geek girl at your service

technology is pretty freaking amazing...as some of you know, i've been obsessed with streamlining and backing up all of my pictures and music for a couple of months now. two essentials of the easy life...must have music and i'm sure i will want to look back and laugh at all of the ridiculous things going on in my life that have been recorded on film.

first the pictures. i take a MINIMUM of 3 pictures of anything i see fit to capture on film. i may take it from a different angle, closer or further away, whatever - i simply must get more than one shot of it, because you never know. considering that i have been taking pictures almost daily for about 15 years and upload them ALL to my computer (in order to select THE VERY BEST ONE [and you are not it]) about once a week...i have an assload of pictures on my computer. not only do i have an assload (if you haven't seen my particular ass lately, believe me - there is mass potential for a LOT of freakin pictures!) of original pictures on my hard drive; i have multiple copies of the assload of pictures on my hard drive. i am a maniac about making sure i never lose a picture. if i crop a picture, i save it as "rs" for resized; if i remove the color or enhance the color of a picture, i save it as "adj" for adjusted; if i rotate a picture, yes...i save it as "rote" for rotated. all of this in addition to saving the original as it came off of my camera. i am a freak. you would think with all of this "organization", i would have it goin on in the My Pictures folder arena. that would be well...just silly. i don't organize anthing else in my life...why start here?

my plan (grandiose, i admit) was to find every freakin picture on my hard drive, consolidate, delete copies and organize them IN ONE PLACE. i spent about an entire week doing this and thought i was really making some progress. after dumping what had to amount to about 10,000 pictures, i figured i had freed up at least 30-40% of my hard drive. nope...11%. WTF? upon further inspection, i found an entire area of yes, more pictures. some copies of what i had already found, some i hadn't seen in 10 years and forgotten i had even taken. ("holy crap! can you even believe i was ever than thin? friggen BURN that sucker, must. destroy. all. evidence."). so i'm kinda back to square one and still stressing about "what if my 8 year old hard drive desides to take a dump and flushes the last 15 years of my life down the toilet?"...

moving on to the music. i am retardedly obsessive about my music. i would more than likely puddle up in a corner and simply cry myself to death if my music were to just go away one day. (yea, i know - "she wasn't even THAT concerned about losing the irreplaceable photo records of her children" whatEVER!). so anyway, i use itunes and love it, but was having trouble figuring out how to back up my library of 2000+ songs without using up 150 blank cd's and six months of my life. so i've put it off and put it off, and again with the putting it off. most of the music could be replaced as about 70% is off of the billion cd's i have collected over the years - but hell, that was a LOT of work getting them on there, i don't wanna do that again. the other 30% is purchased online or borrowed from people i may or may not hang out with now that i don't need to use them for their music. (kidding.) bottom line - i need to back up my music.

so i'm tripping around costco yesterday...i have a list, but never stick to it anyway, so why do i bother? i head down the electronics aisle, you know...just to see what is there, and what jumps out and trips me in the aisle in an attempt to get me to stop???

say it with me:

External
Hard
Drive

(and as the Heavens above open up and the sunlight fills the dark and dreary warehouse store, i hear angels singing at the top of their little angel lungs..."HALLELUJAH, hallelujah-hallelujah, HAL-LE-LOO-YAHH!")

oh good Lord, this is the answer i've been searching for. and the choices are endless...if i purchase say, a 160gb EHD (oh yea, i'm that cool now), i can store a combination of up to approximately 45,000 songs and/or photos. all of this for a mere $120 (which i really didn't have, but damn...how can i NOT afford this gadget, i ask you?) (oh and SEE how much money i saved over the website's price {$169.99}- PLUS, i got the carrying case {$19.99} and the cable {$9.99} FREE!). this particular one is portable (so cool) and small (about 5"x3")...oooh-wee go me!

ok, ok - enough drama. i bought it with only about a 10 minute hesitation, raced home and started moving shit around. started with my music (DONE!) as that is the most organized and plan on finishing up my photos next week. once everything is safely backed up, i can remove all these freakin pictures from my lil 45gb desktop hard drive and hopefully stop it from freezing up on me if i happen to be instant messaging leaf at the same time that an email tries to come through. maybe extend it's life another year or two (if, in no other way, than by keeping me from smashing it through the french doors the next time it tries to fuck with me while i'm PMS'ing). my original itunes library will stay on my desktop cause i listen to it there quite often, but i will no longer have to wake up in a night sweat from the reocurring nightmare that portrays a giant manatee eating my computer and forcing me to watch it poop out what is left of my music files (oh and those pictures of the kids too, yea...of course). i really need no other causes for those lovely night sweats - mother nature is handling that just fine.