Good news, everyone! I've taught the toaster to feel love!

Hello there. You may note I am not a.) Jason or b.) Terry. I am, in fact, named "Erik" and will occasionally contribute to this compendium of universal knowledge. I am not going to try to write with any regularity or consistency in subject, but I figured I'd share a few things that have happened to me lately.

I have moved away from home (a gradual, molasses-like process over the last month or so) and have found that it isn't nearly as big a deal as it seems on the box. Setting up is quite expensive and I'm grateful I was able to combine stuff with my girlfriend, who had an entire collection of kitchen things. Most of my stuff belongs in the living room and den and either takes batteries or has a cord sticking out of it.

Speaking of which, my laptop decided to go into death throes while watching some TV before work. When your hard drive starts going "bzzzzt-CLICK" you are pretty much boned and the hourly backups that Mac OS does through Time Machine have saved me once again. I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing or if this computer just likes eating hard drives but when I replace this dead one it'll be the fourth hard drive transplant in my Macbook Pro.

It's a pre-unibody variant, which means instead of taking the battery cover off sliding the drive out, you get to take about 40 tiny horrible screws, remove the keyboard, undo ribbon connectors, etc. to get at the guts. I can almost do this in my sleep now (I don't need directions) - I just can't decide what drive to replace it with. Seagate laptop drives have been treating me badly, but they sell a 7200 RPM drive with 32 MB cache and a 4 GB onboard SSD compared to Western Digital's best, which is a 5200 RPM unit with 8 MB cache and no SSD whatsoever. I'll probably just get the fast one and inevitably have it break again, but by then I'll likely be replacing the laptop so ptthhbhht.

Bought the first DJ Hero game for the Xbox 360. Got it for $50 with the controller, hooray. It's actually quite fun. Must work out the "sweating profusely" and "table jiggling all over the place" issues though.

My condo comes with a year of free Telus service - phone, TV, and internet. This is the only way they got me to try their new Optik thingummy after years of bad dealings with them (through friends). I believe they've run fibre to the building- neato. The $60-ish a month Shaw connection at my parents produced a pretty solid 18 Mbit/sec download and 1 Mbit/sec upload, but Speedtest tells me my new connection is 25 Mbit/sec down and 1.75 Mbit/sec up - not bad for free. (Don't get me started on asymmetric internet connections though. I'd trade 10 Mbit/sec down for another 1 or 2 Mbit/sec up.) The only caveat is watching TV through a set-top box will consume some of this bandwidth.

I was completely NOT SURPISED AT ALL when the installer left without getting phone or TV working - par for the course with telecom companies.

Now to work on that weird feeling of "having to go home" when I am home.