Roger Penrose is on NPR and I just received a bill from the library for his book, so now seems like an opportune time to write about it. I finally finished up Shadows of the Mind, having read it in ridiculously short spurts over the past few months (average session length: 3 metro stops).

I mentioned Penrose before, and JK of C-130 called me out on a dig I made at Penrose. Having just finished Francis Crick's highly unsatisfying "reductionism lite", I decided to have a closer look at Penrose's account.

Just a quick note: we got a message from our hosting company a few days ago indicating that we're on pace to exceed our bandwidth cap for this month. Increasing traffic, the new design and a decision to post more photos all played into this. D'oh. Well, the plan is to move to a new host sometime next week. Things should get speedier -- our current host is located somewhere in southeast Asia -- and we should get about twice the bandwidth allocation for about the same money.

But the site will probably briefly go kerflooey. I'll post more notes about this immediately before it happens, but thought I might as well mention it now. As opposed to, you know, doing actual work toward remedying the situation.

Ah, the simple joys of data archiving. The click of the spindle cover; the smooth line of the constant angular velocity test; the gentle whizz! of Sharpie intoxication.

You see, I finally bought a DVD burner. Prices have gotten quite low, and so has my available disc space, so I picked up this sucker from NewEgg -- a BenQ DW1620. Our relationship got off to a rocky start: despite having installed dozens if not hundreds of optical drives in friends' PCs, I managed not only to put my new prize in upside down but to forget to plug any cables in prior to closing the case. That's not like me at all! I *love* plugging cables into things!

That problem corrected, I found myself in posession of a sleek, high-tech means of manufacturing reasonably priced drink coasters. Reflashed the firmware to an older version, and bang! Success. I'm merrily archiving our music collection, guarding against the inevitable yet never-foreseen infocalypse. It was this or buy a new hard drive and figure out how to set up software RAID in Linux.

I'm also backing up some old movies on the server so that I can delete them to free up some space. I'm a bit of a digital pack-rat. You'll never know when that Pascal version of Tetris you wrote in 10th grade will come in handy, after all. So the first disc I successfully burned holds XviD versions of Alien vs. Predator, Blade Trinity, Van Helsing and Wimbledon. Obviously it'd be a tragedy if these were lost to the aether.

This is one of those tech purchases that I'm completely convinced will change my life for the better in immediate and important ways. I have no idea what those ways are, but it's a pretty safe bet that they'll require that I spend more money.