Through the glass eye

Hello, web site. I'm sorry I haven't been around lately. I've been spending a lot of time with that other site, the one that I get paid to work on. Ah yes, working from home is great except when you can't find time for it. I should be able to, but I have too much other stuff to explore. The computer is my playground, the Internet my sandbox. (The command line? Definitely the monkey bars.)

Next Tuesday (i.e., not this coming Tuesday but the one after it), I'll be going to Europe. Have I been preparing? I have. There's still some stuff to be done, but I've gotten things out of the way. I'm borrowing a large backpack, and my friend Andy and I already bought a netbook for traveling with. I don't expect to fall in love with it during the course of the trip,* and I don't think he will either, so our plan is to sell it when we get back.

I've also been accumulating some generally useful things that I'll want to keep when it's over. The main one I can think of right now is a memory card for my digital camera. When I got the camera in 2004, it came with a 16 MB card, which was virtually useless. I bought a 128 MB card along with it, and that has served me well for almost five years, allowing me to take roughly 64 to 72 photos at a time.

Since Europe is full of fantastic sights, I thought an upgrade would be deserved. I picked up a new 1 GB memory card on the cheap at a failing camera store. It should be good for at least 500 photos at a time. To put that in perspective, that's more pictures than I've taken since the beginning of last year. And because there's a good chance I'll take more than 500 pictures, I'll be relying on my trusty 8 GB flash drive that I recently picked up on the cheap from a failing electronics store. My new netbook has less than 2 GB of free space.

So what if I take more than 8 GB worth of photos? As ridiculous as the question seems, it has crossed my mind. Whenever I try to think about the logistics of storing 8 GB worth of photos, I suddenly remember how incredibly ridiculous it is, which saves me from having to think about it any longer. The flash drive is actually 8 hard-drive-vendor's gigabytes, i.e., about 7.5 actual gigabytes. All of the digital photos I've ever taken—4,150 between December 25, 2002, and May 3, 2009—add up to 6.2 GB. I think I'm good.

That said, in case I do take more than 7.5 GB worth of photos, I would probably upload them to my web space, where they would cost at least 10 cents an hour to store, and wait for my family to download them, which would cost me at least $2.50. Not too bad, I guess.

Okay, that's enough math. Now, the links.

Google has oodles of servers, but like many large companies, has never talked much about them... until now. They're pretty amazing little things that have battery backups in case the power goes out. (Via The Presurfer)

The Free Music Archive is my kind of thing: it aims to be an "interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads." The music is released under Creative Commons licenses and other licenses that allow sharing.

From another blog, it's a continually updated collection of negative Amazon reviews of classic books, movies, and albums: You Can't Please Everyone. (Via J-Walk Blog)

*subject to change