Is it nearly 2008 yet?

Bloody Christmas nonsense. And the traditional "is it next year yet?" thing tonight. Great.

Still, I've got a big pile of DVDs to wade through now. Which might keep me going for a bit. And by the time I've got through those, I'll be able to get lots more for free.

Just got a cheque for 20 quid and another 5 quid Amazon voucher. Which brings my final total for the year up to £636.74. Pretty good. If I keep that up next year, that covers the big long list of DVDs and CDs and books that all seem to be appearing at the same time. Or I might just save them up and by the time I have enough, I'll be able to find a Wii for sale.

My new drive does not contain bank account details

No, really. The new harddrive I ordered from Amazon does not (or at least, shouldn't) contain 25 million people's bank account details. But possibly someone thinks it does. That would explain why it seems to have gone missing. Amazon seemingly sent it by TNT. The company that delivers mail, not the explosive. (That wouldn't really work, would it? Exploding people's packages and hoping they get thrown many miles and just land in the right place?)

So obviously someone is thinking "Hmm, looks like a harddrive. Wonder if it's got anything interesting on?" Or maybe it's just got delayed. Of course, you have to wait 3 days after the expected delivery date before complaining to Amazon. (That expected date being 6 days after it was sent, and 8 days after it was ordered). And then they'll chase it and let you know within 2 days. Good job I'm not desperate for it.

But Amazon generally seem to be quite good at sorting out problems. Never had any trouble, and things do go wrong or get lost now and then. To be expected with the amount of stuff they must be sending out.

And I've just added £28.07 to my total of free stuff (a cheque converted from $50 makes it an odd amount). Making £611.74. Which is pretty impressive. Let's see if I can get more than £700 next year.

How quickly can I fill a hard drive?

A couple of months after buying a new PC, and I've only got 17% of my disk free. Ok, so that's technically more than I had free on the old PC, but the drive is twice the size. And because it's a faster and fancier PC, I'm installing more stuff. (How much space did the Half Life 2 Orange Box take up?? Worth it just for the glorious Portal, obviously).

So, having just got another 15 quid of Amazon vouchers (£583.67 now), I've just ordered another drive. 320gig should last me a little while.

Problem is, with my fancy box for my guitar, I can record my guitar doodlings. Record those at CD quality, making sure I record both pairs of outputs (the one with the effects and the clean one), and that's about 345Kb/s. Or 20Mb a minute. Or 264 hours on the drive. (Allowing for 320gig drives not really being that big). About 11 days. And given that if I ever get around to trying to record something approaching a proper song, that's 3 or 4 guitar parts, each one taking 3 or 4 attempts before I get fed up, and we get 16 hours. Which would be quite a long song, I guess. And my fingers would probably explode.

But then there's all the other stuff I'll shove on the drive too. I give it 6 months at most before I need another one. At which point, they'll probably be 1/4 of the price or something silly.