Friday, June 10, 2005

Drowning in a Half-Empty Pool

As I briefly alluded to the other day, my office PC has been experiencing a "low disk space" problem of late - "of late" being the past few months. It was only after I had moved every non-essential file from the C drive and was still overflowing with something or other that I was forced to seek a lifeline (mainly because I do not possess partition software).

The partitioning of the hard drive was the crux of the problem. And when I say partitioning, I'm not referring to two segments, or three, but four of them on a drive with a modest 40GB capacity to begin with. It's a wonder I made it two years before outgrowing the arbitrarily designated main partition.

Why the drive was sliced & diced, I can't fathom. Nobody else I talked to about it could avoid head-scratching puzzlement either. Ditto the curiosity of the machine having both a CD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive. But it was custom-made for my predecessor, an older lady who was the nicest person but who had some peculiar quirks about some things and was set in those ways like granite.

It pretty much goes without saying that the estimated repair timeframe would prove overly optimistic. In the end the partitions couldn't be removed, so we improvised by expanding the C partition to overwrite and absorb the D, which only contained a duplicate Windows directory (Don't ask, it'll just give you a headache). I now have ten extra gigs to work with, which at the previous rate of disk space consumption should last about nine months, plenty of time in which to upgrade to either a newer machine or a bigger, and unpartitioned, drive.

In the meantime, the delay put me a day behind, which, given that this was a slow week, wasn't difficult to make up this afternoon. But meant that something else had to give, which turned out to be my links pages, which haven't been updated for three days. I'll tend to that this weekend, assuming my kids don't succeed in running me ragged.

Also the blog fodder I couldn't get to this week.

All that cricket-chirping doesn't fool me. I know you're all waiting with the rapt anticipation of a Star Wars fan going to see Revenge of the Sith again. Seeing it the first time is another thing on my to-do list, along with the subsequent review and reviewing the final two Enterprise episodes before Battlestar Galactica's second season kicks off next month. And there's a ton of receipts for me to enter, and bank statements to reconcile, and home remodeling to contract, and lawn to mow, and a basketball net to replace. Sheesh, I've reached middle age and haven't even begun planning my mid-life crisis yet.

With my luck, it'll end up hitting me suddenly while climbing one too many flights of stairs.

Just so they don't remove any partitions from my heart. I understand they serve a purpose there.