Friday, December 12, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Been wanting to check out mobaganda after learning about it from Time Magazine yesterday, but the site was not serving a home page when I tried yesterday and again this morning. Yesterday the page wouldn't even load—just a spinning cursor. This morning it was a blank page. Then, I tried again a few minutes later this morning and a home page came up. Weird, unreliable, untrustworthy. Some digging reveals it's built upon Google App Engine—is that the problem? I didn't realize evite got bought by Ticketmaster (IAC) in 2001—interesting. Doodle's home page got a redesign—nice! Minor web edits: closure notice. Holiday dim sum brunch at Ton Kiang with the Dean's Office staff—yum! More minor web edits. Uploaded schedules for Lucia. Investigated Fluxiom. Website occasionally did not serve pages. Hard to remember how to spell the name. Who has digital content management needs and only needs to store 20 GB of data? I guess someone, but not us. Even if I were to use Fluxiom for home, I have way more than 20 GB of creative data to manage. For $2,500 per year you'd think they could give you more storage space. Chatted briefly with James about his old telephone number. Comm network activities. Management activities. Home. Dinner at home with Patrick: lasagne, shrimp louie salad. More research for online backup solutions. I can't use Mozy anymore because they were unable to resolve the problem I had with Mozy crashing upon launch. Jungle Disk and S3 are still too expensive in the long run. Sonic Backup gives only 50 GB for $60 per year and only 500 MB for free—not worthwhile. Current options: rsync, CrashPlan Home, Elephant Drive Home Plus. Watched Sun's video for Project Looking Glass—so laughable and sad. So many talented people going wrong in so many ways. Watched the BumpTop video. This was better than Project Looking Glass, but will people remember all the different gestures and actions you can perform simply to organize piles of stuff? Installed the trial for Elephant Drive Home Plus. It's not clear that it's beta software until after you install the software—misleading. (I'm using Mac.) Also, the user experience lacks polish and doesn't seem to have been tested on Macs. e.g., my download screen said I was downloading the Windows version, but I ended up getting a dmg file like I should have—very confusing. The installation experience was shoddy. The Finder window in the dmg was incomplete (i.e., not prettified). And installer screen button labels were incomplete and showed truncated words followed by ellipses rather than, say, Back, Next, and Cancel.