Western Digital, and how they suck (Saturday, 10 July 2010)
Someone organized for tonight a "Pirate Party" which included everyone bringing their external hard drives and swapping stuff. Naturally it turns out that my Western Digital Passport broke sometime between leaving New York and now. Naturally I disassembled it with some force, and was left with a problem and some pieces. The problem is that the USB connector for the SATA drive broke off somehow. You suck, Western Digital. But now I have a SATA drive which should work fine, only I don’t really have a way to plug it into anything, since all I have are laptops. So, if someone wants to send me a SATA to USB connector, or a cute SATA/USB enclosure, that would be nice. Alternately, I may be able to swap in the SATA drive for the hard drive of one of my laptops, and do Computer Science to get contents onto the other one.. but that’s not really a convenient storage mechanism, and that’s what I’m looking for right now.
Realized also that there’s a bunch of stuff I wanted to copy over onto this machine that never made it over, no idea why.
During the course of the party, I blew away a bunch of files from my old job. It’s only July, and the project was supposed to end in August? But I still wonder how it’s going. (Prediction: shittily.) I would have liked, ideally, to archive some part of these files, but realistically I’m never gonna look at them again. Souvenirs: we had a shitty SVN server, when what we needed was a good Git server. svnsync was useless. We had gigabytes of VD files in a Dropbox account, when what we needed was a solid generic technical/visual design. We had PHP, which can basically ruin any project.
Placed a letter in the envelope marked "Mails with Cameroonian Stamps" at the party, only three days after writing it. Going to check to see how many days it takes before that envelope gets emptied. It may get a free ride to Yaounde before actually having to deal with the post system. Hopefully it will get to Gus before the end of August, when she moves out of her current place.
During the party, knocked over and broke a mostly empty bottle of Whiskey Black which I had been drinking. Deeply upsetting. Maybe I ought to stick to Fanta from now on.
After the party, walked Rose and Jeneca back to their houses with Timothy and (wisely chosen by Timothy) Timothy’s host brother. No incidence of anything resembling trouble, but still glad to have had the backup just in case. Timothy and his brother walked me back afterwards.
Now I’m trying to move some fairly large files that I acquired tonight over to my personal media player without much luck. I’m about to call it a night and just move it to a USB key or an SD card. Still haven’t started my lesson plans for Monday. Wish you were here.