Sunday, February 27, 2005

Movie: Amelia and I watched Ray last night to prepare for the Oscars. The movie was really good. Jamie Foxx definitely earned his best actor award. I give this one 4 stars. The acting is top notch but some of the cinematic devices used to move the plot along detract from the experience.
Western Digital Sucks



About a year ago I bought an iPod. Shortly there after I invested many hours into ripping CDs, purchasing music online and downloading said purchased music. I quickly realized what a major bummer it would be if I lost all this data (e.g. if the hard disk crashed). In an effort to ward off the aforementioned digital disaster I purchased a RAID controller from Western Digital. I configured the controller with 2 SATA HDs for RAID 1 (i.e. the second disk is an identical copy of the first).

Months later, one of the hard drives fails and joy of joys, I still have all my data and it is accessible. This is good, no? Of course I didn't want to tempt fate for too long so I bought a second hard drive to replace the failed drive. Unfortunately when I installed the new drive and attempted to have the RAID controller synchronize the new drive with the old (working) drive, all my data on the working drive was destroyed.

The $%#@ing RAID controller trashed my data. The whole reason I had shelled out extra money for two hard drives and a special controller was to protect against this very problem.

Needless to say I am not happy. If Western Digital were to pay me, say $2000, I might stop feeling so much anger and hatrid for them. Of course the screwball snake oil hucksters at WD are not going to compensate me for the damage they've done so I will continue seething and breaking into a fit of cursing everytime I hear their name spoken.

You can help me though. Please, if you get the opportunity to make someone at Western Digital miserable do it. If you can do something that is legal and will hurt them and their bottom line do it. Help turn that karmic wheel and screw them as I (and no doubt other suckers who bought their RAID controller) have been screwed by them.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

movie: Waking Life. 5 stars. The film is made up of several episodes. It is immediately apparent that this animated feature used real life footage as the basis for animation. Each of the episodes is animated by a different person. The episodes consist largely of monologues or dialogues on intellectual topics such as free will or evolution. The movie is much more interesting than my bland description of it.