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Okay, so somebody I don't know sent me a four megabyte email message. It could be worse, and even though huge attachments by surprise are somewhat uncool, it seems everyone has a different notion of where the boundary of 'huge' is, and at least this time they were photos that were photos and relevant to the content, not a TIFF of a scan of a news article (I think I ranted about that one a few years ago when it happened) nor irrelevant window-dressing, and at least I'm on broadband these days. But it pushed my disk usage high enough to trigger automatic "you're getting close to your quota" email from my ISP.
Of course, they sent it to my Radix address, which forwards to my Panix address but also auto-replies saying that my address has changed and the old address will go away soon, but also saying that their mail has already been forwarded to my new address. In fact, the autoreply is sent from my Panix address because that way I could put it after the spam filtering (no sense in telling spammers I've moved; they'll find me on their own efficiently enough).
So they sent the four megabyte message again, this time directly to my new address.
I guess it was time to gzip and download a bunch of email anyhow ...(I'm safely under my disk quota again, but it did mean pulling my head out of something else I'd been working on to deal with it.) At least the photos were of something I'm interested in.
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Now, bandwidth I understand. It's still <T1 to most of my machines, and 8+MB will slow things down considerably, especially since most mail clients seem intent on downloading the *entire* attachment during browsing.
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Some of this space will be freed once I feel completely "settled in" here. Some of it will be freed once I get around to replacing the Radix and Panix copies of my web site with pages containing redirects to the same pages on www.dglenn.org. Some of it will be freed when I get around to dealing with some largeish email I've been putting off dealing with. And then it will feel like I've got all the space in the world, until the next time I get waaaaay behind or the next time I have a project that needs a lot of room.
I'm actually hurting for space at home as well -- /home on my file server (which is NFS-mounted to /home on the other Linux machines, and is mapped as a network drive on the Windows boxes and the Macs as well) is 99% full, and /shared (various stuff like source code for downloaded apps, temporary health-of-the-system reports generated by cron, binaries I want to run from multiple machines, etc.) is filling up as well. The whole file server is on a 40GB disk ... which is to say, it's the same size as the hand-me-down iPod I carry in my purse. I think it's time to go buy a bigger disk, but I haven't quite managed to have enough money left after paying bills in any of the months since I decided that. (Actually, the first thing 'spare' cash is going to is a new headlight; the second is either new slippers (mine are literally falling off my feet, and my house isn't really a barefoot kind of place); after that comes a bigger drive for the file server.
In the meantime I've been tempted to back up the file server to the iPod ... (I should also get around to bounce the oldest of my archived email off to CD. Archived email adds up.)
As I recall, on a certain mailing list someone observed that he could now fit more memory up his nose than the first mainframe he programmed could even address. Apparently this was both a) true, and b) worded so as to find out how many friends could be goaded into sticking USB thumbdrives up their noses. I only carry 260MB in a nose-compatible form factor, and even that doesn't really fit very well (it's a pair of Memory Sticks, and they're just a little too wide to want to stretch a nostril around).