Entries from January 2004 ↓

I had a really bizarre dream last night. What’s so strange about it is not that it was weird — all dreams are weird — but that I remember this much of it, 24 hours later.
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I created a website for two of my friends from college, Shaun and Amanda. They’re getting married in July. Amanda’s a graphic designer and she designed their “Save the Date” card, which looks fantastic! So I used the colors and graphical elements from her design, which made the website look pretty great. It was easy since she had already chosen a color scheme and everything. And the website is 100% standards-compliant too

I just learned that there was a small gathering of people on January 2nd for a memorial to my friend Marcie Shields. She passed away one year ago on the 2nd. There are a few photos available in the photo album.

Yay, I got my mobile phone number transferred to T-Mobile without any problems. Other than Sprint PCS ripping me off, as I mentioned last month.

Litigious bastards.

I’m looking at hard drive specifications, and I noticed that the 160GB Seagate hard drive has the following features: “350 Gs non-op shock, 3D Defense System”. I assume 350 G’s means that if you drop it out of an airplane (or at least off a desk) it will still work, as long as it’s not in operation at the time, which is quite cool. But what does a “3D Defense System” on a hard drive do, and will it result in accidents like this?

Today’s Washington Post contained an interesting article predicting that President Bush plans to significantly increase the U.S. committment to space exploration. Next week Bush is expected to call for a manned settlement on the moon, using that as a stepping stone for a manned mission to Mars.

In the meantime, the Congressional Budget Office announced today that last quarter’s budget deficit was $126 billion. If that rate continues, the entire deficit for fiscal year 2004 will be about $500 billion. A half trillion dollars in one year.

I’m all in favor of space exploration. Hell, I went to Space Camp when I was 11. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone!) I think a permanent colony on the moon would be damn cool. But does Bush have any sense of priority here? Bush reminds me of the college student that ends up with $20,000 in credit card debt… or the lottery winner that blows $18 million in 8 years.

And where are all the “conservatives” who were up in arms about supposedly reckless budgeting under Clinton? The deficit started at $255 billion — half the 2004 deficit — during Clinton’s first year in office, and declined every year after that. If Republican voters were so outraged at the size of that deficit, shouldn’t they be even more outraged now?

How do people partition their hard drives these days? I’m getting a new 120GB drive. It seems a bit large and I don’t know what to do with it. Right now on my 60GB drive, I think I’ve got something like 20GB for my C:\ drive, 16GB for MP3s, and 16GB for “Archives” (downloads, multimedia crap, etc.), and 8GB set aside for Linux.

On the one hand, I’m thinking one big partition might be the way to go. (Except Linux.) I shouldn’t limit myself to exactly 16GB of MP3s or downloads. But could I get better performance by splitting things up, or would it keep me more organized?

I haven’t been using Linux recently, but I still want to dual-boot Windows XP and Linux. If I dual-boot with Linux, I’d like to keep all my data on a partition that will work under both operating systems. That way my documents are always available, my music is available, and so on, no matter which operating system I’m in. But Linux doesn’t support NTFS fully. They were getting close back when NT 4.0 was popular, but then Microsoft released Win2k which completely changed the NTFS structure. So right now they only support NTFS as read-only, and I think they’ve decided it’s too big of a task to try any further. So FAT32 seems like the only way to share the data on one computer.

(There are also drivers which give you full access to a Linux partition from Windows. I could store my data on a partition formatted with one of the Linux disk formats, ext2 and ext3. Presumably those would work well because those formats are well-documented for open source programmers. But when I tried some of those drivers before, they seemed very experimental and risky. I don’t trust that.)

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed? This must be an issue that’s encountered frequently by Linux converts.