I am borrowing a DVD drive from work to play around with. So far it’s ok, sort of a pain in the ass though. Writing 4.7 gigs of data to a disc takes a long time is the unfortunate bottom line. But what if there was something better, like for example credit-card sized 5 gig hard drives that sold for $15? It seems too good to be true, but they’re supposed to ship in the second half of this year so we’ll see. The technology certainly seems promising.

Check out The Elder Geek. There’s a great collection of tips, walkthroughs, and explanation on all things windows there. This site was very helpful as I tried to recover from hard drive death this weekend.

I think I mentioned last week that the hard drive started to fail on my primary desktop at home. I bought a new drive from my favorite online vendor and spent the weekend getting everything up and running again. Things went fairly smoothly with a few exceptions:

• I discovered that my machine cannot boot to its DVD drive. This took hours to figure out, the machine was failing to boot to the windows xp install cd. Ultimately I pulled the cd rom from my linux box and got it booting that way.
• I cannot seem to get Firewire working reliably. The DVD burner constantly disconnects from the machine, seemingly at random, which among other things causes burning of DVDs to fail. I’m still digging into this one. So far I know it is a known issue pre-service pak 1, but I already have that installed so thats not it.

Other than that, and the fact that I basically have no software installed yet, (oh, and the fact that it took pretty much all weekend) things went ok.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike Windows? Would that there was something better.

Check This out Straight out of Stephenson’s Snow Crash (a most excellent book btw, as is everything by Stephenson). I signed up for a beta account. It just amazes me to see the stuff I was reading about in sci fi 10 years ago turning into reality. This may turn out to be the year of the mass market acceptance of virtual reality as a place to be, between this and The Sims.

Hey, just testing that my upgrade of moveable type, the software I use to publish this site, went ok.

I’m terrible this year. Every time I went shopping for xmas gifts for someone I ended up buying at least one gift for myself. My favorite by far is this little jobbie:

I had been steering clear of wireless mice, figuring they would introduce too much lag to the gaming action, but I detect none with this model and the lack of cord is really great. The only downside is their drivers absolutely suck, but I ditched them and went with the default windows drivers and everything seems to work fine. It’s a Logitech MX700 in case you’re interested, I got it for about $45 after rebate.

2002 style. Remember Battling Tops when we were kids? Check em out nowadays. I almost bid on one of these on ebay just for the novelty factor. I used to love battling tops when I was young. Somehow I never ended up with a set but several of my neighbors had them and I used to battle all the time. These seem much more….robust is the word I guess. Plus complicated. Still, in concept it seems promising for kids.

…no, not with Lisa, though she’s cool enough. No, I’ve once again fallen in love with tech. This time it’s SnipSnap, a clever amalgamation of weblogging and wiki software. Go play around with the one linked above and see what you think. I’m thinking of adding one to my server though since it’s in early alpha I’ll probably wait a while. We have one running at work but I can’t give out that URL. I was originally planning to add either phpwiki or twiki, but now I may go with snipsnap, we’ll see.

So the hard drive upgrade is all set thanks to Trevor. I’ve started uploading more music now that I have the space to hold it. Ignore everything in that new Air album aside from the first track, it’s otherwise bad to awful.

Next up: an upgrade to the publishing system. Stay tuned 😉

Testing to see if MT still works after installing the new drive.