January 10, 2005

I'd have to say that my favorite upgrade for a computer has to be 
storage.  My wife and I recently purchased 160GB drive, which is what I 
think I said in and ealier posting.  I never imagined I would have this 
much space.  The most wonderful part of storage is filling it up.  In 
real life, I am quite the packrat; I get sad when I throw away a box 
that somthing came in.  I think I'm still holding on to my college 
backpack that no longer has any working zippers because of an unnatural 
emotional attachment to it.  The problem with keeping things like empty 
boxes and broken staplers is that they take up space.   I've upgraded my 
"space" a few times, moving from dorm to apartment shared with four 
others to apartment with only one roomate to house, but I've pretty much 
plateaued, so I cannot collect more crap without disposing of my old 
pencil tray and a non-working Commodore monitor.  

I'm just as bad with computer storage.  To this day my Eudora (version 
1, believe it or not) has messages dated 1997 in the inbox.  I think the 
mail folder is up around 50MB or so at this point.  When I first got my 
own IBM PC in 1996 with a 1GB drive, that might have seemed too large, 
but, thankfully, computer storage upgrades are cheap.  So I've managed 
to keep around every file that even has the slightest bit of 
significance to me, from school papers written freshman year (in 1996) 
to an explicit picture of my friend having sex with a book drawn by my 
best man at my bachelor party using paintbrush.  Everytime I get a new 
hard disk, everything from the old one gets transfered to the new one, 
and the old one goes into storage to ensure that my wonderful collection 
of crap will remain at least partially safe.

Luckily, I'm yet to have a complete hard disk failure on any of my 
primary machines ;-).

Adios,
Jeff 
.