All I Want for Christmas is TB

Yes, Folksy Fans, it's August, which means that the holidays are just around the corner.  Since I know you are all sitting there, in front of your computers, pen poised over paper, dying to know what I want for Christmas, I thought I would share it with you.

Memory.

No, not memories, I have plenty of those, thank you very much.  I'm not talking about some sappy, Walton-esque, perfect dream of a holiday that makes me mist up with tears when I'm old and grey and all of the children are gone and it's just me and a cat named Bootsie who eyes me with a somehow knowing glance as if calculating my net worth and the distance I would have to crawl to reach the telephone.

Memory.  Specifically, computer memory.

When I bought my beloved MacBook, the salesperson tried to talk me into an upgrade that would double the capacity of my hard drive.

"If you use your computer for media, especially video, you're going to want that memory," he argued.

"Trust me," I chuckled knowingly.  "250 gigs of memory will do me just fine."

I hope that salesperson refrained from shaking his head and clucking his tongue as I walked away, because he clearly understood what I did not: HD video, higher resolution cameras, and an iTunes account means that now I am down to my last 10 gigs.  A mere 10 episodes of Saturday Night Live stand between myself and the oblivion of a full hard drive.

This happened because of the magic of iTunes and instant gratification.  Why get in the car, go to Wal-Mart, search through fourteen separate bargain bins and 84 shelves of randomly arranged DVD's on the off chance that they have the movie I want, when a quick search of iTunes shows me they have it, often for the same price or cheaper?

"Piff," Sven spats, "twaddle.  What if your hard drive crashes, huh?" he asks, sorting through the 268 loose DVD's on the couch, attempting to find our fourth copy of "Sponge Bob Watches Dora."

"Well," I reason, "that's why I have a backup drive."

"And how often can you watch movies on your computer?" he further queries, taking the DVD to the DVD repair station to attempt to resurface away the skips and freezes.

"Pretty often," I reply.  "And if it's on my computer, I can put it on the iPod and we can take it to restaurants for the kids."

"That's true," he concedes.  "Still," he continues, allowing his righteous anger to inflame him again, "It's ridiculous to spend that much money on something that isn't really there."

"Daddy," Princess interrupts, "have you seen the My Little Pony movie?"

"No, baby," Sven replies.  "It's lost."  I wisely don't say anything.

Since it would be completely ridiculous for me to buy a new computer when this one is only three years old, the solution, clearly, is thusly: give Sven sole use of our current backup hard disk, the one with a paltry 320GB of storage, and purchase, for me, a portable hard drive with at least one TB of memory.

"TB" is the abbreviation for terabyte, or one trillion bytes of storage.  That's 1,000GB, or four times the capacity of my computer.

You're right.  It probably isn't enough.