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buried in the various announcements during macworld and ces this past week was a juicy tidbit that came from lacie. they released a 1 terabyte firewire 800/400/usb 2.0 hard drive for $1200. yep, that’s 1000 gb (or 1024 gb if your a purist) of file storage. that works out to be about $1.20 per GB of storage. no, it’s not as cheap as buying a ton of 200 gb drives but if you add in the cost of enclosures for those drives this is an amazing price for that amount of storage.


i recently purchased one of lacie’s 200 gb external drives and i’ve pretty much filled it up already. i was looking at buying another one of their d2 firewire/usb 2.0 drives but this one looks amazing and may make me rethink that purchase. no, i don’t have $1200 sitting around but i can start saving the pennies for when i buy the home server i want, hopefully later this year. this would be a nice addition to that system for complete home archival solution. i record a lot of replay shows and i’d love the option of being able to archive them without caring about file size of how much space i had left on my other drives.


i’ll definitely be watching this product and the various reviews. one can only think that this is going to lead to a few hard drive price wars on the horizon.

i’ve been looking at various hybrid cars over the past few months. basically starting a long term investigation so when we’re ready to buy something we can make an educated choice. i have to admit that the new toyota prius looks pretty amazing. it was recently voted as motor trend 2004 car of the year. i know, now days it seems like you can buy that honor … but if you look at the features of the car you start to see why it was given this title. $20,510 msrp, 16-valve dohc V4, 11.9 gallon tank with 60/51/55 mpg (city/highway/combined) which gives you a on average 654 miles per tank of gas. add to that optional auto parking and integrated bluetooth technology for phones and computers and you have the perfect car. yes, if an american company came out with it i might consider it, but the fact of the matter is they haven’t and aren’t. yea, some can say the hybrid ford escape (been in “coming soon” mode for years) or various general motor pipe dreams but then reality hits you when you look at the timelines on these products or their reliability. toyota has a great track record with the prius and this is their second generation. i have to admit this car is a front runner for me. if i get a chance i’d like to test drive one soon.

it only took 14 hours to change my provider. despite all of the rumors of it taking 2 days - 2 weeks it was painless and quick. amy and i also have a family plan now with shared minutes. after i get my phone some time next year i plan on adding the t-mobile internet plan. the price quoted on their website isn’t correct though, it’s only $19.99 per month.

i’m switching my cellular phone service from at&t to t-mobile. amy an i went to the store today and i took all of the steps to transfer my service. there are varying online reports of it taking anywhere from 24 hours to 2 weeks to transfer from at&t to any other provider due to the inept technology employed at at&t. the quality of service (qos) that i’ve experiences at at&t over the past few years has been substandard. i get crappy signal in highly populated areas, constant call dropping, and their network doesn’t support the features that i want. i plan on using the t-mobile hotspots, t-zones, and t-mobile internet plans. i picked up the samsung e105 but that is for amy actually. i’m planning on picking up the sony ericsson z600 in a few weeks. i wanted a high tech bluetooth enabled phone that would work with my laptop and the z600 has some great reviews and seems to be exactly what i’m looking for.

after playing a bit with my own openssl solution i found some faults with my original posting. the obvious huge one had already been pointed out by a reader. i forgot about the web of trust that is broken by creating our own certificate. who’s to trust us? well apparently not apple. once you restart mail.app after having approved a cert from another user it forgets that you trust them. the next time you get a message from them you have to perform the signature hand shake again. the web of trust must be created somewhere, this is what the thawte certificate does for you. i have since download the free thawte certificate and will post later how well it worked for me.

is anyone as discontent or disappointed with the software industry as i am these past few years? it’s as if software companies have given up on innovating and improving their products and have instead turned toward throwing huge sums of money at lawyers to sue their competitors into oblivion. the most visual instance of this as of late has been the sco wave of lawsuits against all unix vendors, novell, ibm, and others. i guess their next target is going to be the bsd vendors like apple and other open source distributions. if that isn’t the ideal example, how about at&t suing paypal and ebay for infringement of their “mediation of transactions” patent. their what? what the heck is an “apparatus for employing a communications system with actively connects communicating entities to mediate transactions”? if you submit a patent, the unwritten rule is to make it as obtuse and obfuscated as possible. this leaves you with a huge window that will facilitate the suing of anyone and everyone who remotely appears to infringe on your patent. we have truly entered the era of innovation via litigation.

if everyone in the world had a backup hard drive we’d live in a better world. well, not exactly but we’d be able to not lose sleep over the possibility of losing all of our electronic information. other people lose sleep over that right? right?


to counter my problem of lost sleep i’ve placed an order for the lacie 200gb firewire 800/400 usb 2.0 external hard drive. i plan on backing up my laptop as well as amy’s, something i’ve been meaning to do for years but never quite got around to doing. i wanted to get the usb 2.0 since it’s likely that amy will always have a windows laptop in her future and for some reason windows laptop vendors haven’t woke up to the advantages of firewire over usb.