It’s a soft longish beep (it’s like the drive is taking a deep breath), followed by a sharp increase in tone (an exhaling that becomes whistling) and then a constant hum. The soft longish beep happens just before the hard disk drive starts spinning up, while the sharp increase in tone is the spinning up. Then the comforting hum.

My new external disk drive seems to be suffering from some lung related disease. It’s stuck on the deep breathing part. Inhale. Stop. Inhale. Stop. For about ten minutes, then just stop. It’s just 31 days old, perfectly enough for Amazon to not accept it on their 30-day return policy. Perfect. Timing. Design is not only how it looks (as Steve Jobs says), it’s also how it works, right? Well, I think we can extend that to how it doesn’t work as well.

I bought a LaCie drive to replace a quirky 3 year old Western Digital, which likes to go to sleep if inactive for 20 minutes. *Great* feature WD, of course it can’t be disabled, why would anyone in their right mind want to do that? It’s not like disk drives die a little every time they spin up.

Anyway, I kept the old drive as a mirror for the new one, so the data is still safe. The lesson here being that with these new disposable-grade disk drives, always buy in pairs and have a back-up.

The thing with LaCie drives is that you never know what you are getting. Sure the cases are nice and all (actually they are pretty great), but the disk inside (the problem in 99% of the cases) can be any brand. Never touch anything with Maxtor drives inside, unless you like electronic music.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a support service to contact.

Don’t be afraid to sing along, and to not be confined to only one song, try to do them all! (at the same time).

Also, notice the abundance of ‘baby’. And the fact that most of them are a lot more pornographic than the actual music videos, probably because our brains are already desensitized to boobs and cheeks and tongues and shit, but when we see written “…are you big enough? / …can you get it up?”, well, our brains start filling up details that the video directors might not think about.

Like a stock exchange for lyrics, watch six songs battling it out text-wise. Like music videos from another universe where YouTube would be all about the writing.

If you’ve been wondering what’s up with all the slow weird videos, they are all part of a greater scheme. There was once upon a time an Youtube aggregation project called ‘zeitgeist’, in which six Youtube videos would play simultaneously on one page (while you can still find the posts here on Central Feed, the links lead nowhere I’m afraid…)

Overload is the evolution of that, with the addition that you can now control the audio (select only one of the six soundtracks or all mute) and the playback. You can play with it here.

The particular episode with the slow videos is Nice & Slow.