A few thoughts on Star Trek, Teaching, and the justification of purchases…

The saddest episode of Star Trek ever is on right now. It’s the one where Data constructs a daughter, and Starfleet tries to take her away. But she dies before anything can happen. I guess he should’ve gotten a Dell.

I’m such a sap.

Teaching went well today, such as it was. They wrote for a half hour, so there really wasn’t all that much for me to do. I have a sneaking suspicion that I ran some people off today. Several people’s eyes got wide as I walked them through the major assignments. Oh well.

In other news, so, um, yeah. I bought another FireWire drive. I finally got through to QPS tech support today (on hold for 38 minutes), and he walked me through some troubleshooting techniques, but the problem is that I won’t know if this even helps until I try to capture some video and then export it as a VCD. How long does this take, you ask? Why can’t I just do this on the phone? Because on my little iMac, transforming an hour of DV into a VCD (which will play in most DVD players) takes about 15 hours. That’s why.

So I bought another drive—a Maxtor 80 gig from Staples—at a pretty good price. I paid $30 more than I would for a 60 gig via mail order, and I get it immediately. It’s worth it.

This wasn’t brought about, incidentally, by the problems I’m having with my other FireWire drive. Those will be fixed soon enough, and I’ll have a nice little 60-gig FireWire drive. This purchase was brought about by my realization last night that I have less that 3 gig of free space on my iMac and nowhere else to install stuff.

I figure 80 gig (for MP3s, photos, etc) should do the trick.

I hate it when I make a large (for me…$300) purchase, because then I feel the need to justify it over and over again. I get this from my mother, it turns out. When we get ready to make a purchase, we both mull it over for months. She’s just gone through this with buying her first new automobile, and I go through it with everything I buy that’s over $30. It’s awful. God help me if I ever buy a house or a car. I just don’t like spending money, but then the crass consumer in me wants.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t just want indiscriminately. I only buy clothes when old clothes wear out. I don’t get haircuts (I have paid for one haircut since 1993). I don’t wear jewelry, other than my wedding ring. I have only a few pairs of shoes. I rarely buy CDs anymore.

In the past year, though, I’ve bought two computers—a refurbished iMac and a new iBook—to replace my old desktop and my old laptop.

Anyway. I’m exporting a 10 minute test-VCD right now. Greg, if you’re reading this, there’s a chance this week’s episode of Enterprise will come to you in a format playable in your home DVD player. By the way…I got your Tolkein thing today! I havent’ watched it yet, but I probably will tomorrow.

Thanks!

See. I’m doing it again.