Friday, December 26, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Downloaded and installed Name Mangler, used it once, and it did what I needed. Downloaded Eclipse but did not start using it yet. Shopped for a shoe storage solution online with Patrick. Made a lunch date with my brother and parents for tomorrow—they're coming to SF. Edits and updates for Danny's website. Yesterday in researching online backup solutions I discovered Transport by MacMiniColo. Transport seems like a really nice idea, especially the part about doing the initial backup before you send the Time Capsule to them, but what are they doing that regular people couldn't do by sending Time Capsules to trusted friends or family? Yes, they're providing a more secure environment for the hardware, but the price does not seem very reasonable to me, particularly for largeish quantities of data (e.g., over 50 GB). Apple could give the online backup industry a good kick in the pants by making Time Capsule behave more like Transport. Or maybe we can do that now and just no one but MacMiniColo has discovered how to do that easily? Downloaded and installed Songbird 1.0.0. Songbird is music player software that looks a lot like iTunes but it's open-source and smarter than iTunes about integrating non-Apple outside content and services. Songbird would be especially useful at a party. I especially like the streaming Flickr photos and the lyrics integration. Napped. Dinner at home with Patrick: apple cinnamon pig chops, asparagus risotto. Patrick and I watched as much of Dangerous Game on Netflix DVD as we could stomach. Watched Heroes season 3 episodes 7 and 8 on Netflix instant watch. Continued setting up the new install of Vista. Time Machine finished its initial backup—took about a day.