Friday, August 24, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. I set the Mac Mini back to portrait mode. I like it too much. Lately I've had new hardware desires in a bad way. I discovered that Samsung—my favorite monitor maker—makes the monitor I want which automatically changes the display from landscape to portrait and back. They call their feature Magic Rotation with Auto Pivot. The Samsung SyncMaster 244T is the only widescreen monitor they make with this feature, so that's the one I must have. I also identified the Mac Mini and 500 GB miniStack v2 that will replace 2 computers at home. And Patrick recently has been needing a camera to take to China, so I'm giving him my old Canon Powershot A610. The Canon Powershot A650 IS becomes available next month and it looks like it will be a lot better for taking photos in low light which I frequently do now but with very blurry and worthless results. Upon arrival at work, I was somewhat supposed to go to the Partners in D Train the Trainer training but the number of messages in my inbox more than doubled in the 2 days I was gone, so I started picking things out. It was more important for Eric to be there than me anyhow; I'm not planning to do the work we hired him for—he's certainly capable of doing it on his own. Answered a question about computer purchases for student PN. Web edit followup with Susie. Performed a restore of 2 small files from Mozy for Scott—it took about 90 seconds, which in my book is extremely fast for any start-to-finish backup operation. For a comparison, let's look at the restore steps for Retrospect which go something like this: (I'm doing this from memory...) Click Restore > Files. Select source. Select destination. Specify filename. Set a lot of settings just right. Click Restore or Go or whatever. Retrospect prompts for the password to the backup set. Open the password manager. Copy the password to the clipboard. Switch to Retrospect. Paste the password. Click OK. Wait for it to tell you what media item to insert. Walk to the document safe. Retrieve the named media. Insert the named media. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Check that files are restored. Remove media. Put media in document safe. Lock safe. Okay. So here's Mozy: Open Windows Explorer to My Computer. Find and open the Mozy device (object) in My Computer. Under the Mozy device (object), you see all the files that have been backed up. Navigate the file system until you find the file you want. If Mozy has more than one copy of a file, it will show you all the versions it has and you can view details to see which is newer or larger. Right-click the file you want and choose Restore or Restore To. Wait. Check that the file you wanted is restored. I think Mozy has more ways to restore than this, but I haven't investigated them all yet—haven't had time—but the scenario today proved Mozy a winner. Nearly all home computer users and probably most small business users don't need backup as sophisticated as Retrospect. Mozy gets the job done with the minimum of fuss required. The only thing I think could be improved (so far) with Mozy is that it's not very intuitive how to begin to restore. When presented with the need to restore, the first place I went was the system tray icon. But with Mozy, you need to browse the Mozy device (object) in Windows Explorer. Mozy could improve its product by letting you right-click the systray icon, choosing an item called Restore, and having that open Windows Explorer to the Mozy object. Web home page edits for Susie. A-Z list edit for Tony T. Stopped in at the Train the Trainer break, chatted with Tim, Susie, and Eric briefly. E-mailed Nancy N photos for Susie. Reminded current students about computer deals at the techstore. Chatted on the phone with Kurt G and Teresa R briefly. Refreshed OSACA introduction slides for Cindy. Chatted on the phone briefly with Kirk H about door locks and e-mail setup with Apple Mail and Entourage. Paper mailbox followup for Eric. Followup with student MB regarding computer setup. Preview session followup with Alyssa. Lunch by myself at L'Avenida: chicken soft taco, tortilla chips, Dr. Pepper. Bought a few groceries after lunch. Calendar management. Chatted with James briefly. New hire followup with Eric and Helen. Required software cdroms arrived. I unpacked mine and sent copies to Heidi and Kirk and Rodney. Chatted with Rodney briefly. Asked OAAIS to redirect a URL because their new website launched after our cdrom went to press and the cdrom had a URL in it that isn't yet being redirected. Chatted briefly with resident AH. Lucia reported the Software Update Failed problem again with Netscape. I don't know why the problem keeps coming back even after I do the active-update.xml fix. I searched Google for "software update failed" "keeps coming back" but got nothing. Gave up for now. Followup with Lucia about a WebCT project. WeID setup. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Caught up on blogs and e-mail. Calendar management. Worked on Danny's website some. Disk cleanup and defrag for some Windows computers.