Thursday, June 16, 2005

i was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver when the switch broke 'cause it's old

I actually managed to get something accomplished yesterday. For a while now, I've been getting a lot of warning messages on my computer. To the effect of "You are perilously low on disc space. Do something about it". These were legitimate warnings. I was fluctuating between 200mb and 600mb of remaining space. That's nothing. Given that I like to store a lot of music on my machine, that's no space at all. I pondered some options, and I hope I've done the perfect thing. I got a 200 GB external hard drive. The guy wanted to sell me an internal drive. It would have been a slightly better deal in an out-of-pocket kind of way. However, I don't have a bay available to host another internal drive. This one was easy enough to set up. Certainly easier than it would have been to dismantle my machine and risk putting it back together incorrectly. Actually this was a breeze to set up. As soon as I got it set up, I moved all of my iTunes stuff over to the new drive, did a little tweaking, and I'm all set. I really like that it's external because I'll still be able to use it whenever I get another machine, and it has the super-cool benefit of being portable. Sort of like a ginormous iPod without having the capability to play the music on its own. Okay. It's not quite as compact as an iPod, but it's the size of a 300 page paperback. These sorts of things are designed specifically for backing up hard drives, but lots of people use it exactly the way I'm using it.

After I played around with that a little bit, I watched This So-Called Disaster, on rent from Netflix. It's a documentary about Sam Shepard's semi-autobiographical stage play "The Late Henry Moss". It mostly shows the actors (Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Cheech Marin, James Gammon, Woody Harrelson) in various stages of rehearsal. We also get some personal insight from Shepard about the play itself and about the events it is loosely based upon. It kept me interested, and it made me wish I could have seen a production of the play. However, I can't give it a high recommendation. I can't even say that it's the best movie about rehearsing a play that I've ever seen. That honor would have to go to Vanya on 42nd Street, closely followed by Looking for Richard. Oddly enough, I noticed that another movie about play rehearsal was on HBO last night. A Midwinter's Tale is about a community theatre trying to put on a production of Hamlet, but it isn't strictly about rehearsal, the way the others are.
After watching my movie, I was pretty tired, and I was passing in and out of sleep as I was watching the TV. I called it a night a little earlier than normal, but I didn't get good sleep. My dumb-ass cat kept waking me up with a bunch of noise she was making. She figured out how to open one of the dresser drawers. I don't know how, but she does it. It takes a lot of effort on her part, and a lot of clamoring, so it woke me up on two different occasions. What she's trying to do, incidentally, is climb inside the drawer so she can lay down. Not that there aren't 2 million other places she could lay down, but that's where she really wanted to be. Fucking cat.

now playing:
The Decemberists -- Picaresque
The Decemberists Picaresque

4 comments:

doug said...

Good move on the hard drive tip, we did the same thing when we were running low on disk space - and when I got a new computer, it was nice to just have to connect the external drive to the new machine instead of having to move a ton of files or fool around with an internal drive - plus, since we store music on it, we can hook it up to the laptop if we want to play music on that (or, yeah, we can also use the Itunes sharing music thing too).

doug said...

incidentally, we got our drive right before the asian tsunami - and I had named my drive "tsunami"...so don't name your drive "end of the world" or anything like that.

playfulinnc said...

If you like plays about rehearsals, you should check out "Waiting for Guffman." Cracks me up every time.

d-lee said...

yeah, I've seen that one a bunch of times. I didn't even think to include that. Probably because their play isn't a real play. Actually, we see more of the actual performance than we do the rehearsal, too.