The Little Hard Drive That Couldn't (At Least On One Computer)

I was awoken this morning by the smell of gasoline and fresh-cut grass, as well as the sound of the machine that was producing both scents.
Despite this, I fought desperately to not wake up fully, even though I knew it was probably time do so.
I managed to keep total wakefulness at bay for about fifteen minutes, but after the third pass of the mower by my window, I gave up the fight.
Once up I did the usual morning dicking around ritual before finally showering and getting dressed.
I didn’t shave, even though I haven’t shaved since Saturday morning, because I didn’t feel like it and decided that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference anyway. Oh no, my face is stubbly! What will all of the various hot single chicks I see in the course of a day think? Heavens!
I will, of course, shave somewhere along the line this week, simply because I have no desire to grow a beard, or whatever I could grow that would have to pass for a beard, but would actually consist of patchy bits of blonde fuzz interspersed with thick, black hairs that resemble nothing so much as the hairs growing out of Jeff Goldblum’s back in The Fly.
I have, on a couple of misguided occasions, grown a goatee, but the less said about that the better.
Besides, in addition to looking foolish and out of place on me, goatee maintenance seemed like much more of a bother than simple shaving.
Anyway, once I was dressed I headed to Best Buy, as I was planning to pick up a portable hard drive. I wanted one of the nice new external hard drives that are powered by USB and are very tiny so that I could load up all of my mp3s on it and be able to access them (and other files) from my tablet PC when travelling without having to bog down its relatively small capacity internal drive (60 GB, with much of that already used up).
And that’s just what I did, opting for the Western Digital 120 GB Passport.
It’s a slick little drive, and seems perfectly suited for its job.
The only problem is that I can’t get it to actually work on Hugin.
That’s not a huge deal, but is kind of annoying, as I wanted to be able to use the drive for quickly transferring large files between computers, and to use to access my mp3s on Hugin, as my connection to Munin often drops when I try to stream music from it, and Windows won’t let me add files stored on my NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive to my music library, and, again, I don’t want to bog down the already bogged-down drives on Hugin by copying over my mp3s.
The reason it won’t work on Hugin – basically, Vista sees the drive, installs a driver, and says it’s ready to use, but the drive never shows up in the list of available drives – is that there is so much crap connected to it via USB that there’s not enough power available to both power the drive and actually access it.
That’s my theory, anyway, based on some stuff I’ve read online.
I can access the drive on Hugin if I plug it into the USB port on my NAS drive, but that does nothing to resolve the problem not being able to add files on the NAS drive to my library (Which is by design on the part of MS, apparently. Thanks, Bill!).
After Best Buy it was off to the grocery store.
A few weeks ago I mentioned seeing someone who appeared cute whom I wanted to get a better look at, but despite my best efforts was unable to get close to in order to make a more complete inspection.
Today I had the opposite problem. There were these three people (husband, wife, and daughter, I think, though they were all fairly old), speaking in another language, which I think was Italian, though they were speaking in sort of hushed tones, so it made it hard to make anything out.
One of them, the older-looking woman, was pretty much talking non-stop, in this low, high-pitched murmur, that, combined with the fact that even if I could fully hear her I wouldn’t be able to understand, started to get on my nerves.
And of course they were always in front of things that I wanted to get to, so finally I just tried to get the hell away from them because they were pissing me off, but everywhere I went, there they were.
Also, they kept looking at me, perhaps shocked by the fact that I was out in the world unshaven.
Eventually I managed to lose them.
When I finally got to the registers – I had too much crap to go through self check-out – I found myself sort of baffled by the lady in front of me, who was buying, with her sister, I think, two carts’ worth of groceries.
The first thing that was strange about her was that she was polite enough to find a divider to put behind her groceries so that I could start putting mine on the belt.
It’s just generally unusual to find anyone who’s even remotely thoughtful in any fashion.
So that alone was odd, but then she went further and kept trying to move everything up faster so that I could get all of my groceries
She then turned to me, with a look of apologetic distress, and said, “That’s as far as I can move it all.”
I told her that was fine and that I could wait, and did my best to assure her that it was nothing to be stressed out over.
It was rather odd.
Their total, if I heard her right, came to over $800.
Admittedly, they had a lot of stuff, but that still seems way over the top. They must have had really expensive tastes.
I bought rather a lot of stuff myself, but only came in at about a tenth of what they spent.
That’s just crazy.
The almost too-polite sister (again, I’m guessing) was a bit stunned by the expense as well – she was the one paying – and said something like, “That’s why dad and I just go out to eat.”
The other one just shrugged and took it in stride, saying that this was about typical.
(It’s worth noting that she was rather heavy…in much the way that Death Valley is rather warm.)
Apart from partially-preparing dinner tonight (based off of a Giada recipe), that’s pretty much been my day.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon and early evening watching episodes of Justice League Unlimited that I either hadn’t seen before, having missed them when they originally aired, or that were particular favorites.
Among those favorites? An episode entitled Double Date, written by none other than Gail Simone, who is one of my favorite comic book writers.
It’s an interesting episode, as it makes use of two characters who, at the time, were appearing regularly in her series Birds of Prey, but who are, naturally, very different, in many ways, from their printed versions. I think that added an interesting dynamic to the episode.
Plus that episode introduced what went on to become one of the most oddly compelling elements of the series, the I-never-saw-that-coming romance between The Huntress and The Question.
I saw today that all three Law & Order series are returning in the fall (if for no other reason than to just beat out Gunsmoke’s record as longest-running drama series, NBC really ought to keep L & O running for a few more years.), though they’re doing something odd with Criminal Intent, choosing to air first-run episodes on USA, then airing the rerun on NBC. That’s just kind of wacky.
Hopefully the fact that, as of tonight, Criminal Intent will be airing after Heroes will help out its ratings.
In any case, I suppose I should find something to do with what’s left of the afternoon.