Moore's Law is my friend...

... including its variants for other dimensions of computing. In this case, storage.

The CD of MP3s I'm currently burning is the one that will break the camel's back. For a long time now, I've been gradually ripping our CD collection to MP3, to listen to it on the iPod. This was a very slow process previously, but now that I'm working less than ten feet from the CD collection it's accelerated a lot -- I'm rating and ripping around four discs a day.

Last week I synch'ed the iPod, and realized that it was finally at capacity: there isn't room for another tranche of music. So msmemory got me, for a birthday present, a new iPod, which arrived yesterday. It's not a Touch, it's not an iPhone, and it's not a teeny-weeny Nano -- indeed, it looks just like my old iPod, except that the new one is black. But the new one has a preposterously huge 160 Gig hard drive in it: enough to hold our entire CD collection, plus a few movies should they strike my fancy.

Happiness is the right tool for the job -- this thing should have enough capacity to keep me for years. But a part of me is kind of boggled, when I think back to the boat-anchor-sized 5 Meg drive I started college with, and compare it with this pocket-sized gargantua...

Moore's Law is my friend...

... including its variants for other dimensions of computing. In this case, storage.

The CD of MP3s I'm currently burning is the one that will break the camel's back. For a long time now, I've been gradually ripping our CD collection to MP3, to listen to it on the iPod. This was a very slow process previously, but now that I'm working less than ten feet from the CD collection it's accelerated a lot -- I'm rating and ripping around four discs a day.

Last week I synch'ed the iPod, and realized that it was finally at capacity: there isn't room for another tranche of music. So msmemory got me, for a birthday present, a new iPod, which arrived yesterday. It's not a Touch, it's not an iPhone, and it's not a teeny-weeny Nano -- indeed, it looks just like my old iPod, except that the new one is black. But the new one has a preposterously huge 160 Gig hard drive in it: enough to hold our entire CD collection, plus a few movies should they strike my fancy.

Happiness is the right tool for the job -- this thing should have enough capacity to keep me for years. But a part of me is kind of boggled, when I think back to the boat-anchor-sized 5 Meg drive I started college with, and compare it with this pocket-sized gargantua...

Signal-boosting for Where the Hell is Matt?

I *suspect* that everyone else has seen this by now, but having just gotten up to it myself (thanks to siderea for pointing it out), I commend the beautiful video of Where the Hell is Matt?. Very simple concept, but it manages to cover the concept of "world" better than anything I've seen in quite a while. (The song can be found on Amazon.)

It does manage to express the power of modern Internet word-of-mouth. The video's apparently been watched almost half a million times in the past five days, and the song has shot to #14 on Amazon in the same time. When you have the right thing at the right time, the Net can deal with the publicity...

Signal-boosting for Where the Hell is Matt?

I *suspect* that everyone else has seen this by now, but having just gotten up to it myself (thanks to siderea for pointing it out), I commend the beautiful video of Where the Hell is Matt?. Very simple concept, but it manages to cover the concept of "world" better than anything I've seen in quite a while. (The song can be found on Amazon.)

It does manage to express the power of modern Internet word-of-mouth. The video's apparently been watched almost half a million times in the past five days, and the song has shot to #14 on Amazon in the same time. When you have the right thing at the right time, the Net can deal with the publicity...

And while I'm recommending bite-size media at you...

Alison Bechdel (author of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For) got asked by Entertainment Weekly to do a 4-page comic story for their 1000th issue. She's posted it in her blog, and I recommend it -- albeit with a trace of irony, since it is on the way that reading becomes a lot less fun when it's pushed at you...

And while I'm recommending bite-size media at you...

Alison Bechdel (author of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For) got asked by Entertainment Weekly to do a 4-page comic story for their 1000th issue. She's posted it in her blog, and I recommend it -- albeit with a trace of irony, since it is on the way that reading becomes a lot less fun when it's pushed at you...