Ranting to /dev/null

Leeching

Yeah, so I bagged switching to Linux. Not because I wanted to, but because I'm moving to New York in about a week and realized about a week before that that I wasn't going to have Gentoo working by the time I needed it to work. So I popped my old hard drive with XP installed on it and I'm back up. Pretty painless in one sense, absolutely excruciating in another. Oh well.

The unexpected side affect of all of this is that I had to format the disk on which my music collection resided. I wound up losing about 10GB of good stuff, most of it recently added, as my last backup was at the end of last summer. Most of my Dylan, Sufjan Stevens, Sun Kil Moon, Death Cab, Iron and Wine, Tom Waits, some really amazing stuff. So that was bad. I also found while copying from my backup CDs to my new setup that they don't necessarily hold up all that well. We're looking at a 2-3% failure rate in under two years. I'm underwhelmed. Granted, I did have these discs in my car for use in a mp3 player, but some of the discs that failed had probably never been read until today. Bummer.

But there is an upside. First, the reason I formatted my drive is that I configured it into a new SATA RAID array with another disk, meaning I've not got 240GB of really, really fast storage. The other thing is that P2P still works, and I've managed to leech about 7GB in the last 36 hours, and copy most of my backups onto the new drive, so I'm almost back to where I was. Once I am, I'll ditch the 250-300 CDs that the backup took (one artist per disc) and drop down to about 12 DVDs. Yay.