Then a funny thing happened. The n3wbs and I started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. This is a series that we’ve played since the first version on the original Xbox. I spent an unhealthy amount of time in a friend’s basement playing Project Gotham 1 in head-to-head racing. We got pretty good at it. We still miss San Francisco which was never included in any of the subsequent games and made for some pretty insane racing. PGR2 was probably the game we played the most as a group. Not Halo. Not Gears of War. Project Gotham 2. We have our own lexicon of terms for racing. Some of the less-colorful ones include, “crop-outing” and “toro”.

I recently made some changes to my room, moving my gear around for better viewing position. So when we started playing PGR4 after a year’s hiatus, I was shocked to discover some strange audio glitches coming out of my speakers. Engine noises had drop-outs. Music would skip. It was the strangest thing. I checked other sound sources at the speakers and listened hard for anomalies. I checked cabling to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up during the reorganization. I tweaked sound settings in the game. I put up with it.

Then I checked the Interwebs. Sure enough, a bit of googling turned up some hits about PGR4 Audio Problems. Weirdly, it’s a result of installing to the hard-drive. Why this should be makes absolutely no sense. It has to be playing the sounds from memory (assuming the engine noises aren’t discretely modeled audio simulations which would be very surprising and worthy of at least several papers) and it has to load them from a disk. It shouldn’t matter where they’re coming from. The only reason I can think of is that using the hard-drive is putting extra load on the processor or I/O buss and that’s causing the glitching. Still sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?

At any rate, I’d like to see MS release a patch for this, but since Bizarre Creations have pretty-much stopped caring about the PGR series (*snif*) that’s very unlikely. I’ll have to suffer and play it from the DVD.

I’ve had a blog post sort of percolating around in my head for a couple of weeks, and thought I’d take a few minutes to try to get it out there. It’s a bit meta. As I’m typing this, a video chat request comes in from Toronto and I get to wave to my friend from 400kms away. It sets the tone nicely.

It’s occurred to me recently that leaving the house with a fully-prepared go-bag, I am hoisting around nearly half a terabyte of data. No really. Let’s add that up:

MacBook Pro internal hd: 120GB
IoMega portable firewire hd: 120GB
5G iPod: 80GB
Camera storage: 8GB
Other camera storage: 4GB
Phone: 2GB
Nintendo DS: 4GB (more on that later)

Total: 338GB

Let’s chew on that for a second. Even when lightened for field-operations, my available storage capacity’s generally around 100GB depending which devices I’m carrying, more if my laptop’s with me.

What can you do with 338GB of storage? Well, nearly 80GB of that is my music collection (or most of it, anyway). About 40GB is made up of various alternate operating systems needed for work and games. Another 40GB contains various source code trees that I’m working on. I have storage space for nearly 1500 photos at full resolution, camera RAW format. Nearly 10 times that if I bother to off-load my cards onto laptop or portable harddrive. The rest is a bunch of movies and tv shows ripped from DVD or the internets.

I’m not the worst offender. I know people who are probably more technologically-powered than I am in their daily affairs. I certainly don’t leave the house fully-equipped all the time. Usually only when working remotely. But still…

How much data is this? Looking at http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/, I’m somewhere between “A library floor of academic journals” and “50,000 trees made into paper and printed”. Or, 338GB / 9GB per disc = 37.5 full length movies. I’m not saying that what I carry around with me is that valuable or informative to anyone else, but it comprises an almost total copy of my “working set” of data.

These are truly the days of science fiction 15 years ago. Not quite Neuromancer strange, but definitely

Spook Country

.