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My Almost-daily Journal |
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| About I love trying out new things, especially when it comes to internet technology. I never really kept a journal, but it's something that I've always wanted to do. Now, everybody will get a chance to look inside my twisted, and somewhat-warped mind.
I've also subscribed to Audio Blog, so a few times a week, I'll leave actual voice blogs. Very cool!XML Newsfeed Previous Posts
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Thursday, October 16, 2003
The Life of an Archivist Being a genealogist as well as a photo and video archivist IS an under-appreciated job. Sure, I get props and kudos from my siblings, parents, and a wink from a distant cousin, but that's not what lights MY fire. A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind man. My unborn progeny's progeny is the reason that I toil over family trees and capturing history. And what are the chances that an offspring of mine (or my brother's or sister's) will actually be interested in history, genetics, traits, behaviors, or even genealogy? I'd say I have a 10% chance that someone in the future will actually look at ALL THIS CRAP. But, I have faith, that some day, some one, will actually find all this stuff interesting. The Perpetual PC Upgrading Continues Other than my first Commodore Vic-20 or Commodore 64, I don't think that I've ever bought a brand new computer, or ever began with a "fresh start". My computers have always been in some sort up "upgrade flux". For instance, last year, I had a stick of memory go bad. It fried my OS and left me for dead. I was able to backup most of my info, so I wasn't totally dead-in-the-water. Did I start from scratch? Hell no. I scavanged almost every component I possibly could from my working computer and put it toward "the new computer". The only thing that I really bought was a mobo, cpu and RAM. Everything else was carryover. As a matter of fact, all my computers sitting in my house (I have at least five that are functional and on 24/7) are just leftover remnants of what should really be in a landfill. I just can't throw away working equipment. And even funnier, one of my computers, I actually picked out of Peter's garbage. Go figure. It's probably the 2nd or 3rd best computer I have. So what went into my latest upgrade fetish? Since my computer was turning off on its own, I figured I needed a new power supply. What really was the culprit was a dirty-as-hell switch that was neither on nor off. After a while, the switch overheated and shorted, and turned the computer off, while sucking the life out of my UPS. So now I have an Antec True Blue 480W power supply with an additional $10 silencer kit that is nothing more than a rubber grommet to dampen the fan noise. It actually sounds wonderfully sweet and quiet, unlike my $10 gookanese PS. Can you say DVD burner? I purchased the Plextor PX-708A which burns DVD's at 8X (fastest burner out there now), as well as CD's at 40X... which is amazing to me, considering I've been burning at 16X for almost two years. Now I can safely backup my cherished photograph and video archives, and actually not lose sleep at night worrying about some phantom power surge or virus wiping out my life. I CAN'T WAIT to start copying DVD movies! RIAA and Co., come and get me! Then I decided to go big, but smart on a high-capacity special edition hard drive. Western Digital's Special Edition drives are packed with an 8MB cache, which makes the drive incredibly fast. I've already noticed a 33% increase in performance. Of course, that's just perception. I was struggling between 120 GB and 250 GB, and ended up compromising and settling with the 180 GB drive. At about $1/GB, I couldn't pass up that deal. PLUS, I purchased it at Microcenter to satisfy my impulse-buying urge. So why stop there? My main OS drive was down to about 10 GB free, and it was getting to the tail end of its useful life. I already started getting bad sectors, so I figure I might as well take the plunge since I have my case cracked open. I settled with just an 80 GB Western Digital Special Edition drive. I probably should have went a little higher, but I couldn't pass up the deal from Newegg.com for $75. The drive even came with Data Lifeguard that allowed me to copy my main drive, boot sector and all, to the new drive. The ability to do that made life sooooo much easier for me. After copying the contents of the old drive to the new drive, I swapped out the cables and jumpers, and I was back in business. And it's such a treat to have an SE drive as the OS drive. I immediately saw a perceived 33% improvement in performance. So what's next? I think I'm going to wait a while, but I've been drooling over an Abit IC7-Max3 or Asus P4C800-E motherboard, powered by a 3.0 Ghz P4, with a gig of Corsair XMS memory. Of course, with that powerhouse, I would be selling myself short without two Western Digital Raptor 36 GB SATA 10K RPM drives running at RAID 0. Just to be the king of this hill would cost me a grand, and that's carrying over my ATI 9800 Pro video card and 180 GB data drive. Encoding videos would take seconds instead of minutes, and Photoshop would function like ACDSee Lite. Ahhh... to dream. Perhaps it'll give me good reason to wait, since Wester Digital is coming out with 72 GB Raptors in a few months. posted by Dino at 11:40 PM (permanent link) |