Rui CarmoToday being my birthday, I took the day off to lounge about doing a select few things I had postponed, shopped around a bit and fielded the usual amount of e-mail, SMS, IM and calls from my friends.
(The farthest birthday greeting I got? Easy. Hi pmos!)
Being a part-time geek, it makes perfect sense that I would take advantage of the date and buy a slew of gadgets for myself, right?
Wrong. I'm way past the "gadget freak" phase. I did buy another cartload of paperbacks at Amazon yesterday, but it's part of my regular tri-monthly shipments (I read voraciously, and it's not uncommon for me to read 200 pages or more at one sitting).
Besides, It's the wrong time of the year to buy gadgets - most of the interesting stuff in my WishList is not yet available here, will be steeply discounted after Xmas or is not really necessary.
But OK, I confess. I did buy one piece of computer hardware this weekend: an el cheapo internal DVD writer for my XP box, which is a more cost-effective purchase than the pricey Firewire drive I was looking to buy for my iMac. Given that it will be exclusively used to do backups of my photo library and my laptop home dir (including e-mail, CVS trees and the myriad Office documents that are now part of my livelihood), and considering that SMB between my Macs and XP works just fine, there just wasn't any point in spending twice the money.
Oh, and my next Mac will have a SuperDrive anyway. :)
The nice thing about this approach is that I just have to copy or rsync my stuff across (around 5 minutes now) and then let the XP box cook the DVD (20 to 40 minutes depending on wind shifts), leaving me free to do other stuff.