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Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Definition of Excitement at My House

One day last week, we came home to find that one of JJ's computers had crashed. It was dead. It just made a fun clicking noise when we tried to turn it on. Now, for most families this would be a serious issue, but I am married to King of the Nerds. (He knows I call him that. He was the Scholastic Bowl Team Captain in High School. His degree is in computer science. He embraces his nerdom, as do I.)
After JJ took the computer apart, and discovered that it was completely dead, not "mostly dead," he kind of got excited. He hopped online and ordered a new hard drive and some external storage. Woot! This is serious fun for us (read: him.) He was a little sad when it was supposed to take a whole week to get here. But, it got here sooner than that and totally made his day.
Here it is, in all its glory. This is the external storage unit that will save all of my pictures and music library if (and when) my laptop goes down.


Kind of anti-clamatic, huh? I was expecting something massive, with lots of blinking lights and whirring and whooshing sounds. We affectionately refer to it as "The Toaster." JJ says things like, "The toaster is up and running" or "The toaster is working hard." I smile and nod. I understand getting all excited about things that no one else really cares about (like pens.)
As one last-ditch effort to save some data off of the old hard drive, JJ tried freezing it. Have you ever had a hard drive in your freezer? I hadn't either until this weekend. He did warn me that it was there so I wasn't too confused when I opened the freezer door. Sadly, the effort didn't work, and we lost about a month's worth of data. Lesson learned: Back up more often. And it never hurts to have a "toaster."
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3 comments:

  1. I thought it WAS a toaster when I first saw the picture. How big is it? Did I tell you I got a whole terabyte worth of external memory? Who the hell needs that much space? Apparently I do.

    And you know, people have had weirder things in their freezers, like dead pets.

    P.S. I appreciated The Princess Bride reference.

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  2. It's actually smaller than a toaster. And it has 3 terabytes split into two 1.5 terabyte mirror images so that if one fails, the other has its back. Nerd Alert, nerd alert.

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  3. This makes me smile, because my hubby is also a nerd : ) and would react the same as Jason. We actually have 3 hard drives in the same computer, 2 of which are mirrored. Yep, I even have the nerd lingo down. We also have super powerful magnets on our fridge from the last hard drive he dissected for fun. (they are great magnets, you should take them out of the hard drive before getting rid of the old thing.) And as a side note, we have had many a dead fish in the freezer to return to petsmart.

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