Back to Basics: Simply your life

Tonight was a nice change of pace, going out with a few friends and deciding to enjoy some glasses of scotch, brandy, and such at a nicer place than the usual dive bar pub fare to which I've grown accustomed. Granted, the price point was about three times the usual fare, but the buzz is essentially the same. On the down side yes, my wallet is lighter, but on the positive side of my mental chalkboard my bladder is also considerably lighter.

Now I understand why my European friends consider Canadians to be gluttonous drunks. After visiting a friend in Switzerland a few years back and drinking five pints in a pub I was greeted with your basic reactions of horror. I would have thought it was due to the amount I drank, but it was over quite a lengthy period of time, and she and her friends had been pounding down shots of grappa with dizzying speed. No, as it turns out, drinking a pint of beer is what was disgusting to her. Five pints even more so.

I have to interject that she and her friends were all waify euro-goths who weighed about five pints between the lot of them, and that they had about ten ounces of 160-proof nut-flavoured aquavit each before driving home. That's where my reaction of horror kicked in. Gotta love cultural relativism.

Yeah. Anyway, all this to say that I feel considerably lighter than I usually do coming home from a pub, which is a nice change. :)

I heartily recommend a change of pace for you too. And wouldn't you feel nicer too if I could bring a levity to your unbearableness of being?

Well I can, and I mentioned it a post back when I said I never wanted to buy another DVD again. Scratch that. A blank one. And don't scratch that. The DVD I mean. They look a lot sturdier than they are. You breathe on the damn things and they warp and you lose a file (just the one if you're lucky). Got forbid you handle them wrong, get a fingerprint on them, or let them anywhere near a toddler (ooo shiny!).

Yes. A 5 1/4" diskette floppy from 1985 had more staying power, AND you could use a hole punch to make them double-sided. Does anyone else remember using that trick? These days we just alter the frequency of the laser, tack on about a thousand dollars worth of "development" costs and call it a blue ray instead of a red ray.

BEST. SCAM. EVER.

So do you feel like you life is being taken over by these things? Do you have too many of them heaping around the house in random piles, in jackets, sleeves, folders, books, cases, or just being used as coasters?

Do me a favor. Go buy a half-terabyte hard drive ($125) and a twenty-five dollar enclosure. Spend your money on something small and solid instead of spending it on the sixty-odd 8-gig disks for the 480 gig and countless hours of searching for lost discs that lie in your future. The $150 you spend will net you a paperback-sized paperweight to stick on top of your tv or desk, and you can put it in a bag and carry it with you for crying out loud.

When was the last time your hard drive had a sector error? Do you want to move all those disks onto a hard drive termporarily and then recopy them all to blue ray or HD disks or whatever flavour of the year we'll have for media in a year or two? Do you reall want to spend your time polishing them and using CD cleaner kits every time you sratch one and can't play a file? Or do you like opening up shoeboxes full of old disks and reminiscing about them like boomers and eight-tracks?

Is it really worth it to you to save a few bucks now for all the inconvenience it will cost you down the line? Do you want your kids to laugh at you in ten years because you have a ridiculously small hard drive with hundreds of low-res movies or would you prefer they ridicule you because you have hundreds of pieces of shiny outdated media, each with one lousy low-res movie on it...maybe...if you could just polish the thing the right way and find an old copy of VLC to play it...

And do you REALLY need to carry around 8 gigs of temporary files with you sometimes to give to a friend? Fine. If you do, buy an iPod or something and use it as an ancilliary hard drive, or just carry around a few flash sticks. Hell, they take up about as much room or less.

Enough soapboxing for now. That's all I wanted to say. Just my two cents worth for the environment.

Y'all excuse me now while I go and try to build a REALLY BIG Star Trek Phaser disk launcher.