(no subject)

As frustrating and stressful as my job sometimes gets, I think it's important to step back once in a while and realize I'm doing magic. This occurred to me while I was on my last phone call.

I was sitting here in my house in Wisconsin and talking on the phone with someone in Kansas. We're some thousand miles away from each other, and she and I could have a conversation like we were sitting in the same room.

On top of that, I opened up a little window on my computer with her computer in it. I could control the mouse and keyboard on her computer that is so far away from me that, for the vast majority of our species' existence, most of our ancestors couldn't imagine travelling that far in our lives. And I can just sit here in my house and connect with this person this way, not to mention fix a stupid IE plugin problem.

We really are, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, a sufficiently advanced technology*. We can work magic, you and I.


*"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic."
  -Arthur C Clarke

(no subject)

I just found and bought a 500GB external USB drive through 3btech. I have one already that I bought through them a while back, and they have pretty decent service. The drive died about a week after I got it and they replaced it for free, though I did have to pay to send it back. With as much stuff as I have stored on it, I want a second one that I can back up the first one to. I'll then leave one at my parents' house, and swap them around and synchronize once a week or so while we have dinner over there.

I still have about 250GB free on the one I have, so 500 ought to be enough for a while. That said, it's a good thing I bought it today, because just now I was copying my latest set of pictures to my little 80GB external that I've been using just for backing up my photos, and it ran out of space. I now have over 80GB of photos.

Speaking of photos, here's a nifty sign on a building in downtown St. Louis. Though it's undergone a conversion to lofts, it looks like it was once a framing studio, among other things. I'm so happy they left the sign; I love vintage neon and building clocks both!





Hey, want to see something creepy nearby? I think this was on the same building. It's an ad for lofts with a baby manically eating its own fingers.