In this day and age of storing your entire existence on fragile, silver, magnetic platters, the thing you never want to know is you have a dead hard drive. Somehow, as you attempt to boot up that honking brick of plastic, you try to tell yourself that this isn’t the end. And if it was, then what can you do about it, really? There are always talks of backing up and redundancy, but, seriously, when the hard drive is a hundred times or more larger than the optical discs that you would be burning its content onto, do you seriously think that backing up your hard drive is the first thing you think about?
And what do you really do when the contents of your hard drives are more along the line of video captures that run multiple gigabytes each? How do you back those things up then? Buy another hard drive to backup that hard drive? At some point it’s sort of become this act of cryogenically freezing a copy of a copy of a copy of your head to make sure you live to Eternity. Only to find out that the cryogenic lab lost power one night, and all of your heads went the way of rat food. Oh, that’s right! You were supposed to store the backups of those backups at multiple sites. Just in case these things happen.
I’m not really sure how to solve this problem. I have drives that hold my past design works and photographs. Obviously I’m due to backup the contents of those drives onto larger drives. But then it’s sort of a never-ending proposition.
Just today I was thinking that I should backup the photos I have been taking on my Android phone (Yes, I have an Android phone. Because I’m creative.). So I updated my Dropbox app, and it automatically asked me if I want to back up my photos. Oh, rejoice, I thought! Of course, I’ll do that. Anyway, that was at 3:30PM PST. Now it’s almost 11PM, and we still have about 1,000 images left to upload.
We seem to have been accumulating so much of these digital files. It’s fine that I no longer have to purchase 20 rolls of film when I go travel somewhere. Or buy all those tapes to shoot those vacation videos. But then I end up having issue with storage—and storage that I know at some point will die on me. However, if the answer then is to send them all to the Cloud, then the questions are: 1) How much space will I need on the Cloud to hold everything that I have created? 2) What kind of bandwidth do I need to send every up into this Computer Networking Heaven without going to my own Heaven before the files finish uploading? 3) Finally, the last question, of course, is can I really trust that the God of the Cloud will continually do a nightly backup of my existence so that I won’t end up losing my digital soul when it all accidentally disappears?
Well, the hard drive didn’t die. The plug on it was, however. Thank God. So I just had find another one from my numerous collection of external hard drives to replace it. I mean, if you see someone lying still, and you think they might be dead, isn’t the first thing you do is get a stick and poke the person to see if you’ll get a response?
• • •
Porn stars spams are a little annoying to me. It was the main reason I hated MySpace. I made my profile private, and somebody complained madly as to why I would do that and still want to exist on the site. That’s sort of why I liked Facebook a bit better. Having someone add you with a real name had a tinge of safety to it. But then soon you realize that people you don’t know just kept wanting to get on your network. So you set your privacy settings to “I am the Terminator! You ain’t getting in! Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!” And then people complained to you madly there too that you don’t understand how to use the site, because why would you want to be on there and only have 120 friends, when you can really have 800. And, see, isn’t that really a social network you can really work with?
That’s true, of course, until you want to get those 800 on your network to do something for you, and only 10 agree to it.
When I went off Facebook a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to be careful about getting back on other social networking sites. Now I’m back on Twitter (Or seemingly I am. I think I am. I just followed a bunch of people.), but I’m doing that knowing full well that I still need to be connected somehow. The Internet is now life. And there’s no better way to get information than to go to those places where the information gets aggregated.
But now I’m contending with porn stars following me. Yeah, sure, they’re hot, and they’ll give you very good wet dreams. But they annoy me, because I don’t appreciate getting spammed. Somehow I know it will keep coming. It’s the risk of having a public account. And for having so much activities in a short burst of time. But what can I do? I’ll just have to let them litter my inbox for awhile and hope it will all settle down.
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I finally got my Pinterest invite. I guess apparently if you’re no longer on Facebook, you can’t have a life online. Especially when it comes to other social networking platforms. I tried multiple times using Twitter to sign up for an account, but it kept failing. At some point I wondered whether if I still have my Facebook account, somehow I would have had an easier time at signing up.
Eventually I was able to create an account using my Twitter credential. But then now I can’t even attempt to find other people that I might know to follow, because it would seem that the only option to easily find a large number of friends in one shot is to connect with Facebook. Damn you, Zuckerberg! Your Open Graph juggernaut is going to be the bane of my existence. You truly want me to forever be tied to your social data collection project, don’t you?
So I’m on Pinterest now. I’m worried. Even without an account, it’s already like Crack. Well, it’s actually more like those salty Bugle chips. You just can’t pull yourself away from those things. I think once I have some boards and pins going, I’ll start posting a link for people to follow. I’m trying to do this slowly and smartly. I really don’t want to end up being obsessive over another site. Social Media Addiction should have a consideration on its own.
• • •
I guess we’re now onto Tintin and Leap Year. If you put those things into the title of your post, it’s a little stupid to not acknowledge them. I mean, you should, shouldn’t you?. Why on Earth would you have that many kids if you’re going to ignore the last two? I know, I know. By then you didn’t want to have them anyway. Damn those alcoholic drinks! Trust me, it gets every good and decent couples that way.
So Tintin. Yeah. It’s past 11PM. I’m not going to get to watch it now. Are you kidding me? I’m still trying to recover from a viral infection. I need my rest. Isn’t it like over two hours? I do love Tintin, though. Hergé had some imagination. I’m not if most American knew what to do with it. Am I right about that? The comics have been around forever, and it has been in reprints over the years here in the States. I’m just not sure how many people were familiar with the character before the movie came out. A friend told me that it made less money here than it did in Europe. If that is true, it’s not a surprise to me. Tintin is more iconic on the other side of the Atlantic anyway. I think most America are more familiar with the Smurfs. Man, Peyo must have been rolling in his grave with that movie they made.
• • •
So I have only have half an hour left to acknowledge that today is the 29th of February. I read up on how we end up having an extra day in February. That was some crazy mathematics they had to do to figure all that out. Let’s not get into it, shall we? Go look online for information on that. It’s no wonder why the Mayan Calendar simply ended in 2012. I think the nerd who was in charge of figuring all that out simply said, “Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to project this out how many Millennia? I’m going home to my social network. We’re playing Words with Friends tonight.”