Author: doug

How they roll

It’s 6 PM on Sunday, January 1st. Normally I would cross the Ruta Interbalnearia. However, it’s time for everyone-at-the-same-time to leave the beach (other side) and return to Montevideo (to the right). I didn’t manage to catch the traffic, but there are lots of cars, also heading to Montevideo, coming from further east.

In this photo there are nine cars in the crossing, one more waiting on the far side of the far lane, and one more on this side, also waiting to turn right.

It was very tempting to wait and watch them all sort out this clusterfuck, but I wasn’t feeling patient.

Retiring an old hard drive

I didn’t remember when I bought this hard drive (I thought 2004). It was an HP product with an unalterable HP partition, designed for Windows backups. Which I probably never used it for. That was a bother, but even more of a bother was my trying to overwrite the disk so I could give it away. My command-line Linux magic simply rendered it unusable, unmountable, impossible to format in Linux or MacOS.

So, impossible to erase. All my data still on there.

However, that raises a question:

Short answer: That being said, if you just want a quick rule of thumb for how long you can expect the hard drive in your laptop should last, we’d say you should be prepared for disk failure after three years of use. source

Of course, this was not in constant use. But, at 13 years and four months, it is now retired. And my data safe.