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shopping while depressed
Thursday, January 5 2017
It was day two since the email server catastrophe of Tuesday night, and there was still no blow back of any sort. As bad as things had seemed at the time, it was looking increasingly likely that nobody was ever going to notice outside those of us who had been directly involved. As I might say to Google if I were to use that feature I never use, I was feeling lucky.
It's nice to have a few good things in your life as the Republicans (now officially embracing their status as a death cult) convene to destroy the safety net and perhaps what they can of the world. It's not something I particularly like about myself, but one activity I find useful for combatting the depressing nature of the times is shopping. It is, after all, what our culture tells us to do to correct any of life's problems. Furthermore, I have never in my life been so well-off financially. But the big problem with shopping as an therapeutic activity is that I already have everything I could possibly want (ok, I'd like a Tesla electric automobile, but that's absurd and needlessly douchey; what I mean is that everything I could reasonably buy is already bought). Perhaps this is why I like the Tibetan Center thrift store so much; that's more like a treasure hunt, introducing me to random things from the lives of others that I had no idea I wanted.
Today, though, I managed to think of something I really need: a new hard disk drive for the household NAS setup. This is not so much because the existing drive is running out of space (it's 77% full, mostly of movies, television shows, podcasts, and music), but because it's good to periodically retire a hard drive and keep it as offline storage. That way when whatever drive I'm using unexpectedly and irrevocably dies (which has never really happened), I'll have a backup of some sort. I'd also like to implement some sort of delta backup using a small 2.5 inch hard drive. Until I get something in place, I'm at risk of losing all my media (except what I have on an old 1.5 TB offline hard drive) in hard drive crash. I've been using computers since 1983 and, aside from a few losses before I got my first Macintosh in 1990, I've never experienced a non-trivial loss of data. But I'm just lucky, as I alluded to earlier.
So today I bought a 4 TB 3.5 inch internal hard drive (as well as a case for making it an external USB 3.0 drive) from NewEgg.com. THe new drive is supposedly optimized for NAS usage, which is the intended application. In the past when I've bought big new hard drives to replace earlier ones, they've been about 150% to 300% the capacity of the one before. This was important back when media needs were expanding at an exponential rate. Here's the data needed for this discussion (a continuation of a chart I'd made in 2009):
| Year | Typical computer media | Typical media size | My largest hard drive at the time | Hard Drive Price |
| Jun 1990 | Word document | 20 KB | 20 MB | ~$250 |
| 1991 | Word document | 20 KB | 120 MB | ~$340 |
| 1993 | Word document | 20 KB | 205 MB | ~$320 |
| 1995 | Application | 500 KB | 512 MB | ~$300 |
| 1996 | Application | 500 KB | 1 GB | ~$300 |
| Jul 9 1997 | Application | 1 MB | 2 GB | $250 |
| Feb 7 1998 | Application | 1 MB | 4.3 GB | ~$200 |
| Apr 1999 | Application | 2 MB | 10 GB | $195 |
| Apr 20 2001 | MP3 Audio File | 4 MB | 40 GB | $160 |
| Aug 11 2003 | MP3 Audio File | 4 MB | 120 GB | $110 |
| Oct 2004 | MP3 Audio File | 4 MB | 200 GB | $130 |
| Jun 21 2006 | MP3 Audio File | 4 MB | 300 GB | $115 |
| Jan 13 2008 | MP3 Audio File | 4 MB | 500 GB | ~$120 |
| Aug 13 2009 | Movie File | 800 MB | 1.5 TB | ~$130 |
| May 31 2012 | Movie File | 800 MB | 3 TB | ~$170 |
In 2014, I moved all media to a NAS server and quit expanding the storage in my workstation.
This NAS storage was initially 2 TB in size and then moved to 3 TB |
| January 2017 | Movie File | 800 MB | 4 TB | $147 |
While it's true that my propensity to download increased (and stayed higher) once I'd added the NAS server, the rate has been mostly flat for half a decade, meaning my storage needs are now increasing at a linear (not exponential) rate.
It suggests that the additional terabyte coming with the new storage should last me years. This could all change, of course, if a popular and enticing new media format comes along that requires more storage (indeed, the presence on Bittorrent of a whole television series as a single download is a little like this). But it's unlikely to change that much given the 3 Mb/s internet connection I have to work with, a bandwidth that has been about the same for something like eight years.
Today at some point I was trying to track down the torrent for Season 6 of Gilmore Girls (which Gretchen had recently begun watching from the beginning). For whatever reason, Season 6 was hard to find, and I ended up on a suspicious site called pastorrents.com. When I clicked on the magnet link, the site started downloading a .exe file and then insisted that I should install a browser plugin called Bitmotion. When I declined and tried to back out, the following Javascript alert popped up:
From there, the only escape was to use the task manager to kill Chrome (you would think Chrome would have a better way of dealing with such obnoxious Javascript). Amused by the shameless ballsiness of that alert, I researched what others had to say about it and what they'd done in response to it. Some admitted to calling that phone number (1-305-985-6352) and one person even admitted giving credit card details to the person who answered. That makes it a surprisingly-effective phishing tool, considering how casually-unprofessional its language is. Interestingly, of all the malware-help sites writing about this alert, not a single one mentioned that just because you see such an alert does not mean anything bad has (yet) happened to your computer. It's only after you open mysterious .exe files, are pressured into installing unwanted plugins, or call a phone number provided in a Javascript alert served from s3.amazonaws.com that your life begins to suck.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170105 feedback
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