Nosce Te Ipsum

Hello all,

So it’s 1999 (party like is 1999! – Gears of War 2 achievement for  those who know what I am talking about) and your 3GB HDD is crammed with mp3s, some digital photos – I say some because you can’t afford a digital camera at the moment – and you’re thinking “I should get me a 200$ CD Writer, I hear those TEAC are bitchin’”. And you eventually get enough cash to buy one. And you start burning your precious mp3s on CDs up to the point you realize that you have to keep popping CDs into your drive to listen to your music – bummer.

Let’s fast forward to…let’s say 2005 – DVDs are all the rage, you got that awesome (Asus) DVD writer which packs 4GB of data onto a single disc. In the meanwhile your cheap CDs have rotted from the inside out because of poor engineering – the discs that were supposed to last forever started to break down(??). Anyway, you pack all your important stuff on the cute blueish discs thinking this will free up your awesome 250GB HDD onto which you install your games. And the DVDs start to pile up, and pile… You buy yourself that great disc storage… thingie.

Back to the future, it’s 2007 and you have amassed quite the DVD collection when you notice – oh, no, DVDs rot as well. Jinkies! Now, sure some of the stuff on your DVDs is expendable – maybe all of it. You had already the lesson from the CDs and keep all your important things on your PC’s HDD. But still, you are somewhat disappointed that some of the discs have started failing. You have since learned that it is impossible to tell if a DVD batch is made in China, India or some boat in international waters. Only after buying the disc can you read the media code and discover where it is from.  Japanese discs are clearly the best but hey, you don’t always have the time to chase down that elusive Sony DVD.

Present time, 2010. You have since packed 4 to 5 HDDs in your PCs case, your power source(PSU) is eating up a 1kW of power or something like that; you’re not happy, again. You are painfully aware that HDDs fail as well. All your work is backed up on at least one extra disk. What now?

Let’s reiterate: CDs suck, DVDs suck, HDDs are cool but you can’t have too many of those running at a time so you should keep upgrading your HDDs to higher capacity, better performing, newer and less failure prone ones. But that is expensive you say? Actually, not if you don’t throw away your older disks. I will explain in a moment.

10+ years of happy computing have passed, your digital collection is huge by ’99 standards and you don’t trust DVDs as well. Wait, what about the elusive blu-ray disc? Well, for starters it’s still a disc, based on the same technologies as the DVD, just seriously more packed, data wise. Sure, the price of a blank blu-ray disc has dropped a bit but it’s simpy not worth spending 10$ for a 25GB disc that might or might not breakdown in the future. I have considered this for a long time – getting a blu-ray writer to save my data and clear my HDDs. But writing blu-ray discs takes a long time and I would get in the same predicament as with the DVDs sooner or later.

Having learned from my experience I started replacing older HDDs with newer, better ones, avoiding failures – I have never had a HDD that failed(thank God!). This however has led to some spare HDDs that were just laying around. So it hit me – what if I used these disks as external storage devices. Eureka!

The solution I found is two fold, so to speak. First, you need to store your HDDs neatly so they don’t get all dusty since they do have an electronic component and you also need to protect the mechanic component. So, I got myself plastic storage containers – made by the German Raidsonic company(yup, free advertising you guys). You could also get your hands on something that protects the disk from strong electromagnetic fields, I went for the cheap plastic containers though… Let’s face it, if you have a strong electromagnetic field in your house your electronics are screwed anyway. Also, plastic absorbs shocks better if you are butter-fingered and drop your disk.  Second, and the most important part, get yourself a fast, simple to plug into, HDD rack/docking bay. Again, I went with may pals Raidsonic. They have one of the few USB 3.0 compatible docking bays(that’s right USB 3.0 means large bandwidth, baby) on the market. While it’s not all that cool that your HDD is hanging upside down in such a freaky manner, it’s not actually that bad: your HDD is in open air which means it needs no cooling and you’re not going to leave it there forever, you just transfer what you need and then store it back safely in its cute case. Did I mention they come with stickers so you can write on down what specific drive is in what case? Also, take into account that you can transfer 1GB of data from one 1 HDD to another, even via USB in seconds while it would probably take minutes to write a DVD or worse, a blu-ray disc. Also, HDDs are read/write – you want to get rid of something, you just delete it.

