Yesterday was commencement day for University of Washington Extension certificate program graduates. It was a thrill to be able to re-live the commencement day thing, even if we don't have caps, gowns or tassels.

 

The theme to the speakers' remarks was a fairly consistent "lifelong learning is fun, addictive and a good example for others"

Last week's Pepsi deal at Safeway was probably one of the best I've seen in recent years.

 

1) buy 2 12-packs of Pepsi soda product, get 2 free! (net $2.75 ea)

2) get 1 24-pack of Refreshe bottled water free! (net $0.00)

3) buy 10 qty of Pepsi/Frito Lay product, get $25 gift card from the in-store display. I chose Best Buy. (chips $2.50 ea)

 

There was a limit of 4@ #1, 2@ #2, 1@ #3. So if you do the math, it works out like this.

 

1) 8@ $2.75 == $22.00

2) 2@ $0.00 == $0.00

3) 2@ $2.50 == $5.00

Total == $27.00

 

Take away the $25 gift card and all that soda/water/chips costs $2.00 plus the tax on $27.00. OMG!

Occasionally, to feed my MMORPG addiction, I find new and somewhat interesting sources of news and analysis.

 

In this case, it was http://www.massive-magazine.com (don't bother clicking, the site is dead). $10 for 4 quarterly issues, readable online only.

 

Now, after only one, maybe two (I'll have to go back through my hotmail inbox) issues, I find the magazine's site is dead.

 

Anyone know what happened to Massive Magazine, a subsidiary of theglobe.com?

 

Side note - do people really read periodicals online? I have a sub to PC Magazine digital and find that I haven't read more than ~2% of the content due to the inconvenient nature (tied to my desktop) of the media compared to my natural reading habitat (I'm not telling).

It's been a while since I last posted here.

 

I've been busy these last few weeks, starting with a business trip to Las Vegas, and ending with the Issaquah Triathlon. No silly, I'm not a triathlete, but I am a volunteer thanks to my kids' school and I had a great time yesterday.

 

My certificate program is completed - all that's left is to pick up my certificate at the ceremony.

 

And new on the hardware front - the Antec MX-1 'actively cooled' external drive enclosure. I've had this enclosure on my mind for a while now, since Antec has been spending the money to put it on magazine back covers. It's a very nice design, all black, looks like something for your media center/home theater.

 

The enclosure itself has both USB and eSATA connections on the back.

 

Assembly wasn't hard, with a few screws and a removable tray that the drive slides into. One very long screw secures the outer case. Slide off the top cover and two more screws hold the drive sled in place. Two small leads attach to the sled for HDD activity and fan.

 

The case comes with extra-long screws to attach the HDD to the drive sled through the silicon grommets. You can see the care that Antec took when they were designing this enclosure. Even with an active fan, you can't hear it when you're sitting right next to it.

 

After sliding the HDD onto the sled, ensuring the SATA connection was good and tight, I used those extra-long screws to tighten down the drive and reassembled the case into a whole.

 

This enclosure is designed for SATA drives only, so be warned! It's a good thing that 750GB drives are coming down in price so fast. I may have to pick up a few more :)

 

The hardest thing now is waiting for the drive to format. No matter whether you count in binary Gigabytes or decimal Gigabytes, 700+GB is a lot of space.

 

So far, I'm very impressed with the workmanship of the MX-1. Time will tell if it will be worth the somewhat high $60 price tag.