I think I may have figured out what's going on with the story, but there's a good chance I'm wrong since anime has a much larger bag of tricks than Hollywood does. If I'm wrong, great. If I'm not, also great, because that would also be a good story.
It's a time travel and alterate universe story, and I like what I've seen so far.
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Last night I watched a video on YouTube wherein a guy unboxed a SyQuest SparQ1.0. New in the box straight from 1998--shrink wrap still intact--he paid $7 for it.
Those drives were junk. SyQuest bet the company on the things, and lost; when production started they were not ready for use "in the wild" and it ended up being the end of the company. Partway through the video the guy is wondering if he's gotten a bad drive, and it would not have been out of the question for one of those things to be bad right out of the box.
A friend of mine had one. It worked for a month or two, then died. And by that time you couldn't really take the thing back because SyQuest was already on the skids. Because of that, unless I threw it away, I have a three-pack of blank carts for the thing, still in the shrinkwrap; if I do have them maybe I should send them to that guy. Assuming his drive continues to work. (I had wanted to keep the drive, too, but that got tossed. Argh etc.)
I'm not sure what he was doing--I skipped ahead in the video--but I think he was installing something or watching a promo vid, and it consisted of showing tiled images and a voiceover. At one point there was a toddler, hands on keyboard of a very 1990s-looking PC, and the guy said, "That kid's probably dead of a crack overdose." It's a mean comment, but I laughed, because the whole video-while-installing nonsense was getting really irritating. Especially the way the propaganda tried to make it sound as if buying a SparQ1.0 was a major life decision.
A lot of these advanced removable storage media were doomed, anyway, by the introduction of CD-R. Within a year or so of IDE CD-R drives, blank CDs were running under a dollar apiece, and that was a damned sight cheaper than the $10 per 100 MB ZIP disks, or the $50 1 GB Jaz cartridges (which did work, unlike SyQuest's junk). For the cost of one Jaz cart you could get fifty CD-Rs, and back up some thirty gigabytes of data. Mind you, at a maximum recording speed of 2x it took some time to write a CD, but it was still a lot cheaper, and it was faster than using a tape drive (which, until then, was the next best option for backups).
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And Hallelujah! I have just been informed that my request to have my anniversary and the day after off from work has been approved, so I can stay home tomorrow and Friday. This means I don't have to go back to work this year, and in fact won't work again until Saturday. Having taken Monday off, that means five days in a row. I'm not going to have any personal time left, but I don't even care about that.
...sure is nice having a job where I get personal time, and can use it.
Today is Star Wars day for us. My wife has been humming "The Imperial March" since she got up. I am looking forward to seeing the movie, too, but with less enthusiasm, because I've seen the veiled comments that others have given about it. I expect it to be superficially entertaining, though, which is fine considering that's where the franchise excels best.
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The snow has lingered, and it might snow a little bit today. I don't even care. It'll be a week before temps are high enough to melt the plow drift at the bottom of the driveway, which means I'll have to go out there and dig on Friday. No big deal; I'll just take it slow and easy. It's not like I have to clear the whole driveway; it's just a stretch about three feet wide and sixteen across. Maybe take half an hour, forty-five minutes or so.
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Guess I'd better hit the shower for the show.