And we'll all mark time as we go

And now, today, I have things that much closer to normal. I've found and recovered my music library and my apps, although I'm only partway through synching my iPod Touch up with the new computer. The photo library too, although I've had a startling discovery there.

You might have noticed I take a lot of pictures. Well, I do that. Thing is this has produced an absolutely titanic photo library. Somewhere high of 70,000 pictures and something like 200 Gigabytes. (!) (!!) Which is only a problem because the new computer foregoes a hard drive for a Flash-based drive. It's quieter, faster, and lower-power than the old drives, but it's also smaller. Put 200 Gigabytes of picture on there and there's not room for anything else.

As a practical matter this is tolerable, anyway. I've got my library on the external hard drive. And it's also on the dead MacBook Pro which, for all that it's expired as a usable piece of hardware can still be started up in emergency modes and used to copy data over. I just can't host all my pictures on this as it is.

What's saddening to me about this is I like having my desktop pictures draw from my whole photo library, changing every fifteen minutes or so. It often draws up pictures I had forgotten, or moments I hadn't thought about in years, and that's delightful. And that's not viable now. I could probably set up the external hard drive through the Time Capsule router so I can access it wirelessly, at least when we're home. I've done that before, when I had too little free hard drive space. But it's rickety, and prone to catastrophe when I take the computer away from home.

There must be solutions. I suppose the ideal one would be to draw a set of pictures at random from my library each time I connect to the external hard drive, and put those in a designated picture folder. It wouldn't be ideal, but it would approach what I want. I have no idea how to code this, though. Probably there's some AppleScript brilliance that could communicate it, but I never learned how to script well enough to do that.

It's such a small problem. There wasn't a really good alternative, though. A non-Flash hard drive would be bigger, sure, but they didn't have one available unless I put several hundred more dollars into the thing. I feel bad that I'm not half a week into owning a new computer, though, and find something about it I'd rather was different. All in all, I'd rather my old computer not have suddenly gone and died on me.

Trivia: To instruct the Apollo Abort Guidance System computer that the Lunar Module had touched down on the Moon an astronaut wrote into memory cell number 413 (octal notation) the value 1. (The Abort Guidance System interface was direct memory manipulation.) Source: The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture And Operation, Frank O'Brien.

Currently Reading: The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life, Marcus du Sautoy.