Last Updated 1/25/2002 by dickdiamond.com

1/25/2002

One nice thing (yeah, right) about having your hard drive crash is that, even if you have several "spare" computers as I do, you get to spend some quality time "off line." In my case, I spent about eight hours filing. As it turns out, I hadn't put a single personal document (I'm actually a very conscientious filer at work, probably due to the CYA instinct) in a manila folder in about a year and a half, pretty much since I last moved. How time flies. With tax season here already, it seemed prudent to get a few things in order. Eight hours is how long it took to turn an unordered (well, roughly chronological, but between the pile falling over every few months and me having to root through looking for documentation for a dispute with Sprint or the electric company or the cable modem company [what is it with utilities anyway?], it was pretty much random) pile about three feet high into 12 inches of files and a big bag of trash.

Now for your media update. We watched Finding Forrester last night. Though this wasn't a movie I was in any hurry to see, I found the DVD on the new release rack at the library. This was the first time I'd seen a DVD at the library, so I figured what the heck, it's free.

I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not going to say the film is flawless, but it could have been much worse. I expected it to be much worse. I kept expecting it to get much worse. It was one of those films where I watch with a sense of dread, just wondering what is going to go horribly wrong—both cinematically and dramatically. And yet nothing did. Maybe that's a problem—too little at stake, not enough conflict, whatever—but not for me. I like when things go well in a movie. Give me a The Thomas Crown Affair over an A Simple Plan any night.

I drove all over the place today looking for a deal on a Maxtor hard drive to replace my dead WD (see below). From my survey of CompUSA, Best Buy, Office Max, Office Depot and of course Fry's I have determined that the price of hard drives (and memory) has gone up significantly in the last four months. I hate when that happens. If I could find a hard drive within $10 of what it would cost me to order one over the Internet and have it delivered I would "buy local," but I'm seeing $40+ differences. Forget it. Retail isn't even trying any more.

1/22/2002

So, my boot/system/apps/documents/everything hard drive in my desktop computer died catastrophically today while I was at the gym. That machine is now an empty, soulless shell. Not to mention a boat anchor.

For the record, this was a Western Digital 60-gig, 7200-rpm Caviar drive with fewer than 3000 hours on it. I bought the thing less than four months ago. Cheap Malaysian crap.

So, let this be a lesson to you all. Hard drive crashes don't just happen to someone else, on 10-year-old machines. Make your backups.

Anyway, it's in a box back to the manufacturer. I'm over it.

It's interesting, considering my last entry, that I just watched American Pie 2 on DVD over the weekend. It almost seems as if I watched these two films in a row, but in reality I just didn't update for a long time. In fact, while I was watching, I couldn't remember most of the plot lines of the first movie that were necessary to understand some of the setups in the sequel. I don't know what it is about that first movie that makes me unable to hold it in memory.

If anything, AP2 was better than the original. I'll recommend it for a night when you need something silly. We also rented The Score. I'm not going to go into a deep analysis of it as I doubt it would stand well. I enjoyed it, for whatever reason. And you can't beat the cast.

I also just finished reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Seek!. If nothing else, these two books prove that the Dewey Decimal Classification system works. They were about 10 books apart on the shelf, and both books are basically recycled articles and essays by (more or less) popular authors. For slightly different reasons, both required a sheer effort of will to plow through. Coincidentally, both of the dust jackets were the same florescent yellow.

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