Monday. Up with the alarm before six having gone to bed last night at eleven after watching my weekend running on Saturday and Sunday Korean “soap”. No complaints, it's one of the interesting Korean soaps and I'm obviously hooked. Back now from breakfast at eight looking at a clear week ahead, just the Wednesday guitar lesson waiting out there in the middle. What's to be done to fill in the rest of the time? Not a problem I'd think.

I have two older floor standing Dell computers I bought when I was working at APL and I've finally found a use for at least one. An earlier version of the Roxio disk burning software works fine on the one, it knocks out DVD's while I'm engrossed in other things on the main machine, and I'd use the second Dell if I'd but connect it to the internet. I could attach it, but that would, well, let's not go into that. Keeps me entertained, this: the addition of something a little different to the daily mix.

I ordered two three terabyte internal hard drives for the main computer. One hundred and forty-eight bucks apiece. Three terabytes each. I'm not even grudgingly impressed. I'm totally impressed. I can remember selling twenty megabyte Compaq hard drives for their suitcase size portables at ComputerLand in the mid-eighties for something like six hundred dollars each.

I forget what a desktop twenty megabyte disk went for, but say three or four hundred 1980's dollars. Three terabytes of storage would cost five hundred times that in 1980 dollars and would be - what? - a thousand times that in today's? Not that you could connect them together. Three hundred thousand dollars? I know, I know, old news, Moore's law and all, but it gives me a cheap high just to think about it.

Anyway, the two will replace five internal hard drives that have accumulated inside the big home brew computer over the years. This crap with Roxio has finally made me get my act in gear. I'll mirror them, give myself a little extra safety storing the photographs, maybe do a clean Windows 7 install and see if that helps. And still make two DVD backups. What did I spend for those drives back when I bought them (not all that long ago)? I don't want to think, they're all state of the art ten thousand RPM models that go lickety-split. Still, I've used them well, they've given back for what they cost. I think.

You think?

This computer crap still gives me a minor buzz. It once provided a comfortable living, doing it after all wasn't like wearing a hair shirt. No regrets.

Later. We do have these little quirks we follow daily, one of mine is checking the Daily Image Update for how the arctic ice is doing at the National Snow and Ice Data Center web site. We seem to be finally pulling out ahead in the race to set a new record. I'm not sure I should be cheering this on one way or another. (hup!)

Later still. A nap, nice. Naps are nice. About an hour. A little guitar, not enough to really say I've gotten into it yet for the day, all the while doing DVD's. Today, the third day I've been burning them, I'll finish the first three months of this year, some hundred plus gigs of image files. I'll be curious to see when all this backup energy fizzles out, how many months done, how many months left out.

Evening. A run for cheese, crackers, milk and, well, sake. An evening of practicing the guitar, finishing up the DVD's and eventually turning in to read.

Read? You?

I read a book review in the Times last week that seemed interesting, referencing an earlier book by the author in which he'd first introduced the characters. So I downloaded the earlier version to see if I might like it and, if I did, I'd buy the new one. Well, I've actually read about three quarters of it with some interest on the Kindle.

I'm wondering, just as an aside you understand, if now that I've retired the iron cladding of the corporate world might be peeling off and I'm getting back to where I once with real interest read books, listened to music and did the off the wall stuff I've since stopped doing because the brain and the soul have become all stopped up. Sounds a bit dramatic and, as I said, an unlikely major contributing factor, but let me tell you, you never know, not in Oakland.