The Trouble with Hard Drives

So, after a year and approximately 2 months, the hard drive on my MacBook bit the dust. November 8th, to be exact. Great. At least the whole computer didn't die. Unfortunately, it may as well have. I had hardly anything saved in other places from the hard drive. Which means, in short, the vast majority of the pictures I had from Hawaii are now nonexistent. Oh well. I did manage to have some of the better ones saved in various other places. And of course, everything else is gone too. Luckily there are other family pictures on others' computers. But all those documents I had going (ranking in a variety of importance) are also lost. A select few dated back to middle school. I suppose in the grand scheme of things that middle school doesn't really amount to much though.
I'm just kind of annoyed though. One year for a hard drive? Seagate, you really need to step it up. (For any Mac users/enthusiasts who may have encountered problems with theirs too, I am referring to the infamous Firmware version 7.01 they released - mostly with the original generation MacBooks, though not limited to just Macs.)
So, hopefully the Hitachi I ordered will pull through. Once I get it in two or three more weeks.

Free Rice

It's interesting the things you stumble upon when looking for innocent things like pictures of trash cans. Okay - the pictures of trash cans were for a test in Tech Editing. I had nothing to do with selecting the content. But I digress.... some of the sites I found were expounding on the fact that we're quite an over-consuming nation. And sadly, I have to agree with them. People laughed at the concept of "ORT" (some acronym for wasted food that I don't remember) at sixth grade camp, but it's so true. We throw away quite a bit of food. So, to contrast this, most of these sites also provided images of the opposite end of the spectrum, primarily of images of the effects of the famine in Sudan, Africa. They were a cause for lament, to say the least.
Thus, I present my newest link: www.freerice.com. They say on the site that for each vocab word you guess correctly, the UN will donate 10 grains of rice to its World Food Program. Can't hurt, ehh?! It might seem like a drop in the bucket to some of us - but just remember that story of the little boy throwing the starfish back into the sea. It mattered a lot to the ones that were thrown back in. And it'll matter just as much to the people who get the meals we were able to give them.
And would you know it? I think I even improved my vocabulary a bit!
Give a try. I don't think you'll regret it.