Space

A few days ago The Man and I went to Sofmap, a big computer store in Osaka, and bought a 160 gig external firewire hard drive and enclosure. All for me.

I spent most of yesterday trying to get my computer to recognise the drive. It didn't work. Everything I tried had the same result. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I searched the web, installed things, uninstalled things, restarted, did a whole clean system install, and a whole bunch of other things I can't remember now. Nothing worked. My computer got rebooted more often yesterday than it usually does in a year. I generally don't turn it off. I leave it in sleep mode, and rebooting is rare.

The really annoying thing was that I had used The Man's firewire external drive to back up my hard drive a couple of weeks ago (it took 20 minutes - that's how small my drive is and how fast firewire is), and this is the same kind of enclosure and the same kind of drive, and it didn't work. So yesterday I tried his one again, and it didn't work either. But the only thing that had changed since then was a fairly minor system update, which I had to do so I could use my new printer. I reinstalled the old system on another partition, and tried to mount the new drive from that, but that didn't work either.

I went to bed last night feeling very tired, very frustrated, and not knowing what to do. I was flummoxed. I wondered if I'd somehow managed to fry both firewire ports.

This morning The Man had left a note for me. 'Try resetting the power manager and doing a cold boot.'

I've never done that before, but I tried it. The first result was that when I booted up I found I had slipped back in time to 1904. Fixed that. Plugged in and turned on the firewire drive - and there it was!

It was so easy!

Now I don't know what to do. I've been juggling with 6 gigs on my little Powerbook for so long that all this sudden new space makes me feel dizzy. What am I going to do with it? It's a big jump, from 6g to 160g. I'm kind of reluctant to sully my nice new drive by putting stuff on it. It's so clean and empty on there. It echoes with space.

But it's a bit like seeing crisp, clean new snow. A part of you wants to leave it as it is, pure and lovely, and another, naughtier part, wants to make footprints.