threehundred gig aleph
After having succesfully implemented measures against the plague invading my cyberanthropologist’s hut, I was so elated that I started to realize my plan to enlarge the private parts of my hut by an appendix. Meaning that I wanted some mass-storage device featuring decent read and write speed and with enough space to really organize my material. Of course, I definitely need a godbox for my project—mainly working on a laptop soon won’t be feasible anymore—but I need another solution before I get my thoughts together concerning the right parts of the godbox [this still can take ages].So this morning I went out, entered a large computer-store and haunted the storage-devices shelves. Finally I opted for a 300GB external HDD [the terabyte-thingie they had on display definitely was too costly], which connects via USB 2.0. Aluminium-encased 300GB for 159,- Euros is not too bad, I think. Immediately after the purchase I dragged the HDD to the office and went to work … you guessed it—I spent the better of the day on trying to install the thing. As always there is the promise of plug’n’play. Forget it. The plug part works, but the play neither worked on the laptop (XP), nor on the desktop (Win2K). Research on the Internet only proved that a lot of other people experience similar problems. Again lots of proposals for solutions. Some quite over-the-top, like fucking around a lot inside the registry … to install a plug’n’play peripheral!—can’t be arsed to do that. The manufacturers website only features a .pdf-version of the manual of which a hardcopy is included in the box, and a Win98-driver (which already is included in the box, too). The hotline, as every hotline, of course is unreachable. After having tinkered around for an hour or two I was close to carrying the HDD back to the shop. Just in time a very last thought occured to me: I already had unplugged every other USB-device, except one: my ↵new snake. Unplugging the mouse, replugging the HDD … now it works like a charm. That’s the meaning of plug’n’play: pull all plugs, fool around with all your cables a bit, plug in only one, and only one! device, then maybe play. I’ll play now.
The title of this entry? “threehundred gig aleph”? “aleph”? wtf? It’s taken from ↑William Gibson‘s novel ↵Mona Lisa Overdrive:
Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing’s storage capacity was virtually infinite; it would’ve been unthinkably expensive to manufacture. It was, Gentry said, a fairly strange thing for anyone to have built at all, although such things were rumored to exist and to have their uses, most particularly in the storage of vast amounts of confidential data. With no link to the global matrix, the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace. The catch, of course, was that you couldn’t access it via the matrix; it was dead storage.
“He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. “A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs …”
