This is a good day. I just discovered that the city of Norfolk owes me $200 in overcharged taxes and the check is already in the mail. I didn't even have to play hardball! On top of that, I just got a minor pay raise. I think this offsets the aggravation of being stuck out here on an iron bathtub, at least a little.
So, in celebration I just picked up a trio of OCZ Vertex SSDs for myself and my nakama. If you've never used one of these, give it a try. Putting one in my main desktop reduced boot time from 1.5 minutes to 21 seconds. The transfer rates are awesome, but even more awesome is the fact that seek latency drops way down. Starting apps is lightning quick. Saving files is fast. Those annoying little hiccups that result from an app deciding to fire off a handful of dinky little writes disappear. Even better, you don't have to do anything else but use one in place of a normal hard drive. Yeah, the capacity isn't so hot, only 30-120GB if you want to keep costs reasonable, but that's no big deal. Most large files don't need ultra-fast access times anyway, so store them on a cheap 1TB 5400RPM disk, or on some LAN storage.
In other news, the promotion list for the Navy came out today. I didn't get promoted, but then, I already knew that. Unfortunately, neither did anyone else in my division. The percentage of ITs advanced to petty officer second class dropped from around 70%, where it's been for almost a decade, down to less than 30%.