Fucking technology needs to get off my lawn

OK, I’m officially old.

OLD.

For example: My trip to Cedar Point was great, but shit, I sure did feel broken after it. When I go to sleep at 9:30 because I’m so tired from WALKING AND DRIVING, that’s fucking old.

But that’s just a side note to my tale today. It’s not the major reason I feel old right now. I feel old because I don’t feel like working black magics with my computar machiene anymore. When that tree went down and broke my power/cable lines about a week ago, I think it broked my hard drives. Right now, I have close to half of my hard drive space marked off as having bad sectors and is unusable. This of course means I need new drives. I could keep using the good parts of these drives, but I don’t really trust them. And backing up a fuckton of shit onto DVDs at a 2x burn rate cause that same incident seems to have broken my DVD burner is not an experience I’d like to repeat. Ever.

I got a new DVD burner, a Poineer something or other that was $40, so that’s one problem solved. But now I have to replace my hard drives. I had a pair of Maxtors, a 250 GB and a 300 GB. That’s way more space than I actually need, since if I installed all my programs and games and saved all my music to the 250 GB, I’d still have at least 75 GB free. If I wanted to, I could buy one of those 750 GB drives Seagate just released (thanks Uncle Sam!), but why the fuck am I gonna spend that much on a hard drive, let alone for space that I don’t need. Hell, I got by fine with my 20 GB+120 GB drives for several years just fine. I only replaced them because the 20 GB (Maxtor) was noisy as hell and the 120 GB (Western Digital) was failing.

Oh, how I pine for my now corrupted hard drives. I got my half TB of space on sale for a combined total of around $220. I loved having infinite space to throw a bunch of disc images on, or rip wav files to, or store DVD and TV show rips on and still have tons of empty space left over. That empty space, while serving no useful function, was like a security blanket. But now…

Now, I don’t care. I don’t want to deal with computer problems anymore. I have the cash to build an entirely new box if I want, but I just haven’t been motivated to do it. There was a time when I would jump at the opportunity to put together a new machine. Now, I just sit and sigh, weary of failing hardware and my piss poor luck with most hardware. To my left is my dresser. In the middle drawer are three optical drives, all either non-functional or on their way to becoming non-functional. I think one of them might actually still be good, just slow because it’s so old. I have old video cards, hard drives, infinite cables, screws, breakout boxes, floppy drives, and other computer junk scattered about my domain…

and now I’m not sure where I was going with that. In fact, I’m not sure where I’m going with any of this. Great, now I’m old and senile.

Anyway, I’m thinking I’m gonna pick up two hard drives in the 200-300 gig range, since they can be had for around $80-100. In addition, I’m going to get one of those external hard drive enclosures. I’ll put one drive in the computer and the other in the enclosure and back all my shit up every couple of weeks. That way, restoring lost data won’t make me die inside. The external drive can sit in a nice, out of the way place, safe from the evil of electricity suddenly turning on and off rapidly, causing the drive heads to go apeshit and eat my data. Not that I know anything about that.

Maybe one day, in my golden years, I’ll look back on this time with fondness and it’ll inspire me to make that HTPC with enough space to record a bunch of shows and also to store all my DVDs on it and add enough space to my main computer so that I’ll be able to store FLAC files on it instead of my broke ass reprocessed .mp3s salvaged from my iRiver. Hey, a man’s gotta have dreams.

PS: I hit up hotdeals.org yesterday, and their “hot deal” on a 250 gig Seagate hard drive was retarded. They had a link to buy.com for it for $88, and both newegg and zipzoomfly were selling it for the same price. How is it a hot deal if retailer x has a sale that lowers their price for a product to be even with their competitors’ normal price for said product? As time goes by, I grow weary of that site as well. Their hot deals are not what they used to be.