maintenance

Been tinkering with my hardware lately (oo-er, missus). Switched my router from an SMC to a Linksys WRT54G, as I was having annoying network issues - the HTPC would stop talking to my partner's PC every so often, nothing could ping the laptop...just annoying weirdnesses. So far the Linksys seems to have fixed all these problems, so yay for that. Also got a new hard disk. My other one (Samsung) seemed to be dying; I'd wake up in the morning to a message that /home had been remounted read-only, and look at the logs and see DriveReadySeekComplete errors, which I've only otherwise seen caused by dodgy CD-Rs. Not good. So I swapped in a Seagate 7200.7, my favourite drive for a while (I used a Samsung in this system as they're supposed to be quieter, but it didn't seem so to me), and used the 2006 Discovery Live CD to mirror everything over onto the new drive. Handy thing to have around :). Now let's see how long it'll stay up for... Also more headphone news. I was lucky to find a guy in Vancouver who wanted to trade his Eytmotic ER-4 canalphones for a pair of Grados - any Grados. Since I'd just upgraded from SR-80s to HF-1s, this was a match made in heaven. Especially for me, since the Etys are substantially more expensive than SR80s. I'd wanted to try canalphones for a while, but couldn't justify spending the money just to see what they were like, so this is great. So far I'm really enjoying the isolation and detail they provide, but having Things stuck in my ear canals is still somewhat disconcerting and uncomfortable. I'll use 'em for a few weeks and probably sell or trade them on if I still can't get used to them.