Here's the current price per meg breakdown of different size drives out there.
SATA 250gb 170$ .68 200gb 120$ .6 160gb 90$ .5625 120gb 90$ .75 80gb 70$ .875 EIDE 250gb 157$ .628 200gb 101$ .505 160gb 70$ .4375 120gb 64$ .533
Looks like a RAID array of 160gb EIDE drives is the way to go. I much prefer the SATA ones, but the market has spoken.
Caught a fantastic short documentary, My Father's Son by Ben Van Hook and Eric Breitenbach. Like Dark Days by Marc Singer, except the filmmakers weren't homeless people themselves. Both movies are fascinating stories, however the way that Dark Days was made is a fascinating story of its own.
Here is my Mr. Picassohead creation, Rico Pensive. You can view other people's here.
Many of you may have heard me talk about an amazing essay I read a few years ago, talking about aesthetic design theory in robotics. Anyhow, I finally found the essay that describes Masahiro Mori's theory, and for anyone interested in seeing the original instead of my poor paraphrased version, check out The Uncanny Valley : Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating? by Dave Bryant.
If you haven't heard me rant about this, read the essay (it's short) and gain insight into how humans think
Wikipedia also has information on the Uncanny Valley
So I'm calling up my credit card companies today to try to iron out my bills and being out of the country for 2 months. I notice while I'm online at my credit card company a test charge from 3 days ago for 500 bucks from a merchant listed as PRO HOSTING out of MIDWAY, UT. Hmm, I think, I've never heard of this company. I call my credit card company, then I track down and call Pro Hosting. They look up the charge and it's for some website, chuongbill.com or something. Apparently whoever purchased the hosting contract had enough information to pass the credit card authorization with flying colors. The guy at Pro Hosting told me that for charges of this size though, they require a faxed copy of the front and back of the credit card (which is in my pocket as we speak). So thanks to good business practice at Pro Hosting, this test charge (when a merchant checks to see if you have enough funds to make a charge) never would have turned into a real fraudulent charge on my credit card. I called up my credit card company and canceled the card and started the fraud process (forms and stuff). So my conclusions. It's pretty exciting to have one's credit card, name, expiration, and address stolen (as long as it's caught in time) and proving me wrong about the state of affairs in the world, there are some companies out there like Pro Hosting, that have ethical business practices, like checking large purchases to prevent fraud.
The other theft today wasn't from me, but affected me. The backstory. Whenever I have to give my email address out to some company that I'm buying something from, or for whatever reason, I don't give them my real email address. I give them an email address with their company name in the address. For example, if I bought something from Acme Cement Company, I'd give them my email address of acme_cement_company_gene @ cementhorizon. Then I just set up my email to receive email from that address as well as my real one. The result is that if Evil Lacking in Ethics Cement Company sells my email address to a spammer, I'll begin getting spam sent to evil_lacking_in_ethics_cement_company_gene @ cementhorizon. This makes it very obvious who sold my address. This has happened twice before, with the company that I buy my Carhartts from, Walker's Farm Home and Track. I tried to get them to fix the situation but they were slouches. This morning I got a spam sent to electrexusa_gene @ cementhorizon. Electrex USA is a company that I bought a Honda VFR Motorcycle Regulator/Recitifier from a couple months ago (mine died on my way back from San Diego, leaving me stranded 35 miles outside of SLO). I emailed them this morning, forwarding the spam, and asking them why they suck so much. I got an email back that they're looking into it and then just received a phone call from a guy there apologizing and letting me know that they'd never sell addresses, and that he's contacting the spam company right now, trying to find out how they got electrex's email addresses. He's assuming that they must have been stolen somehow. My conclusions. Electrex is a real standup company. I was expecting the standard, shamed lack of response, from a company looking to make an extra buck on the side by selling out their customers, but I was wrong. Two instances in one day, of companies, on their own accord, having ethical concern for their customers. I'm just going to sit here and glow for the rest of the day.