So here it is, my solution to the world’s storage hunger.

What’s yours?

Tweet This Post Facebook

A few months back I saw a movie called “Cold Souls”, a rather bleak exploration of the midlife crisis of a creator – a writer in this case. In the movie, a company in New York was offering “soul storage. Their catch phrase was “is your soul weighing you down?”. There’s a real website for this fictitious company – just don’t try to purchase their services. To make a long story short, you could have your soul extracted and live “free” without this burden; that’s exactly what Paul Giamati’s character does but finds the situation not entirely to his liking and when his soul is in danger of being lost he must reclaim it – sounds corny, but that’s how it goes down. While the movie failed to impress me much, it did raise an interesting question. The things we know, the things we have done, all that we have experienced makes us a lot less open to happiness. Does that sound silly to you? It might be, in your experience. This is concept is touched upon in “Up In The Air” as well, where George Clooney is a man who lives with zero attachments, shying away from anything that might bring him down to earth – like love and family.  Of course, ultimately, the writers want you to believe that he is secretly just longing for that special connection and cannot achieve happiness without it.

As time passed, digging a little deeper I came to a more immediate fright – what if all the training and education I got is preventing me from finding the right career for myself? Having worked my way through a certain college I was convinced that this is the path I have to follow, this is the field I need to be working in. But I will tell you, it is not making me happy at all.

I am surrounded by people just like me, who have finished the same education. I am sure at least some enjoy their work greatly. But that is not the point. I had the chance to meet people lest constricted by their education. People who have not graduated from college, people who truly believe that the world is their oyster, and nothing is beyond their grasp. I wish I had that outlook on things. In my mind, I have set up a prison, I have to be a software engineer I tell myself – that is what I worked so hard to be. So I must follow this path, what else is there for me?

I find myself with no artistic talent whatsoever and knowing only one trade – that of computers. And it is not making me happy. I am really screwed you could say, right? “Je suis un type foutu” like my old friend J.P. Sartre said in his “Les Chemains de la Liberte”. A path has been chosen – well, I have chosen it – and now I am rejecting it. So I can either man up and push through or I can search for the key to my cage.

Bottom line, how do you draw the line between building knowledge and keeping an open mind about your life? Are we ruined by education or can we still be free?

I haven’t given up yet.

Tweet This Post Facebook

I am partial to the band All American Rejects. The first song played this band that I ever heard was “Dirty Little Secret”.

Move Along

Dirty Little Secret – Love it!

Gives You Hell

It Ends Tonight – Saddish…

P.S.

Working to improve my Gomoku and fighting through FF XIII. Damn, life is hard .

Tweet This Post Facebook

I just had a thought…

How about a surprise party where those surprised are the guests? I mean, you organize it and then invite friends over, one by one, making sure they will keep it a secret and then surprise them!

I call it a “reverse surprise party”. And I can use a poll:

 Loading ...

Tweet This Post Facebook

We keep in our minds many people who, in different ways, have left our lives either through the front door, maybe storming out, or silently, they just slipped away. They have left us willingly or we have forced them out. Some have left us unwillingly, by dying. This is the hard truth. We are not forever.

I have lost a few people a long the way, of which some have died. You think that when someone you lost is still alive you could at some point still reconnect with them, that is never too late. But when they are dead, there is no way of reviving a relationship, there is no way of asking for forgiveness. You are only left with memories, which someday will burn with you.

Not sure what could be done. Save the ones that are still alive? Can you?

One thing I am sure of, from each of them I’ve learned something and I will do my best to keep the lesson learned. Some taught me by being good and kind and some taught me by deceiving me and being unkind. But they all taught me something, all the same.

So this for you, my departed friends.

Tweet This Post Facebook

I came across a wonderful speech by J.K. Rowling today. I cannot help admiring her. According to the Forbes magazine she is the only person to become a billionaire in dollars from writing books. We need more people like her (and not because she’s rich and stuff). What can I say, I am impressed.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Get the full story here.

Tweet This Post Facebook