I believe it was something close to 3 gigs worth of pictures. Those hopelessly mangled imbeciles from System flipped during a routine scheduled maintenance and turned an entire archive into an unsalvageable wipeout, rife with file corruption and flying cyrillics. 

Back in the ancient day when dinosaurs ruled the earth and a fourteen-four was top of the line in webshredding, it mattered to people how long you could stay online. It was a valid concern. Filenames were six or eight characters max. ROTFLMFAO and its brethren neologisms were unheard of. Time was the penultimate concern, and speed was of the essence. 

But I digress. Netrunning has progressed by leaps and bounds since, while scanning has lost its early grace. Call me a fool for being romantic. There’s something to the charm of having hardcopies of memories and special times with your loved ones. Pictures don’t lie. With acid-free printing a photo can last a good fifty years. Something tangible. Something that can withstand your death bed. I put in more than three months to selecting, cropping, and the whole list of things that one puts these memories through. And then the upload. The pleasure of knowing that the moment captured on film, now available for friends and strangers to view placates me. The privacy issue doesn’t much bother me. It’s the caffeine talking. 

Nothing bothers me.
In addition to the flops I have seven zips with close to 100 megs each. That’s 700 plus the 25. Anyone with half a mind to organize would've burned silver already and save some cargo space in those too-trendy courier sling knaps. I liked the matte black with small orange stripes. Win the auction for almost a fifth the price of a new one and attack vigorously with industrial grade sandpaper. Deconstruction is key to one’s chill factor. 

So with all the people I talk to I should  know somebody with a burner, 
and my pet toy of a pda’s increasingly void of last minute user-friendly contacts. Then the changeover. 

People with burners on the whole possess notoriously inflated egos. They think the world revolves around their 8X4X32 and 50 count spindles. Burn me this burn me that. Gotta get me a bigger drive. A faster micro-proz. Joke and laugh, small talk while the data sparks and coils. Here's your dole. Been good doin biz-nex with ya. As if I had any other choice. 

I don't have a computer at home. Some people put on the pity look when I tell them this and they assume the worst. That I pander myself to some institution and exact my 14 hour binges, toiling at a mixed breed spare parts but-mostly-Taiwanese clone that barely accommodates my broadband gigastorage abuse. I'm thinking an 800MHz @ 20 plus GB on T3 factory cherry's
everybody's wet dream. You don't know how close you are to the truth. It'll be obsolete within the month.

Classic Pavlov. 
An idiot-savantesque focus and attention to detail that would shame the primo hardcore otaku reads like a mother's pride on the profile that those spooks at Central have been keeping on me. Rubbish, I told em. They waved red and honked national security. Kicked my door in, scaring the fuck outta my perennially drunk, nasty bed-wetting double major roommate. Life just hasn't been the same since. I detest being constrained in these white jumpsuits and having my bathroom breaks scheduled. The last foolish trappings of human dignity hang distant.

I dump close to a dozengig of data every 10 hour work period. Copious amounts of hi-rez pr0n, bagfuls of mp3s, movies, webcasts. A ton of text files, e-texts, online gurus, netside communes, Project Gutenberg, max-out P2P’s latest incarnation. I'm hair's-breadth away from human flesh live exposure. Peeking into your drawers. Rooting through other people's garbage. If the prodigies of bleeding edge tek could find it in their hearts to synthesize a menu of odors and upload this onto the net I'd probably be uber-alpha at snorting the assortment of effluvia every half hour on the hour for a good five minutes. Hardwired into the traffic of electrons. I am the comsat that everybody and their mother’s deathly afraid of. 

It's not that exciting, really. Bordering on boredom, like I told you. 

See, I quit smoking a month ago. I knew that the chocolate’s sweet innocence/tooth decay schizophrenia  wouldn't be enough to suppress the scratching insistence that claimed me at least once every two hours. More often as was necessary when things slowed to a crawl. Must be all those additives... But you can never pin the tail on a billion dollar donkey industry. 

Diagnosis is futile.
Nothing to do with that flaky lame excuse for a this week's limpwrist viral "prevention is the best cure" exercise. No longer simple want, but NEED to have my hands on some sweet data all the time. Monster transfer rate in the upper hundreds. Breaking the taskbar with one too many apps. Wrenching the last available bit of virtual mem. Multi-tasking proves one's mettle, meine gutfreund, and I'm ready for any sort of pop quiz. 

Divide the brain into sections and lock settings into autonomous. Send me a too-funny joke via email to print out and dissect during lunch. IM with some inane request to research the latest esoteric tidbit statistic. FTP over a bad ass graphic that needs last minute tweaking. Life isn't over 'til those drones come a-calling and Server shuts me down for hogging precious bandwidth. Information is the new drug, netside is the new sorcery. 

And sleep is for dead people. 

up:  04 03 +1 @ 01 47