BIOLOGICAL WARFARE. GROSS!

The fun thing about riding the city busses is that you get to see all sorts of people. The unfunny thing is you get to smell all sorts of people. And being a warm summer day you can't help but notice that it isn't the bouquet of roses that fills the air. No, when you're sitting down in a seat and it's crowded, some people have to stand in the aisles. And they hold on for their dear lives (because buses make all-too-frequent stops) by grabbing the overhead railing, thus exposing their most deadly weapon: armpit cannons. See, there is a difference between a stinky armpit and an armpit cannon. The cannon is aided by the natural flow of air wafting through partially-opened windows at the fore of the bus which draw air down and towards the aft. As the light breeze passes the armpit it projects The Nasty down towards any occupant seated below. Me. And there I sit trying not to budge from my seat, tears welling up in mine eyes, and using my cell phone to try to create some sort of shield in front of my nose. Oh damn did it reek.

That main course of armpit was complemented with a side dish of Ass. That is served by people who choose to grab the overhead railing backwards, which place the ass right next to your face. Yes, you can try to lean back a little, but the seats don't allow for that much movement.

The takeaway from this is that it is best to get a window seat when possible or be standing above the Smell Zone. Unless you're quite short in which case your nose will still be armpit height---oh poor you.

RERECORDING A VIDEO? EH?

I don't understand this. You know YouTube---that wonderful site where everyone uploads their favorite anime, TV shows, and video blogs ad nauseum. While browing the popular clips there is one of the Family Guy where the men are singing barbershop quartet style in a hospital around an AIDS patient. I can understand uploading just that clip. But what some bright person did was to go to YouTube, play that segment, and rerecord it with their digital camera, then upload the new movie file again.

No, that doesn't make sense, does it?

So the resulting video is now blurry, shaky (from being handheld), in mono, and once in a while you see the YouTube player progress bar creep into the bottom of the frame. Crazy, no?

OUT OF DISK SPACE!!!

GRR! I cannot believe that I actually ran out of disk space today. My home desktop computer has about 450 GB of storage spread over 3 hard drives. While that's not necessarily the largest amount of space anyone can have the point is that up until last year I never thought I'd used it all up so quickly.

And then I really got into photography.

I take a lot of pictures. On a recent trip I took probably on the order of a thousand pictures and movies a day. (Now multiply that by the 12 days I was on vacation!) Most pictures I delete because they just don't come out right, but a lot I keep and then do some very light photo processing on them---e.g. cropping, color balance, fixing rotation.

This last trip consumed about 19 GB of data and when I attempted to make a copy of it I suddenly ran out of space! It turns out the drive the pictures are on is only about 160 GB. 40 GB are used for iTunes CDs and downloads, 16 GB go to multitrack audio, 4 GB go to web site creation things, and there are a few other gigabytes consumed for other things. But the pictures part ends up taking 60 GB or so! And that doesn't count the fact that I plan to make a few movies out of all the pictures!

So, now I'm at a crossroads.

On the one hand, if I shuffle my disk space around a bit I can probably move some things onto my other two hard drives. (However, those two hard drives are actually serving distinct purposes.) I could go and buy a NAS (network attached storage) device and back up all my data over firewire. (But that's like $500.) Or I can try to replace the hard drive with a new 500GB hard drive. And I'm really leaning towards that since it would be less than $180 to do so.

The trouble really is that I'm unemployed at the moment and I really ought not to be buying all these toys. In fact, I have been buying expensive toys because I'm trying to build a home media studio of sorts. And with a couple of impending trips planned, you can see that this is all putting a strain on my already tight budget.

On the other hand, allocating space to do some of these big projects I have planned would be possibly beneficial for the future because I would have the space to grow for some other projects I want to do this summer. And it being 4th of July weekend there are some sales going on.

Ugh. What to do! What to do!