I drove down to the office supply store and bought a new USB thumb drive, viz., an Ativa U3 smart drive. I ferry data back and forth from home to work with one of these, and it would often fill up. That’s not likely to happen with the new one, which has 2GB capacity. (Actually a little less; it’s that 10^3 vs. 2^10 business again.

Whenever I insert the drive into my USB port, I get two devices mounted: a read-only CD-ROM, plus the writable FAT-formatted disc. The stuff on the “CD-ROM” is apparently what U3 is all about: some kind of automatic backup software I can’t use since I don’t have windows. (Like I care; I doubt I’d like it as much as I like rsync.)

Anyhoo. It’s the sort of thing that makes you realize how much you take for granted. Like filesystems that don’t suck, for example, the way FAT does. Or rsync. Or not being in that whole preloaded-crippleware ecosystem.