September 2007 – Only Mostly Dead

To buy or not to buy a new harddrive?

Back in April when I bought the machine that would become my MythTV box I knew that 320Gb wasn’t huge (for Myth) but acceptable (and 3 times larger than the 100Gb across 2 disks I’d had up to then). But I always said I’d wait for a 750Gb drive to hit the £100 mark and buy one. The difference is I thought that would take until the end of the year but it’s here now. And my main drive is 9Gb (or 3-6 hours) off full. I say main drive because I’ve now got an external drive which holds my music, videos and archived recordings – i.e. older recordings which I’ve not yet watched but which have been pushed onto the slower external drive (they play fine, just take a second or two to start). In total I’ve got 500Gb used.

So 750Gb would only be a step up of 250Gb. I know, I know ‘only’ but in Myth terms it’s not huge. But it would allow me to bring my external drive stuff back on to an internal drive – which would make the whole thing run a little better (if I’m scrolling past a recording on the external drive it’s noticeably slower.) And it’d give me a little room for expansion.

So why not buy it? Well because I could wait and buy 1Tb in a few months for similar money (currently around £200) and because I’m still a little bit skint after buying the house and because it’s only a small step up in size. See if I bought a silly amount of disc – 5Tb say – then I could use Myth in a slightly different way – where you let it record all sorts of stuff, some based on generic rules (every new pilot, every film with a > 2.5 star rating etc) and then weed out what’s worth watching at your leisure. But ultimately, and especially since I’m not buying silly amounts of disc, if you record at a faster rate than you watch then you’re always going to run out of space eventually.

I’m taking a break from the Ship of Fools, a website I’ve visited almost every day for about the past four years. Why? The short answer is that I don’t get much positive from it except to kill time, which isn’t that positive, especially when a lot of the time ‘killed’ is time I should be working – and I’ve started to feel like there’s a downside. Lately I’ve come away feeling slightly sad, vaguely upset and a little bit weary.

Before I delve into the long answer let me talk about what’s good about the Ship. The best thing about the Ship is that you can question any part of Christianity and be taken seriously. There are almost no taboos. If all you want from a forum is good rigorous debate then it’s hard to beat. Also it was the place I met M. It was the place that provided me with something of a sense of connection with others when I didn’t have that in real life.

However lately I’ve been noticing that I don’t get much out of it any more. I don’t think I ever felt the sense of community some do (I’ve had about a dozen PMs in those 4 years) and the little I did has gone. The very diversity of thought that is its strength has made the Ship a difficult place for someone, me, who doesn’t quite know what he believes. I fully accept that that’s my problem but I need to focus a little, maybe look at the conflicting traditions one by one. Establish a core of what I think and believe.

The biggest problem though is the attitudes of some of the posters (please note I said ‘some’). There’s a continual stream of low-level digs at Evangelicalism, and occasionally Charismaticism. It’s not unique to those groups but those are the ones I tend to notice, and feel more. I can sort of shrug it off, no big deal, but it makes me just a little tired, sad and angry. Since I don’t want to be feeling that I’m not reading the Ship for a while.