howeird | Too Darned Hot For This Insanity (Reply)

The hoarder part of me went on an external hard drive buying spree many months ago, and there have been five of them cluttering up the floor in front of the CD shelves. Two of them were set aside because my previous motherboard could never hold an eSATA connection, and at 1TB, USB and Firewire were not fast enough to do a backup in my lifetime. One was USB, and had to be retired when 300GB was less room than my backups. Another eSATA was dropped, and may or not be broken. I am currently using a 6th drive, network attached, which does the incremental backups once a week in about 35 minutes. It only backs up drive C, which does not include my photos - those are on a pair of internal hard mirrored drives.

Saturday's backup failed - I had done so much changing on iTunes, which is tracked on C:, that the PC went to sleep before the backup was done. I had to start it again, after changing my power settings to not sleep. It took all day. Maybe it was slower because I was also formatting a USB Toshiba external drive which I had been tripping over all week. I figured while I was on this jag I may as well format the eSATA drives, now that I have a working connection. I was stupid - I knew it would get to be furnace temps upstairs in the computer room today. Even stupider, after I formatted the 500GB eSATA, I formatted the 1TB drive, I ran a bad block scan, which took hours, and then backed up all my photos - another 3 hours.

And now I have one of the two firewire drives formatting - it had a partial photo backup and some iTunes stuff on it.

Not sure what I am going to do with the sanitized drives. Recycle, probably.

As if it wasn't hot enough, I decided to edit my Dad's home movies of the arctic, split the file in half and post the halves on Facebook. That took way too long. While I was at it, I did some net searches and found that the JPL had pdf-ef all the bulletins from the AIDJEX project he was data manager of, and they had a link to some photos which were taken up on the ice by the staff photographers, and there were two of him. I had never seen those before. Posted them on FB too.

Finally shut the PC off and wet to Starbucks for the air conditioning and a Frap. Inside/outside cooling. Read more Darwin on the Kindle there. The stoopid Kindle free version does not include any of his charts, and I was reading a section where he was going into detail explaining the charts by referring to their various points. A1 and F2 and M3, etc. Kind of useless. But each chapter I read I am more and more impressed with the depth and breadth of research he did personally, and read about, and how there is something on almost every page which was controversial when he wrote it, but is now taught word for word in science classes. Also, I am 1/4 of the way through the book, and he has not mentioned The Beagle or Galapagos yet.

Almost fell asleep there. I woke up too early this morning, and the lack of anything useful to do made the day go by very slowly. The heat did not help. Had a Jones for a nap and an Italian sausage sandwich. Went to Tony & Alba's and ordered two sandwiches, which I would not done if they had told me before I ordered them that it would take 20 minutes on account of them filling a huge pizza order first. Read some more Darwin in their not air conditioned, too-small joint with inadequate fans. Once I got them, I went home, took a nap, woke up at about 10:30 and had a sandwich and put the other one in the fridge.

Caught the last 5 minutes of the Miss USA pageant, was surprised they picked auburn haired Italian Miss California over blonde Miss Texas. I was offended by the way they spirited the losers off the stage as soon as each runner-up was announced. They didn't even wait to give her the huge bouquet of flowers first.

Watched some news, and here I am now.

Plans for tomorrow:
Job hunt
Maybe find a pool to swim in. They have the apartment pool roped off for some unknown reason.