about five days ago, my hard drive started clicking at me. i run my whole life on an apple iBook 600 that i purchased in march of last year. it's totally changed my routine, too. the way i write, the way i listen to music, the way i trade live music; all of that was revolutionized when i set up a desk in my spare room and plunked the laptop on top of it.
so now the hard drive is failing. i've asked some mac-geek friends for advice, and they have all told me the same thing: back up all of your data NOW. the iBook only has a 20GB hard drive on it, so i've been feeling the itch for additional storage for the last few months. i've just never made the leap. today, i walked up to compusa on my lunch break and bought a firewire hard drive. i also had two conversations with the employees of the store, both of which were inane and involved vaguely threatening language. i asked the girl working the hard drive counter to explain their rebate program to me. she clucked her tongue and rattled off the steps of the procedure in a flurry of words that i couldn't decipher. i just sort of nodded and moved along to the checkout line. the girl at the checkout counter gave me the hard sell on the compusa hard drive warranty. i told her i wasn't interested, and she started insulting my intelligence by heartily stating facts and figures (obviously memorized long ago) about hard drive failure and the warranty policies of the manufacturer. i said i wasn't interested. she asked me if i knew what i was getting myself into by not purchasing the warranty. i said i wasn't interested.
since the computer began to show signs of imminent death, i've been treating it as though the disk had already failed. fearful of even turning the machine lest it sap even more life from its own short span, i've been filling my schedule with activities other than writing, working on my photographs, and downloading music. i read another forty pages in the murakami book i've been picking at for a month. i also went through my recent record purchases and made some new minidisc mixes.
oddly, it took the death of my closest inanimate companion to force me to realize exactly how much music i've bought in the last five months. i buy records, bring them home, and listen to them while i hop onto the computer to download music. it's a cycle that never ends. i'm constantly buried in burned discs of live shows and all kinds of vinyl LPs that i listen to once or twice before they get filed in the shelf. two nights ago, i actually listened to six or seven records while i read in my armchair. it was a great reminder to not let my hobbies take over my life.
tomorrow, i'll be riding the caltrain down to burlingame to drop off the machine for repairs. and i'll be bringing my book to read on the half hour trip. the same book i am now enjoying nightly. thanks, broken hard drive!
Posted by snackfight at November 19, 2003 03:10 PM