Bigger is better...

It's 21:06 and I'm sitting here again in front of ol' beigechunkyglowy, listening to Bjork and my MSN thingy keeps nagging me.

It's Shinny, and he's explaining some stuff to do with computers to me... it involves this random little fact that when you go out and buy a 1TB hard drive, you don't really get the full 1TB... you get something less... a rounded down number... hell, I guess if the shops get away with charging me 4 extra cents for something just because we don't actually have 1 cent pieces, the computer hard drive manufacturers figure we are equally as hoodwinkable.

Now, you might think "hey, 1TB is a whole friggin' bunch... I can fit heaps of illegally downloaded movies on there, who cares if it costs $300 bucks from Officeworks, I'll never use that much." but I'm a modern girl, with lots of random junk I like to hoard... and after I agonised over a hot google for five whole minutes to come up with this figure:

1,099,511,627,776B
(thanks Yahoo Answers...)

That is over a Trillion Bytes. A friggin Trillion! That's a whole blimmin' lot right there...

But wait.

When you buy a cute little book shaped external hard drive, it has less than that fancy number up there. It has only got exactly: 1,000,000,000,000B on it. Yet they still call it a Terabyte hard drive! WTFH?

Fair enough. It's still big. I can still fit the whole MP3 beatles back catalogue on that...

But growing up as a girl, I used to read Cosmo, Cleo and all those other women's mags... and they always said "bigger is better"... so I demand the full 1,099,511,627,776B that they advertised on the flimsy card board box!

Next time I walk into Harvey Norman looking for a 1TB hard drive (for storing all my 'educational films') I will demand the extra 99,511,627,776B that a TB is supposed to be, or I will cry "false advertising!" 'til they give me a free generic 256MB house brand MP3 player or something.

Hey, never look a gift horse in the mouth!

The Secret Language of Computers...

Hi!

I'm sitting here in front of this glowing CRT... it's 19:15... and I'm searching for tutorials on computers. You heard me. Computers... In general. I know practically nothing about them...

Ever since I was a little girl, I ~loved~ computers... I grew up with a brother who always understood these technical little boxes that could do so much. Me, well... I figured it was a guy thing or his thing or something... so I steered clear of them in my quest to be a 'little girl'.

As I grew, I met boy after boy, man after man who was into computers and gaming and all the awesome nerdy stuff I loved... gleaning whatever information I could I sat there batting my eyelids, baffled, yearning to know more... but it still seemed like 'no woman's land'... secret nerd's business.

"It's too hard to explain... to you..." they would tell me, when I asked a possibly (probably) basic question... Or they would leap into a five hour discussion on the specs of the gleaming beige machine in front of me that I could barely follow... punctuated with an exasperated sigh when I inevitably gave up.

Girls aren't supposed to be into games, girls are meant to be into dollies and hair bows. Girls aren't meant to like star wars... we are meant to like barbie and all her shiny glittered accouterments... But the glowing, humming lightsabers were always a shining step ahead in my mind, than any shitty barbie dream wand. The stolen moments at 3 am with classic Star Trek were a secret indulgence of mine as a teenager... guiding that cute logo turtle into drawing arcane shapes on large bits of paper were a highlight of my primary school days... and playing 'granny's garden' on the old beebs in grade prep are a secret desire I held dear as a 5 year old.

So, snap back to now. I'm in my late 20's... half the people I know are computer oriented and I feel like a ditz without a clue when they start speaking in binary at me... twittering about Lans and CSS and the massive 24 inches they have... on their flat screen monitors...

I have no idea where to begin... but to begin at the very start.

"0 = off... 1 = on... "

I am now 1...