When my new hard drive that supposedly shipped on Monday afternoon from Fresno, CA (nearish to San Jose) didn’t show any FedEx status updates for over 24 hours, I began to wonder if I’d have it before Friday when I might get Leopard.

Has years of FedEx tracking with Apple taught me nothing? As I suspected, the package’s status was not updated when it was picked up, nor when it transited a local sorting center. I saw nothing until it got to City of Industry (nearish to Los Angeles and a bizarre wikipedia entry in itself. Hey, let’s incorporate an industrial wasteland to prevent surrounding burbs from collecting taxes!).

I should have known. Well I did know that FedEx Express updates nearly to the level of a package leaving an airplane. But FedEx Ground is quite another matter. They might give you three updates on a transcontinental week-long journey. And those often after the package arrived.

Now that I ought to have a bigger HDD by sometime on Friday, I hope Holland gets her free Leopard disc that day too.

It’s a struggle to keep even a gigabyte free for VM on this 500GB drive with two users constantly downloading via bit torrent without consulting each other, and managing separate iTunes and iPhoto libraries. It’s the Apple ideal but then I see this a lot, or worse:

To be fair, I have managed to maintain my computing lifestyle for many years and across operating systems and decades. I have all my homework from 6th grade on (about 14 years ago), for example, and crazy internet files and chat transcripts saved since it was invented. My own user folder is over 310GB so place blame where it’s due. Ah well.

I have a feeling the disk is horrifyingly fragmented, even though OS X does have some tricks up its sleeve in this matter. I downloaded a well regarded disk defragmenter to survey the damage before I might have paid $30 and it crashed.

I suppose I might feel tempted to install Mac OS X 10.5 into each of the however many thousands of noncontiguous blocks comprise the 10GB I just managed to free up. Since a lot of what I deleted were *very* old files, and we’ve been Bit Torrenting this thing up to capacity for over a year, perhaps I ought to hold out until I can use the drive as a backup.

It will be a struggle to Time Machine a 750GB drive onto a 500GB external anyway. Good thing I didn’t get the 1TB. (I thought about it but 750GB drives have gotten to the point where they’re so cheap you’d be stupid not to get one. 1TB drives still command the premium I paid for my 500GB drive in January 06. I’m not very employed now, so I feel I should reign myself in. Still, I am a slut for massive amounts of nonvolatile storage.)

If I don’t keep a lot of apps running and not too many dozens of Safari windows, I can keep the swapfiles low. Man this is starting to feel like Windoze. Well at least now I only have 1GB of external swapfiles in /var/vm. Before I logged out both user accounts to erase some hacks (preparing for leopard), it was up to 4GB in what I find to be fascinating increments. A 64MB swapfile. Then a 128MB. Then 256 and on it goes until you have several 1 gigabyte files. It’s Computer Science 101 but I’m so fascinated they start that low. Maybe Leopard will start with a gigabyte.

Anyway that ignores what’s paged out in-place on the disk. Usually with our two users fully loaded with apps, safari pages, and bit torrent downloads, the kernel reckons it’s managing 14GB of Virtual Memory. The machine has 1.5GB of RAM. And I’m not complaining, it’s still quite responsive for a Spring ‘05 vintage machine. I just wish it had a 14 terabyte hard drive.

And to hell with my external 400GB movies drive and 250GB backup (now movies and more) drive.

Seven years ago I wondered when movies would be as easy to download as music.

Now I have nearly 1.6TB of storage ready to be knocked off a desk and I feel desperately close to disaster. With 100GB of music in my iTunes library, most of my CDs still only exist under my bed.

I’d like to (re-)import them all losslessly, but that’s another topic.

This is regarding Apple Computers.
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