Friday 8 August 2003

Pic of the day: The bluish thing in the middle. This picture illustrates today's first topic. Trust me, you would not want a picture illustrating the second.

What's new?

The Maxtor 250GB hard disk, for starters. It came today. Actually it is 233 gigabytes as we nerds count them, with each kilo being 1024 rather than 1000. It adds up, since one gigabyte is one kilo of kilos of kilobytes. 1024*1024*1024. That's a lot of bytes, each of which correspond to one letter of text. Needless to say, text is not the main use for this disk. I may have been a prolific writer, back when my wrist allowed, but not at this scale. Libraries could go into that there box. (One full length novel in e-book format is around half a megabyte. That's 2000 of them in a gigabyte. Multiply that by 250, that would be a library of 500 000 books. Not bad. Not bad at all!)

Of course, books is not what I bought this little prince for. It turned out, somewhat to my surprise, that the anime did after all take up more like 39 GB rather than 15. I never added up, but I guess it was more than 15 after all ... Anyway, now there's lots and lots of space on the primary hard disk. That is quite noticeable as response times are good as new.

No more playing DVD jockey. I am still planning to back up the series, when they end or grow long enough to fill a DVD. But the urgency is gone.

(On the other hand, the heat is on. This thing is too hot to comfortably rest your hand on. I am approaching the point where I could heat my living room with computers during the winter, and it is not winter now. Quite the opposite.)

The disk cost half as much as a normal cheap PC. But a normal cheap PC would not solve my problem. Besides, the machine is overall better than I need. I am glad I can keep it. Although I hope it is not for the rest of my life.

***

And now, whining about my health. It is kinda disgusting and probably won't interest a lot of you, unless I suddenly stop writing...

For more than two weeks now, I have had recurring pain in my lower right side. The pain is almost never sharp or intense, except for the first day. Often it is only a tenderness or soreness. Sometimes it seems to be gone, sometimes it seems a bit stronger. There is no fever, and no queasiness (well, almost never, which is the same as normal). The only other difference I notice is that defecation is more frequent, more urgent, and more runny, kinda, although nothing like a diarrhea. I suppose there must be some kind of irritation in the upper colon. It certainly does not behave like classical appendicitis. Still, it bears watching.