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i spent most of the day backing up and consolidating my photos onto my 8TB seagate external drive, after digging up all my old drives, an assortment of 3.5" SATA and older IDE drives and a few 2.5" drives. is data migration is especially important since i don't know how i can easily access those older IDE drives. i thought i had a dock somewhere but i can't find it, and the only IDE enclosure i have just has USB 2.0 and firewire connections. USB 2.0 is too slow and my current mac laptop doesn't even have firewire support anymore. i could resurrect my older macbook pro, which does have firewire, along with eSATA support via expresscard/34. IDE drives are small anyway, 240-300GB for the larger 3.5" drives. once i copy the data onto more modern day SATA drives, i'll retire those IDE's, or leave them as is as ancient backups.

it takes hours to copy hundreds of gigabytes worth of photos. after a few hours i stop for a break, to let the drives cool off, as they can get pretty hot from all that spinning. fortunately it's pretty cold inside my house, i can't imagine doing this during the summer, when the drives will probably spin itself to death.

i left the house just once to buy some frozen stouffer meals from star market. for lunch i had some canned soup, for dinner some french bread pizza. my father stopped by briefly in the afternoon to pick up some coupons i'd printed for my mother, and asked me to print out a large photo of my grand uncle for his wake which is now scheduled for sunday afternoon instead of saturday. i ordered a portrait on a 16x20" board through walgreens ($25, but i found a coupon that cut the price to $15); it was ready for pickup later in the evening but i decided to get it tomorrow morning instead, when the weather is supposed to be warmer (upper 20's!).

backing up photos is a tedious task and there's a lot of waiting around. while that was going on, i continued reading children of time by adrian tchaikovsky. i'm not even sure i how first came across this book, must've been from some best scifi listicle. it took me a while to get into, as i struggled to read just a few pages a night before falling asleep. i'd classify it in the hard science fiction genre, which i love, including blindsight by peter watts and the martian by andy weir. the basic plot is the future encounter between the remnants of humanity with an uplifted intelligent spider species. it won the arthur c. clarke award for 2016 (a best scifi novel award for british authors), which now makes me curious to read other winners. once i got going, children of time was impossible to put down. i read it everywhere, in the bathroom, on the couch, making food.

every day the solar panels create just a bit more energy. today it generated 472Wh. hopefully the warmer weather tomorrow will create more melting, maybe we can finally break that 1kW barrier.