The Eternal Student “Civilization Ain’t Dead Yet” Award: This one goes out to Nickleback for the cover of their latest CD “The Long Road”. I saw it in Best Buys the other day and said to myself “My God, Impressionism!” Let’s hope that other bands get the idea of incorporating classic art within their marketing plans.

Note of Caution to Not-Quite-Geeks: Be careful in disposing of a broken computer or any storage media, including CDs, floppys, hard drives, whatever. Someone recently told me that there’s a little industry forming, made up of people who roam around landfills or cruise through suburban neighborhoods on junk collection day, looking for thrown-out computers. They take ’em home and hook the storage media up to a diagnostic machine, searching it for files or memories containing Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, registration numbers, etc. Obviously they sometimes find things of value, or else they wouldn’t be doing this. Good old identity theft. I’m not an expert at how to permanently destroy memory – there are probably web sites that deal with this. But do keep the overall problem in mind when you throw computer-related stuff out.

Not-So-Famous-Last-Words: Back in 2000 we got some new computer equipment at work and they gave me a PC with an external USB drive meant for Imation “Super Disks”. Super Disks were a nice idea, a three and one-half inch “floppy” that had enhanced media inside holding 120 megs of data, not the usual 1.44 megs of regular floppys. Sure, CDRW was prevalent by then, but CD drives seemed clunky and slow compared to a floppy drive (and still do). The Super Disk seemed like a happy compromise, easy to use and carry but still holding a lot of stuff.

So, when I ordered a Dell for home, I shelled out an extra $50 for a floppy drive that reads LS-120 Super Disks. I figured that they couldn’t miss. Imation was quite optimistic too. On the back of each Super Disk case it said “Here to Stay. Super Disk will become the new standard disk drive … soon you’ll see Super Disk Drives built into desktop PC,s notebooks, external drives … It’s the technology with staying power”.

The prophecy was not to be fulfilled. Imation never let the price go below $10 a disk (which was reasonable compared to a regular floppy, given that it held 80 times as much data, but no contest against a 50 cent CD that held 5 times more than the Super Disk).

So, Super Disks have gone the way of the eight-track tape. I’ve got seven disks at home and I still like to use them. But obviously I don’t put anything on them that isn’t backed up somewhere else. Sic transit gloria …