5t 1984 - Sam and Travis Time Travel;

Sam turned off the recorder, then the TV monitor. His was a CRT VDU, not an LCD VDU, and he didn't even want a plasma. He had investigated DLP's and found that the bulb was very replaceable, but E-Bay seemed oblivious to the intimate nature of his living quarters. He already had a band saw, a belt sander, a sewing table and a jig saw set in the living room, and a 52 inch TV was better suited to the dining area. He had futuristicly based his home theater system on a multimedia PC, and in true futuristic fashion was just now paying off the bill. He threw the magnetic microfiche in the nearly decade old bin beside the door, near the hat rack and umbrella stand. He was low on tapes, and made a mental note to order more from OZ.

This peculiar hobby had started in the eighties. In the spring of 1985, he had read George Orwell's retrospective of the previous year. This had led to a severe falling out with Travis, right in the middle of County Tax Assessing season. They agreed that something had to be done, but differed vociferously, if non-violently, as to how this should be addressed. Travis argued that he should record himself doing everything he _DID_, whereas Sam argued that he should record everything he _SAW_. His private warehouse in "The Fortress of Solitude," just East of 'Six Flags Over San Antonio,' was filled with neatly stacked rubber band bound bundles of Polaroids, from early on in the experiment.

Needless to say, he had been forward to contact Travis as soon as terabyte Hard disk drives (HDDs) were available, to warn him to buy cheap 320GB drives and use lots of them... a terabyte of data was a jaw-cracker to back up, and if it all went at once, you could lose a whole summer's Six Flags' visits. You can easily back up a 320GB HDD on a spindle of 100 4GB DVDs. They don't last for ever, but if you don't scratch them, librarians will regard you with respect. Proper labeling was his bugbear. He seemed to EITHER be able to date a spindle chronologically, OR arrange labels alphabetically; whatever he did, he could scientifically show that the one he was looking for was in the Very LAST place he thought to look; Travis had told him that to stop this from happening, he should go on looking for a while, and quit at some other place, but the elegance of this theorem had translated badly into language.

Not only did Travis find things before he quit looking, he employed ALL the latest redundant array software, and did incremental backups every day at two AM. Sam had once tried to show Travis that there was literally NOTHING that can go wrong with a computer that CANNOT BE FIXED with a 9 lb sledgehammer, but Travis had spent six weeks in the hospital for interposing his foot. To fairly attribute his abilities of debate, Travis had been able, over the weeks of convalescence, to convince Sam that the restore process was time intensive if one were looking for a specific file - Travis had asked Sam to restore his Diary for the week preceding his accident. Having finished his experiment with the sledge, Sam had found that redundant disks can be temperamental, and the resulting set-up was still finishing its restore process at 4:30 AM the day that Travis came back home, six weeks later. Travis had faithfully believed everything they told him about a twister in town that sucked the whole window frame right out of the wall, and left a pile of rubble in the lawn. Nevertheless, Sam regarded Travis as a suspect source for computer advice, and preferred sledge hammers more than ever.

For his own part, Sam had used tape travel mechanisms to keep his magnetic media moving while he restored batch style if needed. His little dolly truck would move a box at a time easily. In order to borrow the dolly, Travis had made him a gift of 1000 80GB HDDs and now Sam simply changed them out once a month using eSata. To return the kindness, Sam was saving for a ticket to Jupiter, for Travis' computer setup, whenever he got ready to update.

Whatever the case, Sam had made Travis pinky swear that if either one of them were ever arrested, they would drop everything, and transport the relevant computer system to the relevant Jurisdiction, replete with electronic copy of 1984. In this way, the innocent party could show that he had NEVER painted Mrs. Kirkpatrick's Porch Yellow.

The bulk of backup media and supporting documentation was becoming quite impressive, and Sam got out his old Polaroid just for old time's sake and took another picture. He yawned and went to bed.