Thanks to Kevin for linkage to this great article on Wired: A Geek Yearns for Yesteryear’s Noisy Gear In particular, I miss the warm, grumpy sounds of the floppy drive. I remember sneaking into my grandparents’ computer room — that’s right, my grandfather got me into computers; he is an awesome man — at 6 [...]

Thanks to Kevin for linkage to this great article on Wired:
A Geek Yearns for Yesteryear’s Noisy Gear

In particular, I miss the warm, grumpy sounds of the floppy drive. I remember sneaking into my grandparents’ computer room — that’s right, my grandfather got me into computers; he is an awesome man — at 6 in the morning, unable to wait until everyone’s awake for another round of greenish videogaming. I extract a floppy, an actual floppy that flops, from the treasure-trove of pirated games and slide one into the drive. I switch it on and I’m greeted with a startled beep and a clatter from the hard drive, followed by a series of mechanical grunts as the machine wearily rummages for data.
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Better yet, when something went wrong you could hear it. Hell, you could practically feel it. The drive would respond to a corrupt disk with a scraping shudder that resonated in your spinal column. You didn’t get a dialog box with an exclamation point and a polite boop, you got a death rattle.

Looking back, I really do miss the audible feedback you used to get from computing. Floppy drives grinding, buckling-spring keyboard clacking, the thrumm! of a monitor degaussing. It was obvious when your dial-up connection worked and equally obvious when it failed.

Edit: Fixed link to article.

I turned in my two weeks’ notice at B&N; today. For a job I don’t really need, it had gotten to be too much of a grind–no longer any fun. I’ll be giving up my 30% employee discount, book loans and about $300/month net. I’ll be gaining back my Sundays and two or three nights [...]

I turned in my two weeks’ notice at B&N; today. For a job I don’t really need, it had gotten to be too much of a grind–no longer any fun. I’ll be giving up my 30% employee discount, book loans and about $300/month net. I’ll be gaining back my Sundays and two or three nights a week and a bit less stress and anxiety.
It was going to be difficult to keep the job through the holiday season since we have travel plans on three or four weekends in November and December. The “days off request” book shows those two months as blocked out–no requests allowed. So I was going to be in the position of negotiating or begging for those days and I just don’t think it’s worth the trouble.
I dropped a short-and-sweet notice letter in the store manager’s inbox when I got here tonight, where she’ll see it tomorrow morning. Wonder if she’ll call…