Monday, 4/2/01

I got gigs. Lots of gigs. I've needed a new hard drive for a while now. My current one actually died a couple years ago, although it was quickly revived with a solid whack to the tabletop and has served me faithfully ever since. Nevertheless, I've been wary. It's also been stuffed for quite some time, leaving no room for fun things like Linux or Visual Studio. So I've been casually looking at the ads, and today I spotted a very good deal on an obscenely large chunk of magnetic storage. I almost never buy stuff for my computer. It's been several years since my last hardware purchase. So, I figured, it was time. Into the car, off to the store. Fourteen hours later, after haggling over rebate issues, dealing with software problems (naturally, the installation software that comes with the drive doesn't work), sitting through several hours of surface test, repartitioning and reformatting the new drive a couple times, copying the old data a couple times, reinstalling stuff that got dropped mysteriously along the way, and moving around half of the cards and devices in my system just to get the cables to reach, I am now the proud owner of sixty gigs. It's big. It's fast (Ultra ATA/100). And it's completely silent, which is sort of eerie. Unlike the old drive, which sounded like it was dragging the data through a pit of gravel, this drive carries out its mission with furtive secrecy. The light on the front of the computer doesn't even go on, leaving me completely oblivious to its actions. So, I didn't get a chance to do work today. (Although I did rewatch Wing Chun during the formatting and copying phases. "I am impressed. You still manage to stand after receiving the full blast of my chi.") I didn't even get a chance to turn on the keyboard either, so no music today. There was actually something fairly significant I wanted to write about in blawg (relating somewhat to the 3/31 entry), but it will have to wait for tomorrow. It's time for me to go to bed, and let visions of gigs dance through my head.