Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
I stumbled across a website that was talking about the "magical number seven, plus or minus two". The Wikipedia article that I link to has some great stuff. It's really quite fascinating. I myself have found that I am able to really track 8 things at a time. If I'm stressed it seems to drop to 6. I use this quite a bit for making lists. Most lists I wish to make are short (less than 7 items) but I often wish to make them when I'm without a writing device (no PDA, pen and paper, etc.). So what I do is simply think out the list and make sure I firmly remember the number of items. Then, when I need to recall the list, I quickly think of the appropriate number (which is easy to remember) and the items tend to "fall out" of my memory quite easily. I have tried to track multiple lists and can succeed in juggling a few (although it's unnecessary since I rarely have more than one list in my mind at a time).
Sometimes I wish I was autistic (since many of autistic people seem to have this cognitive numeric limit removed). It would be fun to track lists that contained hundreds or thousands of items.
Okay, well maybe not "fun" but useful.
Or I could just get a digital voice recorder.
Storage
So... Back on march 30th I posted an entry on my storage solution. I had built a computer and had added a basic RAID configuration to it:
I finally got my RAID solution in place. I went cheap and got two 500GB hard drives ($145 each) and a HighPoint RocketRAID 1740 RAID 0/1/5 4 channel SATA 3.0 GBps card ($110).
So... With this configuration I get 500GB of storage (430GB or so after formatting). This was great for a while. However, recently I realized I needed more. All of my personal "stuff" that's somewhat irreplaceable doesn't take up much room. Add my ripped CDs in and you get about 100GB. I have another 25-50GB of random things (disk images for linux installs, video rips (which I haven't in the past kept for very long so I was okay with not backing them up)). So I wasn't exactly out of room but I was using a fair bit. However, I also wanted to snag a relation's (who will remain unnamed) music collection. It's 499GB. That's 272 days worth of music if played continuously. We follow a strict rule to ensure compliance with copyright law: we don't tell anyone.
Whoops.
Anyway -- I needed more storage so I picked up some hard drives from Fry's online (why is their online store called "Outpost"? It makes no sense). They were cheap! $89 per 500GB drive. They came with free shipping and I shipped them to Virginia when I was there on travel to save on state sales tax. When I got back, I copied my existing data to a 500GB external drive, added the new drives, prayed a quick prayer that my system wouldn't overheat and started it up. I reconfigured the RAID array from a 2 x 500GB RAID 1 array to a 4 X 500GB RAID 5 array. This gives me 1.5TB (1.4 TB or so formatted). It's nice. I've loaded everything on there and since I have so much extra breathing room I've immediately started piling on stuff that I previously had kept on local hard drives. Here's my usage currently:
It's nice to have some room...
The Temporal Me
I have a terrible memory. Even so, I remember enough of what I do to realize that I'm always somewhat disappointed and underwhelmed by my past self. I feel as if the person I was 6 months ago was a much more immature person who said and did all sorts of ridiculous things. Now, the odd part is knowing that 6 months from now, I'll scroll the archives of my blog (but not too far since I don't post much) find this entry and gently shake my head and tut-tut.
It's disillusioning.
There is at least a slight benefit though. If people think poorly of my opinions, just wait! I won't be the same person in 6 months and I'll have the class and sophistication to agree that I was wrong!
