Earlier today, I closed my accounts at National City Bank. The two accounts that I had open their had been open since I was in middle school (for the savings account) and since I was a sophomore in high school (for the checking account). With those closings, I have severed all financial ties to Indiana that are not familial. I'll roll the funds from these two accounts into the appropriate two accounts at my CA based banks instead which will give me significantly enhanced access to them.

In other news, I bought an OLPC XO-1 the other night. I'm still off on my never ending search for a device that is closer to a laptop in functionality but with the accessibility of a PDA. The Nokia N800 wasn't quite the answer (though the N810 might be close), but the XO-1 will hopefully be closer to that goal or at the very least an interesting distraction.

There is an approximately 90% chance of Magi being retired and replaced in the next month. If you have an account on magi that suddenly stops working within the next month, you'll know why. Magi suffered a hardware failure after a recent power outage. It is currently functioning, but it needs a new video card. Rather than simply replacing the card, I've decided to go with a new 2 TiB system built from scratch (mostly) to replace it. This is mainly to reduce the current complexity of the two 1 TiB systems in place. Hopefully the transition will be straightforward.

I may also use this transition to check out disk destruction techniques. I've developed a curiosity recently for secure data destruction and, since I am lacking a blast furnance, I am thinking about testing the feasability of other options. One idea that has recently come to mind is grinding--simply taking a platter and griding it into powder using an appropriate tool. It seems like a sure-fire way of destroying a disk, but I am unsure as to the speed of such a system. Would it take hours or days to destroy a single 3-platter disk? This is why we have science!

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