67- 102 days

I -was- going to go on about how I hate myself for not having ridden to work today after having to spend hours stuck in traffic, and actually having to turn back on my way home after being immobile for almost 15 minutes.

But then I found something better... my WD Mybook World II has now been up and running, without shutting down and without problems, for 102 days =D

If you recall from 2010, on October 17 one of the drives simply died, out of nowhere. The following days' exchanges with tech support led me to find out just how buggy, dumb and just plain strange external drives from Western Digital are. But, a month later Western Digital was true to their word and I got a replacement hard disk in the mail.

The replacement disk is still in the closet, in its unopened packaging. I had bought a replacement locally while the new drive from WD shipped and decided to keep it instead of opening the new one and stashing that one away. Eventually this year if I get around to upgrading to a desktop PC I'll use that new disk.

Well, it's been 102 days since I last turned the drive off, and it's still going. Without locking up, without making any weird noises, or anything of the sort.

And I'm pretty hopeful it'll keep on going that way, at least for a couple years more :)

End of story, almost

Finally. Exactly one month after I send the defective one out, I got my replacement drive from Western Digital.

I do have to give them credit, that month in the mail was mostly the local post and my package forwarding service. WD's did a pretty good job, and their part was just 4 days long: 2 to process the return, and 2 more to ship a replacement.

But my forwarder forgot to notify their address change, the package got stuck when UPS couldn't find them, and it sat there for a week while everything got cleared up. Which in turn made it miss the weekly flight. It finally flew this week and the package was released today.

Only thing left to do now is open the bag, and pop the replacement into the Mybook World II. And wait to see if it does its magic and syncs up. I'll do that before bed, otherwise I'll be up all night looking at the sync progress every 5 minutes.

Killing the lights

Ever notice how those little LEDs that you never pay attention to, all of a sudden look like halogen floodlamps at 2 AM? You wake up and think to yourself "wait a minute, didn't I turn off the lights 4 hours ago?"

The light on my network hard drive is especially mean. That thing will light up a room like a Christmas tree. So today I thought to stick a couple of rubber bands on it and repurpose a strip from an old plastic flag I had laying around.

And now it's a whole lot nicer. And the best part is, I can still see what the indicator light is doing.