I had a vision, last Sunday. As I was inching my way, through a huge crowd of people, inside the air-conditioned subterranean shopping mall, that connects where the IT Show was held, to where I parked my car, I saw grey sky and the heavy rain, through the huge glass windows. Travelling at point zero zero zero zero one kilometer per hour, smelling the humidity of sweat and rain, at one vintage point, on top of an escalator, four meters above the crowd, I saw faces. Lots of faces. So many faces looking at my direction. At that point, I had a vision. I want to be a rock star. And these are my audience, with the faces of anticipation. My friends and I were looking at each other, shook our heads and said: They have no idea what they are getting themselves into.
But such is the price of attending an IT Show. I have not seen that many people in our convention and exhibition center. Not even for the Motor Show when there are usually a lot of hot babes inside. I got scared coming down by escalators. What if there was a – touch wood – piled up at the bottom? Sardine heading into the cans like the non-stop production line. Where is that bloody emergency stop button? None.
Sunday morning, I woke up relatively early, wanted to pay Azeroth a visit. Bam! My hard disk crashed. It crashed on the last day of IT Show. Panic! I called my friends at the last minute to see who could accompany me. Phew! Those Maxtor hot backup devices do save my life as advertised. My data is all saved. I wish Bill Gate has the brain size of Steve Jobs and gave us PC users a Time Machine, like Apple has. Time to replace my crashed 500GB hard disk and reinstall the Operating System. Fun time.
Not.
Maybe this is a sign. Maybe I shall go beyond saving my life. I need my own home network storage, with an industrial standard that I can pull out or jam in any hard disk any time and all my data will still be intact. Happy for me, TK and my photography buddy Mat could make it. Time for shopping!
Except, it was not too much of a shopping with them. They knew exactly what they wanted, they knew the strike price, and they just needed to find the exact location of the booth, buy the item, and go. I had no idea what to buy, exactly. Exactly! I had a concept, like most things in my life, that’s all. Yes, Mat has used Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ for years and he loves it. TK is going to get the little brother version and he said: Since you have tons of CDs like me, you will need a Squeezebox and this. OK sold. If I am stuck don’t know how to use that device, I have some numbers to call.
Wait … what the heck is a Squeezebox?!
Imagine this: all my 800 CDs can now be digitalized, in the free lossless audio codex (a.k.a. flac) format, ready to be streamed into a Squeezebox (?!), that connects directly to my Hi-fi. Any song from my CD collection available with a touch of a remote control. Hi-fi sound quality. My new toy (as seen in picture above) can hold up to 4 hard disks. Right now, I have installed three 1TB Western Digital green power hard disks. With the data redundancy built-in function, I have a total of 1.8TB of space accessible from within my home network. Gadgets these days are going green. So is the new D-Link switch I’ve bought that day.
I could have bought two of the latest version of Nikon 50mm with the money that I’ve spent. Oh well, there is a price to pay for the world of ReadyNAS. TK and Mat told me that I could do a lot more with that. We shall see.