Michael's Weblog

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<soapbox>
Cell phones run most people's lives days. But--Do they ruin it or make it better? I like the free long distance and the fact that I can call a tow truck if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. That's about it though. I hate having to carry them around. My blackberry is just too big especially when it's paired with my personal cell phone (which may get ditched soon). They make it too easy for people like my sister, for example, to call home (although I like hearing from some of the people I currently know in college--darn double edged sword). When kids are at college (I guess they would prefer to be called young adults), vacation, retreats, or summer camp their life back home is only a button away. On a side note, I've done a few things with the church youth group here and they do a decent job of keeping the cell phone talk to a minimum--it's nice to be a chaperon because you can have one and flaunt it in front of them :) (not that I would do that). I feel like cell phones must take away from what you gain in these circumstances. It's time to get away and take a break from your comfort zone and experience something new. Make new friends..yada yada. Of course I guess it's also good that you don't lose the connection with your friends from home. I've only seen/talked to one of my close pre-college friends since I moved back..and that was for all of two seconds. Most of them don't live here anymore so that doesn't help.
</soapbox>

For those of you that care about computers: It was quite the experience, but I was able to to get the RAID set up, recognized by windows, and formatted. I actually had to find a floppy drive and install it to get the RAID working (although looking back I may not have needed it). BTW, in case you forgot, floppy drives are slow! Now I'm working on repartitioning all of my other drives into single partitions. I think the reason my hd failed the other day was because it was still using FAT32 and my pvr program was writing a lot of really big files to it. I was able to retrieve the data and convert it to NTFS for future use. In case your curious, my hd space is as follows: 60GB + 80GB + 120GB + RAID 320GB = 580GB - ~30GB (that I can't use) = 550GB of usable space.