Saturday, November 18, 2006
Woke around 2 AM and couldn't sleep for 90 minutes, so I got up and figured out a plan for replacing the REV drive at work, then backfilled yesterday's journal entry. I noticed yesterday that Google finds only 22 occurrences of the exact phrase "write once, crash everywhere" which surprises me—I thought it would be a lot more. House chores. Lunch with Patrick at home: leftovers. Cut my hair. Showered. Napped. Dinner at King of Thai Noodle with Patrick. Patrick went home to write and to get to bed early so he could wake up at 4:00 AM for shao lin practice with Simmone. I went to Jonathan and Adrian's quite possibly flawlessly designed home—they were throwing a combination birthday party for Jonathan and a housewarming for their new place in the Castro / Upper Market. Jonathan is a user interface designer who was previously with Adobe but is now with Google as of about 6 months ago. Adrian is a banker. A sign written with Andy in mind warned guests to keep 2 things on. Pablo tended the bar most professionally, and tons of people showed up mostly between 10 and 11. (We think many left to go clubbing afterwards.) The party was a lot of fun. I ended up chatting with Adrienne and Rob whom I found friendly and engaging (Adrienne worked with Jonathan at Yahoo!) and I also met Kevin C and Cuong N. Kevin and I had worked together at Adobe remotely—him in San Jose and me in Seattle—a fair amount, but I had never met him until today. We started around the same time and he's still with the company, by which I think he's surprised, himself. I thought perhaps Kevin knew Jonathan from Adobe, but it was Cuong who knew Jonathan from Yahoo! He informed me that Sau and Stephen have 2 adorable children and that Sau is now working with the video product line. Remi and Jesse are newly returned from France, including a trip to Remi's hometown of (I can't remember the name). I met and chatted with many others, though I can't recall everyone's name. Their neighbor Teddy (Ted) declined when I offered to take a photo of the three. Anime ran silent on the flat-screen TV—Miyazaki's Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984) and Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (1986)—while the latest house music played on the stereo. I forgot to bring a cdrom of my camping trip photos for Remi. I stayed late and chatted with a handful of other latestayers, and 318ti-buddy Ryan gave me a ride home. I have photos but haven't processed them yet. At home, the Iomega Automatic Backup Pro error message "Access is denied" with my REV drive backups is unexplainably back. After the REV drive at work failed last week and my corresponding experience trying to right the wrong, I feel I must begin to abandon Iomega. My REV drive at home still works. I spent about an hour installing a trial version of Retrospect just so I could retrieve 13 kilobytes of Stickies data for Joel which he happened to lose just after the office REV drive went kaput. I spent some time today researching backup options; I feel like I did this only a few months ago. Go back to XXCOPY? Go with CMS and their BounceBack solutions? Go with Amazon S3? More research is necessary before a decision can be made. The Brother MFC-845cw all-in-one device I ordered a few weeks ago has had its delivery date pushed back, worst case is now another 2 weeks. There are 2 other internet stores that claim to have it now, but it's about $60 more than Amazon's price. I don't need it that badly. I've waited this long; I can wait 2 more weeks to save $60 and buy from a trusted source. Several weeks ago we bought an OfficeMax-branded paper, cd, and credit-card shredder. I've been really happy with it because it is much improved upon our previous shredder. I will write a review later.