Posts Tagged ‘money’

Notes on last night

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 by Andrew

Last night around 10:30 PM, a cat fell off the roof. Made a lot of noise. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Then a mos­quito started hov­er­ing around my ears, so I decided to revive a nightly tra­di­tion from ear­lier this month and douse myself in bug spray. It was late, I was tired, I didn’t have my glasses on, the lights were off.

Long story short, I sprayed myself in the eye with insect repellent.

The pain was excru­ci­at­ing, but not intol­er­a­ble. On a scale from one to ten, I’d give it about a seven. I’d never do it again, not even for a bet… depend­ing on the stakes. $100, no way. Not a chance. For $1,000, though… well… I’d at least have to con­sider it.

We had our last Cineastas class today, and I fly back to Minneapolis on Saturday. More posts, pic­tures and video to come soon now that I have less work to do, and I’ll be announc­ing an excit­ing new… thingie… in a cou­ple weeks.

The cost of a terabyte

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 by Andrew

Today I got my brand-new 1-terabyte (1,000 giga­byte) exter­nal hard drive in the mail—bought in order to store and edit the Political Justice footage. I paid about $110 for it, includ­ing ship­ping. I remem­ber a few years ago when I was intern­ing at Channel 10 and they got their first ter­abyte drive, my boss looked up how much a ter­abyte would have cost in years gone by. I couldn’t remem­ber those num­bers, so out of curios­ity, I did a lit­tle research and cal­cu­lated the cost of a ter­abyte in years past (via Cost of Hard Drive Space):

2004: $1,000
1999: $27,400
1989: $12 mil­lion
1984: $80 mil­lion
1956: $10 billion

Granted, the very idea of a ter­abyte would have been ludi­crous in 1956, when only one mag­netic hard disk existed, with a stor­age capac­ity of 5 megabytes and a pro­duc­tion cost of $10,000 (in 1956 dol­lars). Still, hypo­thet­i­cally, a ter­abyte would have cost $10 bil­lion 53 years ago. Inflation-adjusted, that’s $78.4 trillion—enough to pay for the fed­eral bailout more than six times over.

And now I’ve got two of ‘em in my liv­ing room.