This is a collection of thoughts and statements about things that annoy me. I am a big, angry man. Hear me roar, or piss off and give me peace.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Justice

I thought Justice was supposed to be blind.

Justice was never described to me as black, white, middle class, upper class, lower class, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, wealthy, poor, feminist, sexist, chauvinist, misogynist, or whatever.

The BBC tells me that Jack Straw is telling us that there are "too many white male judges".

Surely what colour they are, and what sex they are should have no bearing on the decisions from the bench? Perhaps I am missing something here... I want the best folk as judges, not ones appointed to fit some sort of quota. Maybe that's not politically correct. Maybe we're not supposed to have people who truly excel at anything in case there's an imbalance of some group or other, and 'tards have to be drafted in to make everything more "equal" like in Harrison Bergeron or stupider as in Idiocracy.

Lampposts. Piano Wire. Enough said.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Death and Destruction - to Hard drives!


The Register
tells us of a wonderful piece of equipment from EDR which can crush over 60 HDDs an hour. It costs $11,500, and needs electricity to run...

Pshaw!

I can do double that, for waaaay less than that money.

My solution, which peaked at 120 drives an hour, albeit with me putting a sweat on, involves some really good physics, and a fairly old piece of metalworking equipment.

A fly press is all you need.



Pop the drive on to the bed, stick a section of 2" diameter mild steel pipe above the platters, and spin the motherfucker down. The platters and motor tend to pop out of the bottom of the disk chassis.

I'll tell you it's very therapeutic, and almost made me feel like I had an honest job. I reckon, if I had an assistant, we could have punched the spindles on 4 drives a minute. Although my assistant might not have any fingers left... A small price to pay though.