A Day In The Life Of A Computer Geek

a few weeks ago, when i had a little extra money to spend, i bought a 200 gigabyte hard drive on ebay.

[digression]

the subject of this tangent is an increasingly brazen and highly annoying tactic that ebay merchants use to inflate the price of their goods while sheltering the extra padding from ebay fees. what the fuck is up with these ridiculous shipping charges?! do you people think you're fooling anyone? $30 dollars to ship a hard drive? for that much money, i ought to get a free greyhound ticket to your home town and a gift certificate to city sports. if i'm gonna pay thirty dollars in 'shipping' charges for a piece of hardware weighing less than 5 pounds, i'm going to get a baseball bat and ship myself to where you are so i can beat the living shit out of you.

the best deal i found was a total of $110 dollars -- $95 for the hard drive and $15 for the 'shipping' costs. that shit shouldn't cost more than $5 bucks to pack and ship. _priority_ mail is $3.

[end digression]

so whatever. i'm happy with the hard drive, and the price i paid to get it. i just hate cheaty bastards.

it has been two long years since i had a second hard drive in my computer. for much of that time i was running windows 98 SE. to put it mildly, it required endless nursemaiding to function adequately. expressing my real feelings would require a lot of profanity. it needed to be cleaned of spyware infections constantly. often, it would just 'stop' working. and always, always, it settled into a state in which shutting it down involved the dreaded Ctrl+Alt+Del sequence. every time. without fail.

i reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows 98 a couple times a year. it was the one fail safe thing i could do that would ensure smooth functioning. for a few weeks i would even be able to get the operating system to shut down properly.

at that time, i had two hard drives, so backing up my data was fast and easy. then two years ago, one of my hard drives died. within months, i installed suse because i wanted to try something new without throwing down a hundred bucks for admission. this fall, i went completely linux. no spyware and the 'just stops working after 6 months' problem disappeared. i still like to try out different flavors of linux from time to time, so having the second drive is a huge relief. i will no longer need to invest three hours to backing everything up to cd before i can reformat and reinstall. i also need somewhere to store all those digital photos i've been taking.

the new hard drive has also made possible my dream of the household 'jukebox'. i am busily ripping every cd i own. then i will rip every cd that emily0 owns. then i rip every cd that our roommate, the invisible emily, owns. when this project is complete, i am going to set up a household network consisting of an ibook running OS X, a PC running Linux, and a PC running Windows ME. yes, this will be a bitch to do, but it shall be done. once this frankenetwork is complete, all three of us will be able to access the jukebox.

i have decided to embrace the linux way. the music will be encoded in ogg vorbis format. it delivers better quality sound for less hard drive space than mp3 does, and it's an open format.