU was, indeed "grub". Odd, that the installer would run grub at this point. Every Linux installer I'd ever used set up booting at the very end. It makes sense, especially if you're dual booting. Why screw up booting over a half installed OS? So I simply killed the grub process, and the installation continued.

WHen it finally finished, I rebooted with trepidation. Would interrupting the grub installation make the system unbootable? Nope. Everything starts up fine. After all the time it took, I'd have been seriously peeved if it didn't.

I now had a (more or less) functional copy of OpenSUSE 11.1.

Conclusions, Part 1

Linux reviews usually overemphasize the installation process. First of all, it's a very small part of the user experience. Also, getting Linux onto the hard disk and booted was never all that difficult, even in back in 1996. What was hard was getting the X window GUI to work, and getting the sound card working with a kernel. Those were real headaches, but fortunately these things have been painless for many years now. You might not get 3D acceleration working on every video card, but most people don't need it.

Still, when an installer simply doesn't work, that's an important detail.

Hardware support is both the great strength and weakness of Linux. If you have an old piece of hardware lying around, say an old USB wifi adapter, chances are you can plug it into a Linux box and it will work. If it was designed to work on a PC, you can usually use it on Mac hardware running Linux. Device manufacturers don't support Linux, so Linux developers build drivers that last.

On the other hand new hardware presents a problem to the Linux user. Manufacturers don't bother creating Linux drivers, so often you'll have to wait until somebody with the skills figures out how to get it working. Still most of the time, even on newly purchased systems, Linux installation is straightforward. This particular laptop, however, is the exception.

My laptop's hard ware, while relatively new, is far from exotic. It has the Intel PM45 chipset, which is fairly standard on high end notebooks these days. The PM45 chipset is pretty much what you want to have if you really want to run Vista reasonably well (more on this in upcoming installments). The F8VA has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics adapter. Basic 2D operation should work (actually 3D seems to work fine under OpenSUSE).

Still, the Ubuntu installer issues are pretty much what you expect for hardware that has been out for less than a year; it's to OpenSUSE's credit that it handles the hardware more or less perfectly. What is a real concern is that OpenSUSE's installer hangs.

Most people, even those accustomed to installing Linux, would not have got OpenSUSE installed, and as it was it took an unconscionable amount of time. I don't ask that an installer be beautiful; it just has to work. It has never been that difficult to get Linux running, so long as the installation program does what it is supposed to, and OpenSUSE's does not.

It makes me wonder about the priorities and overall quality of the distribution, that the installer should look good, but not do the job. It turns out that this is not entirely limited to OpenSUSE's installer. OpenSUSE 11.1 is quite admirable in certain respects, especially it's visual polish which is on par with any other modern operating system. It has a number of serious shortcomings that lead me to think that it wasn't very well tested before release.

Next: OpenSUSE 11.1 and KDE 4

Unbricking an ASUS F8VA after Changing BIOS Settings

INTRODUCTION
Recently I acquired an ASUS F8VA Laptop with Vista Home Premium on it. I'll be reviewing Linux and Vista on this device, but first I'm going to note it is possible to brick the thing with BIOS settings, which I promptly did. I'll post directions for getting out of that mess first, in case any other people encounter similar problems.

My plan was to set aside the Vista disk and buy a new disk to run 64 bit Ubuntu. For some reason this laptop comes with only 32 bit Vista, and I plan to run very large virtual machines on it. As soon as 8GB of RAM becomes less the $200, I'm installing it. In the meantime I started to poke around in the BIOS as is my usual custom. I came across this innocent sounding entry: "Intel TXT(LT) [Disabled]". The help text in this machine's BIOS are really utterly useless; typically the text will be something like "Choose enable to use Intel TXT(LT) feature." No explanation of what this might be or whether it's a good or bad idea. Googling brought up this explanation:

Intel Trusted Execution Technology for safer computing, formerly code named LaGrande Technology, is a versatile set of hardware extensions to Intel® processors and chipsets that enhance the digital office platform with security capabilities such as measured launch and protected execution. Intel Trusted Execution Technology provides hardware-based mechanisms that help protect against software-based attacks and protects the confidentiality and integrity of data stored or created on the client PC. It does this by enabling an environment where applications can run within their own space, protected from all other software on the system. These capabilities provide the protection mechanisms, rooted in hardware, that are necessary to provide trust in the application's execution environment. In turn, this can help to protect vital data and processes from being compromised by malicious software running on the platform.

OK, that sounds interesting. It sounds like a kind of hardware based choot jail. This laptop has a recent processor and the new Intel PM45 chipset. Actually, the hardware on this system is so new it's a bit of chore getting Linux running. What would Vista make of this being enabled? If Vista wouldn't boot, I could just F2 back to BIOS setup, right?

