Category Archives: Log

FBackup: Free Is Good

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At work I was asked to put together a server on the cheap which I’m fine with as long as everyone understands that doing so has some implicated risk. A server cast on a desktop machine is a risky proposition. You don’t have power support from redundant power supplies, you don’t have RAID which can protect you from hard drive failure, and the machine is not designed to be a very robust server in any stretch of the imagination – it just lacks the processing and RAM that would really answer the need strongly. However, once I covered those risks, everyone was still on-board with me moving forward. I rolled a server out, used an Operating System that would be best to not speak about and set up the software.

Being a part of the technology from the great beast, of course it didn’t work well at first. There were hidden requirements, annoying requirements. Requirements with “dots” in their name. Once I figured out the how and got the thing running I took it down from the lab place I was working on it in and moved it to its permanent home in our machine room. From the point of deployment which was a few days ago I’ve had a niggling worry that the thing is going to fail, as any machine could when it relies on just one hard drive. I needed a backup solution.

The built-in backup solution in the “product” that I was “using” as an “operating system” was just not going to work. I needed something that would work well and be free above all else. I went to the great sage and eminent junkie Google and eventually ran across FBackup. It’s not glorious, it’s not complicated, but it is exactly what I was looking for. So now with that software installed, and it’s quite good in fact for the “operating system” I was using I don’t have to worry so much about that “server” going down. If it does, eh, who cares, at least the data will be safe. For those that wonder where I put my backups, I have a NAS, a handy dandy DroboNAS that isn’t the fastest tool in the shed, but at 16TB, it certainly has a lot of space and it’s RAID means that I don’t have to worry so much about hardware failure with that box.

So, hooray for FBackup. It’s free, and while I can’t spare any change for it, what I can do is recommend it. If you are looking for something handy and you can’t get your hands on a native installation of ‘tar’ like you should be using, this is quite good. It’s not Backup Exec of course, but then, I would rather chew a lightbulb than even hear the words “Backup Exec” spoken aloud.

FitBit Part Two

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I have returned my poor dead fitbit back to best buy and used my 2-year warranty. They returned the unit, put up a $100 gift card then tore up the old 2-year contract because its one-use. Then I picked out a new FitBit One (new and nicer) and they applied the gift card and then all I had to do was pay for the pro-rated new 2-year protection plan. Total spent? $3.83. I’m good with that. Yay!

FitBit

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My FitBit failed yesterday. The poor thing no longer wants to work and when I plugged it into the charging base it just started to flicker with half the display actually showing. It was just another nail in the coffin that was yesterday and I was only half-expecting FitBit to honor their warranty because I doubted I had my receipt.

As it turns out, I started rolling up my receipts and storing them in a little collection box in my kitchen. I opened the drawer last night and rooted around for it, not expecting to find it. Not only did I find it, but I also discovered to my chagrin that when I purchased the FitBit I also purchased the “Performance Guarantee” with Best Buy for $15, which covers the device for two years and expires on 8/28/2014. So not only do I not have to muck about with the warranty procedure and wait for shipping and processing, but I can get a new unit as soon as I can get myself down to Best Buy.

Now I know what I’m doing for lunch. 🙂

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

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2012-08-20 17.30.42 Last August I was walking out of where I work and I just happened to glance down and saw this flower growing all by itself in a crack that had developed in the concrete stairway leading out of my building down to the sidewalk. It struck me that something so evocative would grow without encouragement in a place that really is unlikely for any flower to thrive. It didn’t really last very long as someone from landscape services (I assume) came along and plucked it. Now all that is there is a crack in the concrete stairway. A little bit of special was there only for a brief time.

Unique.

When Silence Falls

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I’m only a little dismayed that my blog post about my shirts and possible bow-tie combinations just passed unnoticed by everyone who I share things with. So, without any input I’m just going to make my own choices on what I should get. Today I’m wearing the only bow tie I have, my green one I got for Christmas and everyone comments on it. Bow ties are coming back in style I tell you. Thanks to the eleventh Doctor! 🙂 Bow ties are cool.

Tagging

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I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.

My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.

Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.

Friday Flashback – February 22nd

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Friday Flashback 2/22

2006 – Coultergeist Visits WMU
2008 – The USS Lake Erie knocked a “downed satellite” out of orbit using the AEGIS weapon system to do it, perhaps. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but sometimes I like to think about how it might have played out. Also in 2008 I was playing around with a swiss ball trying to get in shape. It didn’t take, at least not at that point.
2009 – One-word LiveJournal quizzes kept me occupied and I was busy contending with a cold, feeling awful and sick. I was also in the middle of reading Green Lantern comic books from the 80’s with all their adorable schlock.
2010 – Toyota was dealing with their runaway vehicles, while I was struggling with an injured back. Christmas trees that resist removal are such a pain. TweetDeck was a charmer but ultimately a piece of shiny junk.
2011 – I wrote about the importance of a Carbon Monoxide detector as the region was dealing with a nasty winter storm and a lot of power outages. Western had opened up some of it’s resources to the community to help mitigate what the outage meant for a lot of people in the community. We also learned that sections of permafrost were melting. Saying that this was one of the first indications of climate change would be laughably wrong. We’ve all known for a really long time that we’ve damaged the climate, this was just some lighthearted wistful comedy that helped round it all off.
2013 – I finished moving my Twitter activity over to Day One. I also decided to buy into the Sentricom system to protect my house from Termites. Perhaps it was a waste of money, but generally isn’t it better to be safer than sorrier?

A little trip down memory lane. I’m going to try to do these on Fridays from now on. Since I have so much of my past recorded in Day One, this should be easy. The only difficulty will be trying to summarize some of those days when I was tweeting a lot.

Empty Nests

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I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

 

 

PAD 1/26/13 – Music

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“What role does music play in your life?”

There is two kinds of music for me. The first kind is filler music. The clever hooks and poppy nothingness that I play all the time on my Spotify account while I’m at work. I keep it low and quiet and it helps to pass the time. The music is good, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it’s not pleasant. It would do a disservice to declare who and what is “poppy nothingness” so I just won’t. If you think your art is deep and moving and transcendental then so do I. Whatever floats your boat. But…

There is another kind of music. The fundamental delight that it brings is beyond description. You just have to sit back and let it wash over you, changing you, as the tingles rage along your body when you hear the music that changes your life. I don’t know what thematic musical styles do it for me, but I know it when I feel it. If I’m listening to music and I feel that tingle – it doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does it’s unmistakable, then I know. I place all of this sort of music into a special playlist on Spotify and when I want to be agape with musical wonder I double-click on the playlist and shuffle. It doesn’t matter what track comes up first, they all do it for me, each and every time they play.

I used to think of music as the frilly doilies of life. Easily ignored and really compelling for doily collectors, for which I am not one. But over time, and since I discovered that some music brings the tingle, some music is more than others. I would say, much like books, going fishing for good music can lead you some truly excellent catches.