Rick’s Rants and Raves

Prior to Monday, my total disk space in my house was somewhere less than 500GB, spread across my desktop, Anne’s laptop, the kids’ laptop, and my NSLU2 attached drives. Recently one of the drives on the NSLU2 gave out, so I decided to upgrade. I got a pair of 500GB drives, and installed them today. I remember paying $300 (I think) for an 800MB drive in 1995, which brought my PC to 1.2 GB, which I thought was totally killer. Thirteen years later, that available space has multiplied 1000 fold.

Unlike most idiots who write reviews of external drives on Amazon, I do not trust my data to be on just one drive. My primary NSLU2 drive is backed up to the other every night. So when one failed? No worries, really. My only concern was then to be sure I had another copy of that data somewhere while I waited for my new drives to ship.

How hard was it to migrate from an 80GB drive (since the other had failed) to twin 500GB? Plug a new 500 GB into Disk 2, and format. Wait 10 minutes. Start the backup job. Wait 5 hours. Turn off NSLU2, remove 80GB drive. Plug first 500GB into disk 1 port, plug second 500GB into disk 2 port. Turn on NSLU2, format drive 2. Wait 10 minutes. Backup disk 1 to disk 2. Enable daily backup.

My new pet peeve: People who shovel their drives, but not their sidewalks. We got a record amount of snow this past weekend, and I understand that some people are simply not capable of shoveling at all. We live in a wonderful neighborhood where people actually walk on the sidewalks. There are three schools within 10 minutes walking distance of my house, and dozens of kids (maybe hundreds) from kindergarten to high school walk down our street every school day. Some people shoveled their drives so that THEY could get their cars out, but couldn’t be BOTHERED to shovel their sidewalks. This creates a dangerous situation for the kids trying to walk to school as they are forced to walk in the street, rather than through the 15 inches of snow on the sidewalk. That, to me, is incredibly selfish.

Kudos to the residents of Blue Ash: the entire length of Blue Ash was shoveled (on one side) for a whole block. We walked to the Y down Blue Ash late Sunday evening, and had to divert to the street for the one segment of sidewalk that hadn’t been shoveled. Fortunately, the owner was on his front porch, and took notice. By the time we returned from exercising, his walk was shoveled. Well done, sir.