Where’s the peanut butter?!

A new ongoing series of ways I will some day lose money.

Not so recent bets, lost:
• Conan O’Brien is Canadian: $20 to Eric (Conan is from Boston)
• Jukeboxes have some queue randomization: $5 to Morgan, Katie, Tanya (the queues are mostly simply FIFO)
• Gore will win the election: $5 to Randall (a technicality?)

Recent bets, lost:
• Our kiwi will bloom by August 1: $5 to Tanya (August 1 has come and gone without any blooms)

Not so recent and recent bets, won (a comprehensive list):

Existing bets:
• Your roof will take more than 1 week to repair: $5 to Moshe (I took the too-pessimistic position that it will take about 3 weeks)

Chances are this tree is falling in an empty forest and you aren’t
reading my blog at all. But if you are, and if you’re reading the
version that you see online when you actually go to my webpage, you’ve
probably notices it is massively slow to load. “What gives?” you
probably aren’t asking. Well, it seems that the syndication to
publish the music I’ve most recently been listening to on last.fm (in
the left hand strip) is incredibly slow to populate and they don’t
nicely do a background update or anything slick like that. This is
*really* lame - especially since I haven’t had foobar hooked up with
audioscrobbler to publish what I’m listening to in a while so it
always comes back as an empty list. So should I ax that from showing
up? You help me decide…

Yahoo! I finally ordered the final components missing from my
RAID array. Months ago I ordered a RAID controller (the href="http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata8000.asp">3ware
8506-4LP from ebay for about $100), but at the time I didn’t want
to a) lay out the money for drives and b) struggle to figure out how
to cram it all into my computer. Well, today newegg had a pretty good
deal on drives (a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140">320GB
Seagate SATAII for $94.99 - it’s href="http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html">perpendicular!)
so I started researching the housing and cooling situation. A href="http://www.dvguru.com/2005/12/04/how-to-build-your-own-external-sata-raid-array-pt-4/">handy
reference from DVGuru.com recommends after getting your RAID
controller, get href="http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/SATACables.php">a PCI slot
SATA adapter, which lets you keep all your disks in an external
enclosure. Awesome! This is exactly what I wanted but did not know
existed. The only problem is that their recommended enclosure is from
a company that thinks they will win future customers by labeling past
customers href="http://www.resellerratings.com/seller1366.html">“IDIOTS
… RUDE, OBNOXIOUS and SELF-SERVING.” OK, so I don’t really want
to buy from them. A hour more surfing trying to find an enclosure
that is 1) cheap, 2) externally powered, 3) not powered by
experimental engines from Boeing, and 4) from a decent company and I
happily find the same place that’s selling the SATA adapter also has a
pretty decent looking href="http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/SATA_Mini.php">mini SATA
enclosure — and it comes with the external SATA cables! Sweet!
Now I just need to wait for it all to arrive and for only about $750
(and an incalculable but well-invested personal time), my href="http://www.psoul.com/index.cgi/computers/recovery.html">data
loss headaches should all be a thing of the past. I can’t hardly
wait!