Dog of the Day: Only the Shadow Knows

Got my replacement hard drive (well, actually an SSD) and have spent most of the day setting it up. Consequently, I don’t have access to my photo library at the moment. With any luck, I should have the last of the stuff I need to get my computer back in tip-top shape by this coming Thursday or Friday at the latest. If you are curious about the details of my computer modifications, look at the text after the dog picture. If not, please feel free to skip it; I won’t be offended, I promise.

The dog picture in question is a bit of a cheat: it’s from a dog park in the East Bay. However, I thought it was pretty, so you get to see it.

You can't tell what breed he is, where he is, what position he's in, or anything else about him... but you can tell he's happy.

For anyone who is curious about the details of my computer modifications: I have opted to get a new SSD for my laptop, to replace the hard drive. The hard drive is working fine since I reformatted it and remapped all the bad blocks, but I am still cautious, and anyway this gives me an excuse to get one, which I’ve been wanting to do for ages.

I chose an OCZ Vertex 3, as the highest-performance and most future-proof drive I could get: it has a 6 gbps interface, so the next laptop I get will be able to use it to its fullest potential, but it should do fine in this one as well.

Since it is significantly smaller than my internal hard drive, I have decided to remove the optical drive from my computer and replace it with a hard drive, which will be used for bulk storage of photos, video editing stuff, and my iTunes music library. (Using a bracket made for this purpose by Other World Computing.) When I’m not editing or posting photos, listening to music, syncing my iPhone, or editing video, I can keep the hard drive spun down and just use the SSD.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works. Keep your fingers crossed for me… there’ve been a few people who have had problems with this model of MacBook Pro and SSDs, and of course two internal drives is an unsupported configuration, though it should work in theory.