Over 2 years in Fort Wayne now. I started at Belmont Beverage stores ( www.belmontbev.com ) in the fall as IT Manager and I love it. The kids have been in LA all summer and Connor lives with us now.
Pretty happy.

so here's some more:


Joy Justice


yum.

and bought an ipod touch replacing my trusty sansa fuse.

neato.


any sexy apps I should know about my tech savvy princes and princesses?

2 weeks into the new semester here at WMU, we are deluged with new students. Many of them have arrived with computers that are either so virus-laden that they barely function or new computers and absolutely no idea of basic functions.

I have met students (people in their late teens/early twenties) who have never installed nor removed a program. Some have no idea what anti-virus software even is.

I've come across mac users with no idea how to clear their cache in safari.

Frankly, I'm astonished at the level of noobishness among young people.

Even my sixteen year old son is agile enough to do all these things and more. (yeah, he's got an IT dad, but seriously...)

These kids appear helpless and hopeless.

flying up to do hodir dailys this morning i found a neat rare I've been casually watching for:

The time lost protodrake!

currently enmeshed in the following books:

If the Buddha Dated by Charlotte Kasl

Dream It. List It. from 43Things.com

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

"The accumulation of their filth will foam up around their waists, and all the whores and politicians will look up as shout, 'SAVE US.' and I'll look down and whisper,'no.'"

out with miss shellbeach. she's pretty spiffy.

I've been puzzling for a while (years in fact) over the problem of backing up data. Some portions of this question feel more as if they belong in Philosophy, rather than in the hands of modern technologists.

Here's a rough breakdown of the problem as I have encountered it in my experiences:

1. Both at work and at home, we have all developed an ever-growing list of data we cannot ( or would be put to great effort to) replace.
Generally, this data falls into 3 categories:
1. text files or spreadsheets (documents)
2. photographs and scans (images)
3. music and voice recordings (audio files)

The central problem is how to recover these items once a hard drive or main source has broken down or become corrupt. Recovery may not be an option due to virus infestation or mechanical/electronic failure. Going forward the solution seems to be to utilize some kind of backup device, to prepare for failure in the future. A primary pitfall of this solution is than any sort of data backup solution inevitably suffers from the same or worse liabilities as the original.

Archeologists of the far future will curse us for using magnetic media for all our data. Hard disks, CD's, and DVD's will not hold their image for more than a decade before degradation occurs and the image is lost, unrecoverable forever. There are archival data solutions on the market purporting 25 and 100 year archival safety, but no one has lived long enough to test any of these products.

The only economically viable, usable solution so far is to keep a 2nd hard drive external upon which copies of data might be kept safe. The reliability of this drive must be tested and considered on a regular basis.

REF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup

(more soon.)