The Time Sink

Hmmm... Long day. Long evening... One done crossword puzzle...

Well, now... If you've been keeping score, I'm behind a post or three. So far the HDD upgrade story, the Shuttle saga and adventures in connectivity seem to be missing from these pages. Hmm...

Remember when a very early step of the HDD upgrade process was to toss the 'utilities' diskette/CD over your shoulder and get down with the ever reliable FDisk? Yeah, well... Just for the record, Maxtor's latest incarnation of MaxBlast is tres cool. Seriously!

I found out the hard (easy?) way when I went in to upgrade Brad's machine in the Christmas aftermath: his new Madden 2004 game needed 900 meg to move around in... Yeah... Hand typing stuff into the Vic-20 and saving it to cassette... Anyway, his old drive was showing up as a 2 gig job, so I figured 40 gigs of 7200 rpm ought to hold him for a few (yeah, months, not years). ...but when I got in there, I found a 40gig Western Digital. WT??? A cast off? ...and not formatted for Large Drive? WT??? Who knows... I do recall his original install being stopped and started a few dozen times and stretching out over months...

Okay, so we toss in the new one and keep the old one for a files spindle? Sure. ...but what about these very interesting instructions about "moving programs from the old drive to the new"? ...and the bit about swapping the cable positions when you're done. Hmmm... What the heck, neither of us cared about the contents, and Brad was primed for a new install. So, I tossed the CD in the cup holder and sat back. ...and watched the blasted thing move his entire HDD, OS and all, to the new spindle. ...and show me a graphic about how to change the jumpers to swap the master and slave drives (PC? Not close.) ...and then it let me go in and redo the old drive as 40 gigs worth of storage in a couple of partitions. Very cool. ...and very inexpensive compared to commercial cloning and drive migration packages. Who knew?

...and then the fun part: I took the software out to the Win2k box. I have an outboard USB HDD case I use to check the contents of old drives with. ...and I'd tossed a new drive in it one day, but I'd forgotten to format it first. ...and while the Win2k OS could tell me the exact drive in the case, it didn't really care to do anything about partitioning it or formatting it or really anything. I ran the MaxBlast software against it. Instant success. Very cool.

...and I'm not suggesting anything, but I will point out that Office Depot has 80 gigs worth of 7200 rpm drive (8mb cache) for $109 this week. ...and $60 worth of rebates as I recall. Just a thought...

70F here today. ...and of course this had to be the day this week I'd decided to use for the heavy supply runs <g>! Quite a change from frozen mornings just a few days ago...

Well, the asshats are at it again, this time scamming AT&T Worldnet customers...

Oh, yeah, this one is a step up from the eBay scam from the other week: the link is live in this one and pops you to port 1881 on a telcom server in Korea (source available if you're into this sort of thing). There you get a page that looks remarkably like Worldnet's user pages with the usual logos and graphics and such. ...and once again a validating form for you to kindly dump your credit card information their way.

Things are easy enough to check on though, a quick call to Worldnet's tech support (you do have your ISP's number handy, don't you?) and I found the main message had been replaced with a warning about this scam. But I can't help but think about Aunt Minnie...

AT&T has apparently taken the step of blocking the IP from those who access through their dial-up (and maybe their chunk of the backbone?), but I hit it easily from work.

...and let's face reality here folks, if they are done with eBay and Worldnet, your ISP is ripe for the plucking too. How many of you have an address such as yourname@msn.com or cox.net or rr.com. Short version: just expect this stuff and report it when it shows up. Early detection helps the service providers...

Hey!!! Guess who posted? Yeah, go read her instead...

Well, we'll just call this weekend done. Shelley and I have both been a little under the weather since late in the week, but it looks like we're pulling out of it okay. Having playoff games to fall asleep during has helped <g>. We'll see how my stamina is on my return to work; Shelley is taking a day off from subbing to run errands and catch up with what she missed.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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