The time has come

Because my desktop hard drive is awfully close to full, I am thinking of buying this external hard drive: Western Digital My Book 750 GB for $90 from Newegg. On the one hand, it seems kind of silly to buy a backup hard drive with more than 25 times the capacity of my computer, but on the other hand, I can also use it to back up my laptop, R's computer, and my personal drive at work, and surely I won't have this desktop model forever, either.

Any precautions or horror stories about Western Digital products?

*laughing out loud*

From Dennis Overbye, reported by John Tierney:

"On Friday I reported that Brian Greene, the Columbia string theorist and co-founder of the World Science Festival, had admitted under a hard-nosed interrogation by my colleague Thomas Lin that he couldn’t hum the theme song from “M*A*S*H,” thereby losing an art-science smackdown with Alan Alda, the former “M*A*S*H” star, who was able to explain string theory."

All those years of hosting Scientific American Frontiers on PBS must have helped. Even so...