My friend The Accountant™ asked me to build him an external hard drive. He lives up in Northern Virginia and comes down here to visit his fiancee. At any rate, I’ve cut him a DVD or two of data when he visits, and we were looking for an easier way to move data back and forth. The goal was to put a drive and an enclosure together for less than $150. I settled on a 320GB Seagate SATA drive and the Kingwin Night Hawk USB2 enclosure.

This was the fourth external drive I’ve built, and the Night Hawk is the third enclosure. I have to say I like it the best so far.

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Gibberish readers are from all walks of life. Full-breeds, half-breeds, single, married, divorced, breeders, godless heathens, god-fearing heathens, college educated, street smart, young urban professional, downright suburban. The one thing they all have in common? Well, they all read Gibberish. Yes, very clever of you. Besides that, what do they all have in common?

They should all have at least one bottle of personal lubricant.

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It’s triple-digit temperature time in Richmond. It takes every bit of high-tech and low-tech trickery to survive the heat in full leather. Two minutes packing my saddlebags without my jacket on can mean the difference between starting a ride slightly warm or sweating. I wear wicking tops and bottoms, and to complete my set I recently purchased five pairs of CoolMax® liner socks from Sierra Trading Post.

The socks can be worn under heavier socks, or worn by themselves. They were basic: white, with no additional reinforcement or material on the sole, toes, or heel. The socks were listed as “seconds,” which didn’t faze me that much. At less than $3 a pair, what could go wrong?

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I love games. I grew up on them, and all of my friends have been game players. One of us always has a new game to play, whether it be on the computer or in meatspace.

Each player controls one of four families. Every family has five members, ranging from a disembodied brain to a crazy dog to a spooky-ass circus ringleader. My personal favorite was the murderous clown, however the possibly-conjoined twins were very popular during our test game. The object of the game is to make your family as sad as possible and then killing them off. Unfortunate events, such as “mauled by manitees,” result in negative happiness points. The more negative happiness points a character has, the sadder they become. Positive happiness points come from cards involving puppies, yummy food, or a good night’s sleep. You may kill any character (yours or controlled by an opponent) once they have negative happiness points. Dead characters’ happiness points count towards your total score at the end. The player with the lowest score wins the game.
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I never know what I’m going to get when I rent a car in San Francisco. I always request a four-door intermediate car, and I have been given that type of car exactly once in seven visits. After my very delayed flight out to SFO, Hertz informed me that they’d given away my car to someone else, but I could take either a minivan or a Subaru Outback. I chose the Outback, not only because it was the lesser of two evils, but because I’d owned a 2004 Impreza WRX sedan three years ago. I like Subarus, despite their ugly appearance.

My Outback was “satin white pearl,” and the exterior color said it all: this was going to be a bland, yet capable, rental.

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What do the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica and my FZ6 motorcycle Cylon have in common? They are both one-eyed, efficient mechanical wonders who don’t give a damn about humanity.

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I asked Yoda to caliper me last week before I left for California. It had been a little over a month since my last pinching. I have been doing all sorts of crazy plyometric shit with Yoda, and was interested to see how I was doing. I was also hoping to punish myself, since I haven’t been doing as much cardio as I should be.

We went through the usual ritual: I’d weigh in without shoes on, then Yoda would give me the multi-pinch with the calipers. I have dropped even more weight since last time, down to 182 pounds. I was 24 years old the last time I weighed this little. Yoda measured the same sites as last time. He entered the results into the software that records my progress.

“Wow,” he said.

My stomach soured. He was blocking the monitor and I couldn’t see. “Wow what? Is it bad?”

He stepped aside. “Twelve percent. That’s pretty awesome.”

Just like that, I met my goal a month early. Sure, I almost threw up during several of our workout sessions and I had to be sent home early during a set. It wasn’t a cake walk, but it was much easier to get down to 12% with Yoda’s assistance than doing it on my own in 2001. What should I do now? Ten percent?

Total weight loss: 7 pounds

Total change in body fat percentage: -9%

Total fat loss: 17.85 pounds

Rank on the Jaine Parr Badass Scale: Cut

One of my longtime hardware dream projects is a RAID 5 file server for the home. My current setup is a mish-mash of different disks and capacities. I have no backup or failover options except for the external drive onto which I back up my digital photos.

As the years ticked on, drive sizes got larger. A one terabyte array seemed absurdly too big; now single drives store up to 750GB of data. One thing that stayed the same was the need for a big case that had enough room for an array of drives and the ability to cool them.

Enter the Yeong Yang W201 server case. The W201 can hold up to twelve 3.5″ drives by utilizing optional drive cages and the W201’s stock two 3.5″ bays. The case also features some options I won’t take advantage of, such as a hot-swappable SATA 2 five-disk hard drive cage. Standing seventeen inches tall, twenty-four inches deep, and almost nine inches wide, the W201 towers (lol) over my current Chieftech case.

The W201 is a touch over $200 with the two drive cages before shipping. Shipping won’t be cheap: total shipping weight is 42 pounds, the case weighs 37 pounds alone.

There aren’t any immediate plans to build my dream file server. I have enough debts to pay down before I start buying more toys. :)

Thanks to some fucktard who decided that “all muslims must die” was a good game name, we’ve had to put a username:password on the roclar.net JSOC server.

If you’re interested in playing, please email me and I’ll relay the pertinent info to you.

It never fails. When I say never, I mean never. Rosie will be in a different room, maybe even upstairs. Sometimes she is asleep, other times playing. I’ll walk, sneak, or belly-crawl over to Porter.

I wait.

My hand stretches out slowly and I start to pet Porter. He might roll over on his belly or stretch out a bit, but he never makes any significant sound. Sometimes I whisper in his ear that he’s a good boy, or that I love him.

I blink once, maybe twice, and there’s Rosie. Every time.

How does Rosie know that I’m petting her brother? Why does she wake up, jump off the bed, run downstairs, and find us no matter what room we’re in? Seriously, it’s beginning to freak me out. Lady Jaye and I think that maybe dogs make a “I’m happy” sound that we can’t hear but is audible to other canines.

Any guesses?