Wrong. This feature requires a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip to work properly, and if it's not there then the system will not only not boot, it won't let you get back to the BIOS settings to turn that pesky feature off. That wouldn't be exactly secure, would it? Curiously, you can boot ASUS's Splashtop environment, even though you aren't allowed into BIOS settings and can't boot the OS. I'll get back to that at the moment, but for now I'll get right to the unbricking process.

STRATEGY
The aim of this procedure is to clear the BIOS settings by removing the motherboard battery for a few minutes. This battery provides the tiny amount of power needed to maintain the BIOS settings and to run the motherboard clock while the system is turned off. It is a large button or watch style battery, typically a CR2032, and usually lasts for many years before it needs replacing. It's also usually fairly easy to access. Usually. Not here. The battery lies between the DVD drive and the video card. You're going to have to disassemble the laptop to get at it.


TOOLS
You will need a small phillips head screwdriver. You might be able to use a jeweler's screwdriver but a precision screwdriver slightly larger would be ideal. You will need something like a small common or flathead screwdriver to release the keyboard. Then you'll need something to act like a pair of tweezers (tweezers are ideal, but the swiss army type are too short) or alternatively a very thin, sharp thing to pry with, like an old fashioned razorblade or (if you work on Macs) a really thin putty knife.

CAUTIONS
This procedure will void your warranty. It will also almost certainly cause a small amount of cosmetic damage to your laptop, unless you are experienced, careful, and have the appropriate tools and workspace. I chose to do this because I don't care how the laptop looks and can't be bothered waiting weeks for an RMA replacement.

STEPS
(0) Prepare a work area. A large towel on the table will protect your laptop case, and provide a contrasting color to make finding those tiny screws easier.

(1) Remove the power sources from the machine. Unplug the power adapter, then turn the machine over and remove the battery. If you have trouble figuring out how to remove your battery, you should stop here!

(2) Remove the DVD drive. It is secured with two screws, one located on the bottom of the machine roughly an inch behind the DVD eject button. The other is further towards the centerline of the machine near some vent holes. I find laying out the screws on the table in the same physical relationship they have on the laptop makes reassembly faster. Pull the drive out and set it aside.

(3) Remove the hard disk. The cover is secured by three screws. Set aside the cover in your screw layout with the screws in the holes. Once the cover has been removed, the hard disk can be extracted by pulling it away from the connector, then up.

At this point let me note that I didn't completely disasemble my laptop, because doing so would require removing the strip that contains the buttons abovethe keyboard. This would probably be neater and easier, but I didn't have anything handy that woudl do it without leaving some really nasty dings in the plastic. So I opted to get the laptop apart enough that I could reach the battery with a pair of tweezers from the video card side. For that reason we'll remove the video card cover.

(4) Locate and remove the video card cover. It's a large cover located adjacent to the power adapter plug, and has your Vista sticker on it. It's held on by three or so small screws. Remove the cover, put the screws into the holes for safekeepign, and set it aside in your screw layout area.

(5) Remove the screws that would have been visible before you started removing covers and set them aside, including one that secures a little right angle cover along the rear next to the modem port. Set them and the right angle cover aside in your layout area.

(6) Remove the screw next to the wireless card, which was underneath the hard disk cover. The wireless card has black and white antenna wires attached to it. You can see that the screw next to it secures the plastic back to something below. It's been a few days, but I don't think it's necessary to remove the wireless card itself. If you do, you'll have to remember to put it back and the antenna wires; the gold connectors on the end just push on and pull off.

(7) Remove the two screws in the rear of the machine.

(8) Turn the machine over.

(9) Free the keyboard. If you look at the space above the top row of keys, you'll see four black plastic clips. They work just like the bolt attached to a doorknob; they are spring backed with a trianglular cross section, which means the pop put of the way when the keyboard is pressed down on them, but won't allow the keyboard to be pried up. Using your small flat screwdriver, push the rightmost clip back, and insert a swiss army knifeblade or similar to the right of the clip. Use the blade to gently pry up the keyboard so the top edge clears the rightmost clip.

Keeping the knife in place, push back the second clip from the right and pry up so the keyboard clears that. Repeat until the keyboard clears all four clips.

(10) Remove the keyboard. The keyboard is now attached to the computer by a thin ribbon cable. On the computer side, the cable is locked into the connector by a white strip of plastic on the connector. That strip moves a fraction of a mm in (towards the rear of the computer) to lock and out (towards the front) to unlock. Unlock the cable and gently pull it out. The keyboard is now free. Set it aside.

(11) Remove all the screws under the keybaord and set them aside.

