"It's alive!!! It's alive, it's alive, it's alive!"

I have sound on my laptop. I have no idea why. Of course, I have no idea why it ever stopped, so the symmetry of the universe is intact.

The time I've spent working with the various flavors of Ubuntu linux has been interesting. The Kubuntu installer ignores where you tell it to install and sticks you in an infinite loop until you let it have its way. Xubuntu seems to work the best, but the interface is pretty primitive. Ubuntu I haven't tried, but I've been told that ex-Windows users generally hate it. In any case, the emergency is over so I can take some time to play with all of them. I now have a 50G partition on the main drive of my laptop that is just for linux. None of this has changed my opinion of linux and unix in general; it is a guru full-employment product. I know a lot about systems, but unfortunately, all the wrong ones having spent my formative years on IBM mid-range systems (System 34/36/38/AS-400 for anyone who cares). So I missed to whole unix thing and now I find myself helpless. OS-X is a possibility, and it still may be the best option for me if I don't want to spend the rest of my life on the web trying to figure out what the hell a mount point is or why Xubuntu can't find USB drives or why Kubuntu thinks my Western Digital USB drive is a digital camera and keeps nattering at me to download my photos. But while Apple's DRM is less obnoxious than Microsoft's, it is still telling me what I can and cannot do with my own damn data. And Apple requires a full commitment, heart and soul to The Apple Way and all that implies. But I do have to give it to Apple; they have made a killer OS that is miles beyond anything coming out of Redmond.

Speaking of USB hard drives, I picked up a new toy while we were kicking around in town Wednesday for dentist and doctor appointments. Bob Thompson mentioned that Antec, who makes some of the best computer cases in the industry, recently began shipping an external hard drive enclosure that makes any internal SATA drive into a USB 2.0 drive. Well I now have one with a 500GB Seagate drive spinning away inside it. It is the backup point for my massive xcopy jobs that take a snapshot of my entire Documents and Settings folder on the laptop and my entire Western Digital USB drive, and a home for my movie rips. I mentioned a while back we drank the red Kool-Aid and signed up for Netflix's one-movie-at-a-time, unlimited-movies-a-month option. To speed turn-around, as soon as a movie shows up in the mail, I have been ripping it to the laptop's internal 100GB drive and sending it back the next morning. Then we watch it whenever we get A Round Toit (tm). It didn't take long at 6-7GB per movie to deplete the laptop's hard drive. So I now have a laptop with a total of 660GB of hard drive space (100GB internal, 60GB Western Digital, 500GB Seagate/Antec). This weekend, I'm going back to Best Buy to pick up a second enclosure and 500GB Seagate, so I will have more than one terabyte of online storage for my laptop.

(And in case you think this retched excess, 500GB is only about 70-75 movies, or about one year of movie rentals at our current pace, and the second 500GB drive will be a mirror for the first. I know of nothing else that I can back up that much data to other than another hard drive. I could go to tape backup, but I've never had any luck with PC-connected tape drives.)