two dolla

my life can go on

For quite some time, I’ve been having some issues with my external hard drive. I’ve written about them before. I was getting pretty desperate, mainly because that hard drive held every digital picture I’d ever taken since 1998. Every last one. And while those pictures of me drinking beer from a plastic Bud Light picture while sitting in the middle of a pole barn that had been converted into a club/bar approximately 10 minutes from Whiteman Air Force Base may not be all that important to the next person, those gems of photographs are certainly not ones I want to lose.

I’ve been avoiding the thought of the faulty hard drive for quite some time, because it made me really sad. When we were at Pride, we talked to a lady who runs a computer fixin’ business of her own. She let me know that it’d cost abuot $75/hour to retrieve the data I wanted, and it’s likely that it could take an entire day for it to finish. I think I threw up in my mouth when she told me that and decided to stop thinking about it again for a while. And then I’d want to look at a picture or, you know, listen to music, but I couldn’t because all of that? On the hard drive.

One night, I got tired of thinking about it, so I did some looking into things on the internet. Surely if it’s on the internet, it’s gonna work, right? The internet suggested taking the external hard drive out of the casing and plugging it into my computer. I did the first part, and then realized I didn’t have an extra ribbon cable to plug it in. Luckily, The General’s ex is kinda smart with these kinds of things and suggested I just unplug my CD drive and use those cables instead. So I did.

And you know what? It worked. And as soon as I saw my computer recognize it, I collapsed onto the floor with happiness. No kidding. And now I can bring you little gems like this:

Why, yes, that’s me sitting in The Cuz’s old house, partaking in a little 4th of July celebration in the year 2000 while drinking a can of Dirt Cheap beer and downloading songs through Napster. The Cuz had high speed internet and I was amazed at how quickly DSL could download Busta Rhymes’ “Woo Hah Got You All in Check” compared to my 28.8K connection I had back home.