Tidings of technology and joy

I'm beginning to think I ought to rename this the Technology blog, in light of my abundance of techno posting . . .

Our first techno tale is a continuation of our TV etc. saga. Not long before we left Ohio, our DVD player gave up the ghost. Wouldn't respond to cleaning or anything, just refused to play perfectly good discs that our computers had proven were still working. That's when we rediscovered our VHS player and our relative dearth of VHS tapes. A friend loaned us some tapes, and once we got to Utah we found VHS tapes readily available for 75 cents a tape at our nearby thrift store. That in itself was fun: I felt so very thrifty and gifted buying all sorts of "expensive" movies that I'd long coveted at their full retail price. My husband loves the tapes because they are straightforward: you tell them to go forward or backward and they do it, without throwing in all sorts of menu options. Amanda loves the tapes because they're in our budget and because she's been introduced to "new" films through them. However, I still wanted a new DVD player. After much drooling at regular retail stores and online, I finally got brave enough last night to pick one out from the thrift store for $10. And it works! It's almost 10 years old, which means it actually has enough built in buttons to make it so you don't have to have a remote to navigate menus. After I told Amanda about the new machine, she asked sadly, "So does this mean we don't get to watch the tapes anymore?" She felt better when I reassured her we could. Blu-ray? Bah! We thrive on decade-or-older technology around here! (Kidding, of course; I am VERY glad to have an iPod around the house!)

My other big technology story for the day concerns a hard drive. A couple of years ago I bought an external hard drive on eBay. It was advertised as a 160 GB hard drive, but for some reason I had it in my head that it was only a 40 GB drive. It had been a long time since I'd been able to use it thanks to various cords being MIA. After a semi-epic struggle, I learned the identity of the last cord I needed and secured one from eBay. Before it arrived, I'd tried opening up the external hard drive casing to see if maybe I could just stick the thing in my "new" computer rather than bothering with a new cord. That's when I saw the sticker saying the hard drive was a 200 GB one. Really, I wondered . . . where does the other 160 of it go when I turn it on? With the new cable plugged in, I asked my computer how big the hard drive was. The computer recognizes the 200 GB listing, but apparently the formatting or something on it mysteriously takes up a lot of that, but it still leaves 186 GB available. Wow. Not 200, but definitely a lot more than the 40 I thought I had. After using 1, 2, 4, and 8 gig memory sticks to transfer files, it's so nice not to have to worry as much about backup space anymore!