Earlier today, I went to Best Buy and got myself the Christmas present I wanted -- a 1 Gigabyte USB drive. I had been using a 64-megabyte one for a couple of years, but the price of flash memory has dropped dramatically lately, and I wanted to be able to carry around more stuff on my keyring. It was only $60 (after a rebate, which has already been filled out and is waiting to be mailed tomorrow).

So, what to do with all the room? Backups of all my writing, and all the files for a couple of websites I maintain. That still leaves plenty of room -- enough for a full CD's worth of data.

I won't be in such a hurry to fill it up, though. That just happens all by itself over time. My first PC had a 20-meg hard drive, which was a luxury in the days when many PCs only came with two low-density floppy disk drives. After awhile, when that was filled up, my next PC had a whopping 400-meg hard drive, and I was again in heaven. When that space started getting scarce, I added a Super Drive (similar to a Zip drive), with removable disks at 120-megs a pop. I stuck with that one until moving up to a 5 Gigabyte drive. The current PC is getting pretty old now with its 40-gig drive, and I added a 120-gig drive to it a year ago (but it's already filled with audio and video files). The 250-gig drives are starting to look pretty good.

Disk space is like money -- no matter how much you have, you could always do with a little more.