(12) (optional) Remove any screws under panel above the keyboard that has the LEDS and buttons. I didn't opt for a complete disasembly, which would make the next steps easier. Presumably, the remaining screws are under this panel. The thin silver plastic strips to the left and right of the buttons are held in by friction (I believe). You could pry out these strips with a knife or a sharpened metal putty knife (if you work on Macs you have such a thing). The thing is that unless you have the putty knife prying tool, you're going to gouge the soft plastic. After removing this, you'd fiddle around, and presumably discover the remaining screws holding things together. Someday you'll want to do this, when the backlight of your notebook starts acting flaky. This is normally where the inverter board that powers the backlight lives.

(13) Locate the battery. If you sight down the DVD bay, you'll see the battery, which is about the size of a US quarter, in its black pastic holder, at the right of the far end of the bay. It's actually closer to the video card, but it's easier to spot this way.

(14) Gently pry apart the black bottom plastic half of the chassis from the top, from the DVD side. If you opted for complete disassembly, I guess it should just come apart at this point. If not, you're aim here is to bend the plastic enough so you can reach in to the battery from the video card side. IMPORTANT: you don't need to force this enough to break the plastic. If it doesn' t easily pry open an inch or so near the battery, look for a screw you missed. Put someting in the gap like a paperback book to keep it pried open.

(15) Remove the battery. You don't pry the battery out; it has a spring clip. If the computer is upside down, just reach in with a screwdriver and fiddle the clip and the battery will drop out.

(16) Wait for a few minutes.

(17) Replace the battery. This step takes the most dexterity. However, you aren't going to be able to send the computer back in this state, are you? So you're just going to have to fumble at it. Turn the computer right side up (otherwise you'll be fishing the battery out as it falls). Tear of a small piece of paper to insulate the battery where you'll be grasping it with your tweezers (unless you have plastic tweezers), then carefully grasp the battery by as little edge as you can manage. From the video card side, place the battery in its holder, the minus (slightly smaller side) should face toward the motherboard. It will probably drop in a bit crooked, but a little is OK. Then push the battery down with a small screwdriver until it snaps audibly into place. Fish out the piece of paper.

(18) Reassemble the computer in reverse order. The trickiest bit is getting the keyboard ribbon cable plugged back in. These connectors are zero force; you don't have to jam anything. On the minus side, there's no friction to hold the cable in place when you let go of it, until you've pushed in the locking bar, and the stiff plastic cable will want to hop out. If you have a third set of hands hold the keyboard, you can hold the cable in place while you push in the locking bar with a small screwdriver. If you removed your wifi card, remember to put it back in and plug the antenna in.

(19) Put the battery and AC power back in, and reboot, holding down the F2 key to return to BIOS setup. You'll need to set the date.

You have now undone what five seconds of curiosity did to your computer.

Remarks and Conclusion.

If you mess around with BIOS settings, you have to be prepared for some trouble. However, the BIOS writers who put it there also decided to (a) make BIOS settings inaccessible once you changed that setting and (b) not to bother including any help text to that effect. I think it's pretty bad that users can set a BIOS settings that requires a significant hardware fix.

The whole thing is pointless from a security standpoint. This exercise proves it is not difficult for a motivated person to remove the TPM hardware and circumvent the BIOS settings. In fact there is are even simpler ways to get around this, if the point is protecting the data on the hard drive. The drive can be removed and popped into an identical computer with TPM turned off in the BIOS.

Another curious aspect of this is that while it is impossible to boot to the OS or access BIOS settings, it is possible to access Splashtop, as fast booting Linux environment that ASUS has rebranded "ExpressGate". So presumably, ExpressGate is trusted by the BIOS whereas the operating system is not. Now I've noticed a number of interesting things about ExpressGate/Splashtop. One is that my USB keyboard doesn't work. I presume the idea is that ExpressGate is an isolated, self-contained environment, and so can be trusted in ways the main operating system cannot. One of the things that is possible, I believe, is to reflash the BIOS from ExpressGate, although I expect that function is probably disabled in this kind of situation.

Still, while ExpressGate/Splashtop is supposed to be isolated, and can be run from motherboard flash memory, on this machine it is not. It is in a "hidden" partition on the same disk as the operating system. "Hidden" is a misnomer; the partition isn't in any way hidden from the operating system, it's just a notation that the operating system isn't supposed to mount the filesystem in it. The partition is perfectly visible in a disk utility.

It seems to me that the kind of paranoia that locks owners out of BIOS settings is strongly undermined by trusting an operating system on the same hard disk as the user's data and OS, especially when anyone can take the hard disk out and alter the Splashtop system. Since it is Linux, it could even be modified to do something like boot the main operating system in a virtual environment, logging all the user's keystrokes.