Damn, I've been so busy being sick and trying to make a living on eBay I've had writer's block. I had over 100 auctions close Sunday night and my hands are torn up from packing things to mail, but I am caught up which is amazing. Now I get to start all over again. I have a really long rambling entry about the dangers of Prozac that I began and haven't completed yet, I wanted to put it up first, but for the last three plus hours I've been a hostage to my new Maxtor One Touch II external hard drive (don't hit that button unless you've got a lot of free time!!) and I've run out of non-computer things to do so I'm blogging. I'm afraid to do anything that involves my main hard drive because the 38 gig thing is being backed up by the Maxtor...

I've been working my butt off on eBay the last few weeks, and my reward to myself was some new much needed toys. I got a Belkin battery backup, which I plugged everything into tonight despite the warning to charge it eight hours first (oops). That was one of those things I never really thought I needed, but after an electrician looked at our house wiring I decided it might be a good idea. So I spent an hour or two under my nasty, dusty desk following cables and trying to make everything a bit neater. And my old 80 gig Maxtor external hard drive has been making some strange noises on and off the last few months, and Apple's Tiger just came out, so I broke down and bought a new 300 gig Maxtor hard drive, so I can back everything up before I upgrade, and protect everything on my other drive. My intention is to replace the other drive completely, because of several things - first, the weird noise, and secondly... you can't turn the damn thing off! It hums 24 hours a day. And, I only have two Firewire outlets and now have three Firewire devices, I wonder if they make Firewire hubs? So my CD burner is currently disconnected, oh well.

I'm watching the pretty little blue light flicker on the new hard drive, it's kind of hypnotic. It does seem to be much quieter, that's good. I did freak out at first because the CD ROM with all of the installation software would not show up on my desktop, if something's got a defective part, I'm bound to pick it, that's just me. I actually shot off a desperate letter to Maxtor when I registered it tonight, asking for a replacement disk, but then I restarted my Mac and it popped up finally. So I jumped on it and installed everything, and pushed the little blue button... It says it's finished copying, but now it's "comparing", I should have known it would take forever, but I was so excited that the CD was actually working I got carried away.

And I bought Tiger, though I'm going to wait a bit before I try and wrestle with upgrading, especially since I just read that Retrospect, the program that's backing up my hard drive right now, is not compatible with system 10.4. That figures. And I'm really bad about being impatient and wanting to upgrade things ASAP, when I upgraded to system 10 I had to reformat my hard drive and start from scratch. So I'm trying to be a little bit more patient...

Oh yes, and I think I've finally found a mousepad that will work with my semi-new optical mouse and not make me nauseous from the fumes, which seem to never fade away. Am I the only one who is knocked out by that smell? I have a wonderful Ouija board mousepad (recycled material, it NEVER smelled bad), but my optical mouse tends to get confused with all of the patterns on it and fly off into the corners on a regular basis. So I've been on the lookout for a different type pad, I even thought about a leather one, but 99.9 percent of the things have that horrid smell. So when I was shipping in Comp USA this week, I wandered into their mouse section and found a MicroTracker Mouse Pad made of an ultrasuede type microfiber material, and it did not reek of chemicals, yea! It's a pretty grey color, and so far I have not had any control problems with my mouse. The mat does feel slower at first (not for gamers and such), but for anyone who needs precision and control it's very nice. And for those of us who don't always have a super steady hand, it's great.

I've had SO many stupid technical problems lately, Opera keeps crashing (a new version is out but it's still Beta) so I've been having to use Safari, my spam program was all screwed up and super slow (a new version did just come out, thank goodness). I still have a wireless router under my desk that I haven't tried messing with in the last few months, it kept screwing up my cable modem's IP address. And just a a little irritant, I found out one of the mic cables I bought for my Yamaha keyboard back at Christmas time was wrong (it's the one the salesperson picked out to go with a mic), and so I finally went back to Guitar Center to exchange it, which took literally an hour, then when I got home I realized it was now wrong in a different way, so I figured out which kind I really needed and bought the correct one on eBay. I'm sorry, my time and patience is worth more than $9 and hour. Buying the keyboard originally took almost three hours. I'm just not cool enough to hang around a music store for that long, I'm sorry. When I saw it was wrong again, I actually considered going to Radio Shack to see if they had a convertor plug, that's how much I DON'T want to go back to Guitar Center ever again...

OMG, I've been typing now for well over an hour and the hard drive is STILL "comparing" with only 21 gig left!! It would be nice to go to bed before dawn tonight for a change (sigh). And I have some images on my hard drive that I need to run through Photoshop, but I don't want to screw up this backup. Maybe I'll go take a shower and then come back and see if it's finished, I dunno...