Ever since I bought my MacBook I've been using QuickSilver instead of Spotlight. I don't use QuickSilver in any way that I wasn't able to use Spotlight (still need to cache in on that training @scottspriggs said he would give me). But I prefer QuickSilver's interface, and the speed with which it identifies exactly what I'm trying to access.
Until tonight, Spotlight had been allowed to continue running quietly in the background. For some reason unknown to me, tonight Spotlight decided to start indexing the terabyte-or-so of backup data I have on my Drobo. Stupid Spotlight: the CPU is reserved for programs that matter.
So I tried all of the GUI tricks for making Spotlight stop. There's really only one: adding the Drobo to the Privacy list in Spotlight Preferences. Needless to say, if that had worked, I wouldn't be blathering about it here.
It didn't work. Fifteen minutes later, I discovered that this is another one of those OSX features that have to be disabled through a command line procedure:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
And just like that: Spotlight was no more.
