Dear Diary #81: Bad Luck with 2.5" Hard Drives, Spicy Curry

Dear Diary,

Think it's time I swear to never use 2.5" hard disk drives again -- the old, platter type, not SSD. My external HDD may have just dropped dead after I plugged it in, let Windows install the drivers, and safely removed it. There was an out of the ordinary clicking sound but the drive was recognized so I didn't think too much of it. Well, I thought it safely removed after I clicked on the icon and gave it over 10 seconds. When I unplugged it, Windows said it couldn't safely remove it. I go to plug it in half an hour later and game over: the computer sees the drive and thinks it all works but no data shows up. In fact, it was so busted that I restarted my system and the BIOS stalled because it couldn't read the drive -- booted as normal right after the drive was unplugged. And it's a year out of warranty. The sad thing is that I barely ever used this drive, it was for backups and not even my primary, so I probably used it two dozen times over the past four years. That makes dead 2.5" HDD number two in the past year. Still haven't had a 3.5" HDD die on me in two decades.

Yep, hard drive died. Before I completely gave up on it, I got the idea to turn it upside down and that got it to work for almost a minute before it started making weird noises again. Seriously, note to self: never ever buy another 2.5" platter-based HDD again.

Note to self: stay away from spicy curry, not all spicy curry, just the one that was recently consumed. You know, the one that made every inch of its passage through your colon known all hours of the day and night. What did I do wrong...

Ugh, I only DVR'd half of a movie because I'd seen the other half already and I had to record something else that was actually new. I only vaguely remember the other half the movie so it's not clear how the two halves come together now.

TV during the Olympics is "slower" than TV during the Christmas and New Year's break. At least there are movie marathons during the holiday break. It's just reruns and a couple channels are running Olympic coverage 24/7 -- when you get American and Canadian TV stations.

Later.