Saturday, March 28, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To JCB's. Helped JCB with his computers. He recently bought a Dell Mini 9, which is just tolerable for me to type on with some mental adjustments, but the screen doesn't push far enough open to be comfortable for the neck. It's missing a numeric keypad plus sign which is useful in Windows Explorer for adjusting all columns instantly so you can read everything (Ctrl+NumericKeypadPlus), but probably no one else in the world will miss that. The Page Up key didn't work properly, but Page Down and every other key did. Otherwise it seemed like a pretty nice piece of hardware. It's super small and super light, and it works. JCB got it with Windows XP. Since my last visit, he couldn't get Microsoft Backup working on his desktop computer as expected. I looked at the configuration and could not figure it out either (there was an unresolvable permissions problem with the scheduled task that it had created), so I said let's just give up on it and install something else. He's backing up to an external hard drive. I reformatted the external hard drive and then installed CrashPlan home, which was very simple to configure and get started backing up. A great first impression. 10 GB through USB 2.0 took under an hour. Pizza slice at Cybelle's. To home. Patrick and I drove out to walk the 1,000 steps trail north of Baker Beach, but it was too cold for Patrick, so we aborted the plan. We drove to Laurel Village where it was indeed warmer, walked around, visited the Jewish Community Center, bought a few gifts at Books Inc, bought note cards at Papyrus. Patrick got a Jamba Juice, and we ate on a sidewalk bench in the sun eating strawberries and tortilla chips we had brought along. To home. Installed CrashPlan on my home computer. After today's 2 installations of CrashPlan, and since we're getting federal and state tax refunds (woo!) I bought two 1.5-terabyte bare hard drives—$130 each—with the intention of not only implementing CrashPlan for us (backing up and then shipping the drive off to a friend for continued offsite protection) but also to back up Patrick's forthcoming new computer (also courtesy of our tax refunds) and to offer offsite backup to a few close friends. Now that the basic home version of CrashPlan is free, there's no excuse to avoid it. For what you get—free onsite or offsite storage limited only by your ability to purchase hard drive space—it's absolutely the best deal going for nearly all home computer users who can set up a backup buddy. My current recommendation for backup is for Mac users to use Time Machine locally and CrashPlan offsite. For Windows and Linux users, use anything that's not CrashPlan locally and CrashPlan offsite. I still believe that you need both local and offsite backup because it is likely that one of the two will eventually fail you but far less likely that both will fail you at the same time. I recommend that you do not use any single method of backup for both local and offsite backup—there is value in diversity of backup methods. So, it's okay to use CrashPlan for both local and offsite, but don't rely on it for both. If CrashPlan fails for whatever reason, both local and offsite might become problematic to retrieve. In March 2007 when I researched home backup solutions for Mac my options were Box Backup, Mozy, Carbonite, DriveHQ, SpareBackup, and Duplicity. We've come a long way in 2 years. Mozy came out with a Mac version which I tried. It worked for a while, but after some time I kept getting showstopping errors that they were unable to resolve. In place of Mozy, I tested the free version of iDrive, and it seems to work, but now I'll be following the plan I strategized earlier and will be switching to CrashPlan. Carbonite eventually released a Mac version long after Mozy did, and I never bothered to try it. When you are that late to a game which is changing on seemingly a monthly basis, you're not a player anymore. Dinner at home with Patrick: tacos with side of refried beans. Patrick and I reviewed his proposed iMac purchase and played with Magic GarageBand for a while. Watched Quantum of Solace (2008) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Afterwards we rewatched in slow motion the portion of the scene that transitions away from the bell tower—fantastic shot! and kudos to the filmmakers for that one in particular. How did they do that? There is more trivia in imdb for Quantum of Solace than perhaps any other film I've ever looked at in imdb. If you liked Jason Bourne films, you'll like this one. The film's MacGuffin is smirkworthy, but for a film like this we really need only as much plot to get from scene to scene and to create or contribute to a story arc. I particularly liked how the villain is publically presented as a trusted and valued member of society. In this manner, Quantum of Solace's villain Dominic Greene probably represents some of our real world villains too accurately for their comfort. Found a fortune cookie fortune which I had not recorded: You will discover an unexpected treasure.