Friday, July 18, 2008

Literal Translations and Our Anti-Child Culture

Verbatim from the user's guide to the hard drive Vern just bought:

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Samsung 3.5" HDD Installation Guide

Precautions

1MB = 1,000,000bytes / 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
Actual accessible capacity may vary from advertised capacity due to formatting and partitioning of the hard drive, as well as due to your computer's operating system.

Do not drop, shock or strike.
If apply impact to the HDD, it causes a Bad Sector by crashing between Head and Media. Do not stack. Do not external shock and vibration.

Do not remove all items, such as Hard drive label, warranty label.
Warranty void if any stickers or labels are removed or damaged. Never disassemble hard drives.

Do not touch the circuit board with hands or tools.
Protect the HDD from Electrostatic Discharge (ESD).
MR Head is very sensitive in Electrostatic. Keep the HDD in their static sheilding bag. (No anti-static bag was present in the packaging.)

Avoid extreme temperatures and humidity places.
Humidity causes a drive malfunction by reacting with an ingredient of oil in Disk and Head surface. Also, parts can be corrode by leaving in humidity.

When use an external case

Do not drop or fall while using and being storage the external case.
An external case is easy to transfer, but can be shocked easily also.

Check the External case's Grounding
External case's Grounding prevents HDD malfunction for ESD.

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Don't you just love direct translations? lol

If you don't, don't worry. It takes a special kind of eccentric sense of humor to get as big a kick out of those as I do. ;o)

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I wanted to rant about our culture today, how children are distrusted, excluded, and generally seen as a liability by those living firmly (and childlessly) in our adult culture. How I shouldn't be made to feel embarrassed and awkward in public when I have all of my children with me. I usually get "Wow! They're not all yours???" followed by an admiring look and a congratulatory or complimentary something . . . but there are plenty of other times when all that someone can see are the sheer number of bodies, the 50-some-odd pounds of extra pregnancy weight, and the fact that children don't behave like adults. (Duh. So very, very DUH!)

The wanna-be rant was fueled by the fact that one of the two owners of our first choice rental (perfect location, gorgeous home, complete with lovely backyard for munchkin play and a gate to a walking trail) chose to rent his home to a single man with a large dog. Four bedrooms, two living rooms, formal dining and eat-in kitchen, all for one guy. Oh, and a dog. I hope that the guy is independently wealthy, so he'll actually live there, make it a home, and have lots of parties and gatherings. There's something so sad to me when there are huge homes with one or two working people who just sleep and eat breakfast there. Homes are meant to be lived in, made warm with laughter and love and good times, and to resonate with lovely memories. It was completely within the owner's rights to make that call. It's his house, after all. It was just hard because the owner who showed Vern the place told us we had it; he just needed to confirm it with the other owner.

Maybe I feel this way partly because the home Vern and I worked so hard to build still stands empty. The oil executive who bought it four years ago is still working somewhere (Texas or India or something), and who knows when he'll retire and move up on the mountain. I'm grateful that the house sold, so we could move on when we needed to . . . I just wish that we had been able to sell to the family that also looked at it around that same time.

It's frustrating because we actually need a place that large, and because we have five children, we were unable to rent a place large enough to meet our needs. A family, a grand piano and a home business are hard to house these days for less than $2,500/month . . . and even if we could afford that, I wonder if anyone would let us rent their "executive luxury home". We're still looking, and poor Vern is just about fried. The time pressure of all of this actually working out is immense. Wish us luck . . . we're quickly working our way through the list of rentals down in Oregon, and it's taking longer than we thought to secure a dwelling place for our hordes.

Speaking of being fried, I need some shuteye. Sweet dreams, and hug your babies twice as much tomorrow. I'm sure going to.