Whizzing electrons

It’s not all death and chocolate chip cookies around here (though it’s plenty of that) — there is also computer and cultural geekery. On the computer front, I got tired of Photoshop and SoundStudio telling me “scratch disk full” and took the plunge to replace one of the Mac’s internal hard drives with bigger! shinier! faster! Took a 30GB and replaced it with a 120GB drive, which means I can stop pruning down my iTunes and iPhoto libraries, and could even store some GarageBand stuff if I liked. iPhoto has the annoying setup of copying all photos to its own library, so it will always waste copious amounts of space, but now I can afford to keep my pictures on my hard drive. So now that the G4 would have 180 gigs on it total, My 120 gig backup drive would be too small, so I got a honking big backup drive that’s physically smaller than my old one and can back up all three of our computers. That leaves me with a nice size removable that can be used just for moving records onto vinyl — wahoo! One more step in all this — put the old 30GB drive into the iMac, which will give the kids an extra 10GB to play around with. For some reason those old iMacs won’t see more than 30GB, so I can’t make it bigger.

Cultural geekery? I got satellite radio, baby. You heard me right: I’m a huge Howard Stern fan. However, I love having all the music channels, comedy, BBC World Service, and even some NPR programming at my fingertips. Yesterday, I listened to Little Steven’s Underground Garage channel all day, and never had to leap across the room to change the channel once (well, they gave me a remote, so the leap would not be necessary, but still). Anyone who can mix The Beatles, some Stones I’ve never heard, the Everly Brothers, Stiv Bator, Los Straitjackets and The Fleshtones completely gets where I’m coming from.

Further geekery? Went with the Girl Scouts to see the premiere of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” last night. Thought it was excellent, just excellent — as all the movies have been — though the girls lamented things that had been left out, and I certainly could have done with a little more Fleur Delacroix myself. The movie was not even spoiled by the incessant talking by a father and son behind me who were broadcasting the name of every new character and place in the movie, and who made sure they lifted their voices above the soundtrack if it happened to get loud. Very thoughtful of them.