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I’ve seen many harddrives come and go during my life-long fascination with computers. The first one I used was 30MB, the first one I bought with my own money was an 850MB Conner (remember them?). I even had a classic of HD history, the IBM Deathstar, and mine did end up failing in the classic way.

I stopped stressing so much about storage when I built a 3x120GB array when we moved to California. The idea was to have a bit of redundancy (I used RAID 5 for parity information) and enough storage (actually only 240GB, you lose one disk worth of capacity to get the redundancy). It wasn’t cheap, but also didn’t cost that much and I was able to build an all-purpose Linux file server and router/firewall.

Well believe it or not, It’s been over two years since I built that thing and I was at about 80% capacity with more files coming all the time. Luckily, a hard drive fairy from heaven gave me 4 gently used 250GB Hitachi 7K250 drives. I paired these with a super-cheap four-port SATA card (no fancy hardware RAID or anything) and using the great software RAID setup on Linux, brought the 1 terabyte beast to life:

This pic is from the somewhat painful process of getting my data from the old array onto the new one. Since I only have 3 PCI slots on the board, and they were all occupied, I had to give up internet access by pulling out the NIC while I was doing the transfer. Even better, I had to buy multiple power splitters to get all seven drives going at once. Now the new drives are tucked away neatly and the old 120GB PATA drives are moping in the closet. Of course, I had to sacrifice one drive’s worth of storage to redundancy info, but 750GB is still nothing to sneeze at. Now I’ve got a place to stash all those dual-layered DVDs from netflix until blanks come down in price a bit.

Yes, it has come to this. To comment on overt now you have to prove that you’re not a machine. I’m using both one of those type-in-code thingys and also running comments through Spamassassin. Always with the arms race, naughty little spammers.

George is in town and we had an action-packed weekend. We kicked things off Friday with a trip in to San Francisco to visit Toronado, a bar that is close to the hearts of Doug and Nelson. It had an amazing selection of beer, which was awesome, but according to some law of bars they continually turned up the music from about 9pm when I got there until 11:30 when I left, at which point it was almost intolerably loud.

On Sunday we went to the dia de los muertos festival in Fruitvale (a neighborhood in Oakland), saw altars, ate greasy food, had a good time all around. Here are some skulls that kids made of their favorite dead (note 2pac):

On Halloween itself we girded ourselves for one more trip… this time to the infamous (and gigantic) Halloween party in the Castro. We went a bit early, had dinner and plenty of margaritas at the excellent, very Texas-feeling Puerto Alegre in the Mission, then headed to the Castro for the madness. There are some pics up on gallery, but I’ll leave you with a pic of my lame costume (some sort of scary pink rabbit creature, don’t ask me:

It’s not exactly Mario Drama, but it still tickles my fancy.

Just to let everyone know I’m still carrying the torch, check out this article in the New York Times about what Wal-Mart is doing to help alleviate the health-care crisis in the US (you have to register or just use bugmenot:

An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer’s reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

Also choice: “workers with seven years’ seniority earn more than workers with one year’s seniority, but are no more productive.” Yes! It’s all about loyalty in the end.