Okay, we're going to finish up with something light 'n' kooky today, because after that whole Enderle thing, we need something to take the edge off before we inflict any damage on the expensive equipment here in the production room-- like, for instance, the Dancing Coke Can that faithful viewer Tom O'Drain bought for us off eBay a couple of years back, which figures heavily in our daily creative process and which we're assured was last appraised at $1.2 million. Actually, come to think of it, give us a minute while we let this little guy shake his groove thang.

Ha ha! Yeah! Check it out, the little dude's jammin' to Sir Mix-a-Lot! Classic!

Okay, we feel loads better. And though we can probably now get through the day without actually throttling anyone, we're not going to take any chances, so we'll be extending the whimsy with a quick peek at a tech oddity passed along by faithful viewer Xur and the Kodan Armada: the Floppy Disk RAID!

If you don't know what a RAID is, that means nothing to you. Basically, a RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, which is the sort of thing you often see set up in servers for speed or fault-tolerance purposes. The idea is to take a bunch of hard disks and set them up so that they act like a single logical volume; you can either stripe data across them so that, for instance, two 80 GB hard disks act like a single high-performance 160ish GB disk, or mirror data so that those two 80 GB disks act like a single 80 GB disk-- but the data is written to both drives, so that if one should fail, no data is lost and the system keeps right on ticking. Got the general idea? Again, it's usually done for very high-end sort of situations.

Which is why it's so geekishly cool that somebody made one out of five floppy disks.

Floppies, as you know, are slower than sludge on ice and have a data capacity roughly on par with a small bundle of twigs held together with a rubber band. This is the lowest-end data storage around-- assuming you can even find them anymore. Well, the guy in question just happens to work for a manufacturer of USB floppy drives, so he grabbed five of them, plugged them into his Bondi Blue iMac running Jaguar, inserted five disks, fired up Disk Utility, and set them up as a striped RAID. Six minutes later, he had a 4.22 MB disk on his Desktop comprised of five whirring floppies. Imagine the noise as he dragged a 3.6 MB file to it-- which copied in a mere 32 seconds, which, in floppy terms, does in fact technically qualify as "turbo lightning speed!!"

Interestingly enough, this guy originally tried to build his floppy RAID under Windows XP, but that "other" operating system wouldn't let him do it. Leave it to Apple, who ditched floppy drives six whole years ago, to allow a use for floppies that's actually cool. Now let's see, here... USB allows, what, 127 devices? Subtract a few for the keyboard and mouse, and maybe a bunch for hubs, since we're not sure if they count or not... All told, we figure it should still be possible for a Mac to host a 60ish MB RAID made up of about a hundred floppies, all spinning at once. (Finally, something to do with those old AOL disks!) Now that's something to add to the list of stuff to see before you die. If you're out of room, cross off the Sphinx. C'mon, it doesn't even have a nose. We're talking about a 60 MB disk made out of floppies, consarn it!