Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
4 days away and I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to bring for the picnic. A couple others have so here’s what there is to look forward to:
I have some serious picnic meal planning to do tonight.
I get to see the Meducare helicopter take off and land on a fairly regular basis. The helicopter comes in, lands on the helipad at the top of the parkade I park in and the patient unloaded and taken down to an ambulance waiting on the ground for the short trip over to the ER. Signal 46 has a fascinating entry about how things work on the other end when they’re picking up a patient that most people never hear about.
So cool.
According to StarTrek.com, the new remastered episodes of Star Trek will start going on the air this weekend. They show it being aired by WTAT, which is the local Fox affiliate. Apparently they don’t want anyone to watch it because the programmers at WTAT seem to have scheduled it at 1AM on the 17th. Looks like WMMP (the new MyTVCharleston station, formerly UPN) might be showing it too at 9PM on the 17th, but after that it starts showing up at 4 frickin’ AM! Who the hell is up at 4 in the frickin’ morning if they’re not working! Infomercials get better treatment!
Bastards.
Now I’m going to have to reconnect the VCR or get TiVO or something.
Check it out! OneDoggieGoodie.com is just like Woot!, but they sell dog stuff instead. I have to admit I didn’t really see too much in their previous offerings that I would actually buy for my dogs, but there were a couple of toys that I might have considered.
This Woot! thing must be catching on.
Found via Doggienews.com.
Can you believe it? 50 years ago, some big brained people at IBM developed the first hard drive. The hard drive is truly one of those things that revolutionized computers, enabling quick and easy access to data as opposed to much slower tape access.
From the Yahoo! article:
The integrated RAMAC was about two refrigerators in width and not quite as tall, and it literally weighed a ton. Its 50 24-inch platters were in a stack inside the unit, in an assembly that spun at 1200 revolutions per minute. The unit used two magnetic recording heads. The RAMAC could hold 5MB–about the storage that today is needed for one 5-minute MP3 encoded at 128 kilobits per second.
I remember my first encounter with a hard drive. It was a heavy metal box capable of storing 10 MB of data and fit into an IBM XT. Now there are hard drives with 750 GB capacities in a 3.5″ form factor and no signs of capacity increases slowing down in the near future. This week we brought 20 TB of hard drive storage online and are in the process of populating it with stuff from the existing 5 TB RAID and stuff off the tape archive. It should be enough to hold about a year’s worth of patient images online although we’ve projected that in a few years we’ll need about 50 TB to hold the same amount of data online. Amazing isn’t it. Makes me think of that saying “Data will always expand to fill your available storage”.
Plenty of good reading out on the net for this notable anniversary. Over at Tom’s Hardware they interview someone from Seagate about what’s in store for future spinning disk technology.
Found at Slashdot