(Update: Made some small clarifications)

Do you want to hear about my nightmares?

Of course you don’t, but I will begin anyway.

One horrifying fictional vision that has kept me up at night was where my netbook’s hard drive broke down because I attempted to use it on a bumpy bus ride. Scary indeed. The idea of abusing technology makes me cringe.

So the next night, I dreamed that my netbook had a solid state drive. Things felt good, until I realized that my wallet was completely empty, and the drive was completely full.

This reflects the dilemma that I had–solid state drives are more durable on bumpy buses, but cost more and store less. What I wanted is large capacity plus the classic SSD durability.

The solution I came up with? I purchased a 16 GB class 6 SDHC card, stuffed it into the SDHC card slot into the side of the netbook, and installed Ubuntu to it.

The home directory partition remains on the traditional hard drive–unmounted most of the time. But the most frequently used files of the home directory, such as configuration files, remain on the SD card. I can be fully functional without ever using my hard drive.

The pros? I have a pretty cheap storage medium that acts like an SSD, yet still have the ability to summon the storage capacity of a 120 GB hard drive when the drive is not in danger of being accidentally damaged on a bus ride–all without carrying any external drives. The SDHC card doesn’t count as one because it should never be disconnected, considering it is an operating system.

The cons? The SD card is not a true SSD, so it is somewhat slower and is not likely to last as long. Still, I hope that the cost savings are going to outweigh the reduced lifetime.

A quick Google search shows that I’m not completely insane, and that others have also been thinking of swapping out SSDs for cheaper SD cards, but perhaps you would be a better judge of my own insanity.

Though, at least the nightmares are gone now. :)

Somewhat recently, I got bored and decided to write a fictional story. Given that I’ve posted nothing on this blog since last August, I decided I had to break the silence with something.

Last night, I talked to God. The strange—yet somewhat predictable—thing was that God is exactly like me. God explained to me that He and I are clones because my universe was designed to be a replica of His. God, like me, is a computer engineer at BitTech—the largest supercomputer conglomerate in the world. Well, he is a computer engineer at his universe’s BitTech—which is exactly the same as the one in my universe. BitTech is well known for attracting the world’s best engineers by giving away lavish perks—including a small amount of CPU time on some of BitTech’s most powerful computer clusters.

After doing some research, the God version of me found out that the CPU time allotted to him, plus some cheap hard drive space, was barely enough to create a simulation of the entire universe he lived in. In fact, he wasn’t the first to do it—other replicas of his universe had been created. It was not too difficult—astronomy had advanced to the point where the details of the Big Bang were known. A new generation of computers had helped simplify the laws of quantum mechanics and unify it with Einstein’s theories. All the buildings blocks were in place, and others had succeeded in putting them together.

But God’s simulated universe was not a research project—it was the plaything of one of the world’s top engineers. The calculations did not always run as fast as the universes run by well-funded institutions, but that was not a problem. Time was relative.

The main problem with God’s setup of the universe was why he came down to talk to me. God had a warning. His algorithms were not perfect. While both His universe and my universe were identical at the point of the Big Bang, imperfections in His algorithm meant that differences soon popped up in my universe. Energy existed in places where there was none in his universe. But God saw this and attempted to perfect the algorithms. Unfortunately, he was unable to. The best solution that he could come up with was to optimize the algorithms to place the anomalies far away from Earth, so what he considered to be the most interesting part of the universe would be completely unaffected—and thus completely identical.

But I am also a world-class computer engineer. I saw right away that this solution would not be perfect. God nodded and said that after so many billions of years, the anomalies were finally going to affect Earth. There was simply nothing that He could do about it. God said that he had ran the simulation on fast-forward, and said that the miniscule differences in the amount of energy near our planet would ultimately have a powerful effect on human history. Our planet was doomed.

It was the Butterfly Effect. Small changes on our planet over time accumulating and making our world unrecognizable. The immeasurably tiny amount of energy was just enough to cause radical changes in human thinking—even drive us to a nuclear holocaust. He said that we would never know what caused the disaster, because would not have realized that the anomalies were there.

Thus, rather than watch Earth destroy itself, God said that He would euthanize our universe. Delete it from his filesystem, and prevent our humanity from ever feeling the misery that the imperfect algorithms would ever cause us. I nodded quietly. I understood. I told myself that I should have foreseen this.

After all, I had just deleted my own universe simulation the day before for the exact same reason.