Palfrey's life

I've had an idea about better ways to do "consumer friendly" storage. It's been kicking around in my head for a while, and I've explained it to a few others, but I've only just managed to nail down *how* I plan to do this. Big words and chewable version first, then the geeky details below a cut. The basic concept is as follows: as we start to get more and more stuff on our computers, we need more hard drive space, but after a while there's only so much space in your computer, and the drives do fail every so often (more often if you're unlucky like me). There's a couple of ways already to stop you from losing all your data when a drive dies, but most of them involve you needing a set of identical drives, and making one of them a "backup" drive. This is a) complicated to do b) a pain to upgrade (i.e. you *still* haven't got enough space, no matter how big a set of drives you get).

So what if we could make it simple? You'd have this one big drive shown in "My Computer" (or equivalent) to store all of your data, and all of it would be protected against hardware failure. This is all provided by a series of "storage blocks" - a set of up to 4 or 5 easily replacable (switch off computer, pull out module, slide in new module, switch on) modules in the front of your computer. If you need more space, or something goes wrong (you'd see a helpful blinking light on the front of a dead drive), you can simply replace the module, and everything gets done for you. Replacing a small module with a bigger module (not physical size, but they'd have capacities marked on the side) would get you more space automatically, without having to think about copying data from the old drive, or anything like that. Sounds good doesn't it? Hence why I'm putting some thought into this.

( Geeky details )

Having got the geeky thoughts written down, I'm just going to briefly mention the fun and games party of last night, at the household of Mattias (fellow Dutch course participant). Things of note:

• Party was advertised as 9-10. I turned up at 10:15 thinking myself to be late. No-one outside the house, not even the Swedish had turned up. No-one else did for another 1/2 hour. Does *no-one* listen to party start times anymore?


• I didn't know Delft had that large a Swedish population. There was at least a dozen of them there last night, maybe more (and one Norwegian girl, but given she spoke Swedish I think she was practically being counted as an honourary citizen).


• The word 'ombudsman' is the same in English, Dutch and Swedish


• A bizarre conversation about the existence of Eeyore (or whichever translated name someone's using) between myself, a cute Swedish girl with a 'Tigger' t-shirt (she doesn't bounce) and one of a pair of French twins. For some reason the French twin didn't think Eeyore existed. Anyways.


• I really should keep track of how many languages were being used at these things. We certainly had english, swedish, french, german, portugese, possibly some italian, *maybe* a smattering of bad dutch.


• Another cute german girl. Ho-hum.


• Apparently (according to a conversation with a group of French people) France doesn't have much in the way of regional accents for some reasons. Anyone got any insights on why?

I'm aware that I'm making a whole bunch of posts right now, but I've just managed to do something I consider worthy. I've just successfully made a phone call to my parents landline over the 'net using the lovely Skype. Bitchiness aside due to their choice of Qt for the Linux interface, and a current lack of API support for Linux (i.e. give me gaim support!), they have done a damn good job of giving cheap calls using VoIP. It rocks, it outperforms and is cheaper than my landline here, even with various cheap international call programs. For the terminally bored, my skype id is "tom-parker". That is all.

Oh heck, as I'm here, I've been watching a bunch of Voyager eps recently, and despite the middle of the 6th series overdosing on the Irish whimsy, it did have a lovely variant on the old line - "It's the old story - girl meets boy, girl modifies boy's subroutines" - 6x11, "Fair Haven". And in a "why do they bother", fairly much NSFW (provided anyone spends enough time to figure out what the 'images' actually are) I bring you ascii pr0n.