Can a hard drive crash be a good thing?


We're refinishing the basement, which involves a lot of power tool use. On more than one occation, we get brief power failures. A couple weeks ago, a spike caused my external hard drive to crash, despite it being plugged in to a surge protecter. At first I was quite upset, and I went to the Seagate website, where they have a data recovery service advertised. I called them, and they told me that costs ran from $500 to $2500, and he asked me, "Is the data on the drive worth $500?" I thought about it for a minute and said I wasn't sure. I decided that I'd wait a week or so and see how much I missed it. Well, one week went by, then two, and I didn't miss it at all.



I had already transfered all of my files that make up this site, my grad school library, my music collection, and some irreplacable pictures to the internal hard drive of my Dual Processor Mac G5. I had the following things on my external drive:

-20 Full Length Movies

-The first 4 seasons of Seinfeld

-15 Banned Cartoons (due to derogetory racial content)

-15 Video clips of 9/11 footage, including I like to watch which must be seen to be believed.

-10 Skateboarding videos

-5 illegal street racing videos

-200 music videos

-A well sorted pr0n video collection including:

--15 vids of boy/girl scenes with brunette girls on top

--20 tribadism videos (see May 15 blog entry)

--5 Videos with Jewish girls

--15 Lesbian strap-on vids

--40 Lesbian Kissing vids

--25 miscelaneous files in a folder called "hot lez"

--10 "Classic" full length pornos from the 70s and 80s (mostly featuring Christy Canyon)

--800 sex sound files downloaded from alt.binaries.sounds.erotica (including 4 of my own creation)


I aquired the files iin the pr0n folder from IRC, Usenet and peer-to-peer programs. The files I saved on my external drive were the cream of the crop;; I kept only 10-20% of the stuff I downloaded. This collection is a result of thousands of man hours of collecting and filtration, and the sudden loss of all of it gave me a new perspective.


There is something hypnotic about watching progress bars go from 0 to 100% waiting for something to download. As a graduate from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors in Psychology, it's strange I didn't realize that I had trapped myself in a perfect case of classical conditioning.


The most effective meathod by which to cause a subject to repeat a particular behavior is to reward the subject intermitantly with varying degrees of rewards. It works the same way with slot machines as with porn downloaders.. Slots give payouts intermitatly at differing amounts, and downloaders get fresh videos that they will find exiting to varying degrees. The need for novelty for porn users causes the urge to download to continue, but the urge to collect requires further scrutiny.


For me, it got to the point that the collection became an end unto itself. I didn't really enjoy looking at the videos, but stil had an urge to collect, weed through, sort and store these videos. Most of the time, I'd fast-forward or move the progress bar in the media player to skip through the video to see if I should keep it, where I should put it, and if I should rename it to give it a more descrriptive name. There was no joy in the process, just compulsion.


Well the hard drive crash stoped the collection behavior cold, and it brought about a new clarity. I deleted all my usenet downloaders, cancelled my giganews account, uninstalled my peer-to-ppeer clients and mIRC. I found I can watch any mussic video on Yahoo music, and download any song, legally, off iTunes. I promised myself I'd replace all my stolen music with legal copies from iTunes.


Overall, I feel happier since the crash, and I think I'm going to format the bitch and sell it on eBay, and give the money back to my dad, who bought it in the first place.