Because It’s There!

In my college apartment, back when my roommate and I had a collection of (Gasp!) two computers and an Xbox 360, we had the beginnings of a respectable home network.  In actuality, this consisted of a single router and a discreet hole punched in the wall between our rooms to allow for an Ethernet run.  But it was a wired home network, dammit!

One evening, probably after imbibing too much, we had a discussion about stress-testing the network, for no other reason beyond idle curiosity.  And so, we each began a bandwidth test on our computers, while simultaneously transferring a large file between them, and playing an Xbox game.  In actuality, this didn’t represent much of a stress test, but it was sufficient to fry the router–a Linksys WRT-something.

The router was my roommate’s, and since he already had it at the time, I felt no need to purchase something better.  After the test though, I went to a different brand: D-Link, with whom I’ve stayed since, at least until I have a bad experience.  In any case, this utterly pointless test broke an expensive electronic and forced us to be offline for a couple days.  What was the lesson?  NOT A DAMN THING!

Fast-forward to present.  I acquired a 5 terabyte USB HDD, at the time intended as a master backup drive.  I encrypted the drive, then manually copied over every file from every computer we owned.  I then locked this drive in my desk at work.  Clumsily, I had created an off-site data backup.  But the process was cumbersome and time-consuming, and the encryption didn’t play nice cross-platform.  So when Amazon started offering unlimited cloud storage for a fixed yearly rate, and I found out my NAS could integrate with it and maintain client-side encryption, I really couldn’t think of a reason to continue with the arduous task of manual backups.

But now, I had an unused giant hard drive.  What to do with it?  My Xbox One, always suffering from a critical shortage of storage, won the prize.  I connected the drive, followed the formatting prompts, and subsequently solved all my storage problems for the foreseeable future.

In fact, it was so much storage that I decided to download every free game offering that came with my Xbox Live Gold subscription.  Generally, they’re mediocre games that neither I (nor anyone) will ever play.  But, I can.  So now, every month, I download these games simply because it’s there!

because
…at least until my ISP finally institutes data caps

–Simon

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