Backups

New home NAS and backup rig

First, if you aren’t backing up…do it.  You’ll be sorry when your computer crashes and your computer “guy” says ….I’m sorry but I can’t get anything off your drive.  Do you have a backup?

Second, you should also think about what would happen if someone stole the hard drive you were using for a backup (or if you had a fire and needed to run out of the house).

I had covered number 1 easy enough…with an external hard drive.
I had covered number 2 sort of.  I had my backup drives encrypted

But my failure was that my drives were all out of sync, I wasn’t sure what I had backed up or not, and was out of space.  The computer doing the encryption of my local drives was slow (and only supported USB 1) so I couldn’t move the data around easily quickly (I had a 750GB drive and a 500GB drive).  I also needed more space.  I thought about a NAS, but the price drove me away.  And I still wouldn’t have an off-site copy.

That let me to think often about online backups.  Why should I have to buy a new hard drive when I could pay a service provider a small monthly fee?

But wait…I didn’t want the provider to have access to my files.  I don’t want anyone having access to my files but me.  Don’t get me wrong…I don’t have anything to hide.  (But then again, you don’t write you love letters on post cards do you?  Why?  Do you have something to hide?).

I was also looking for unlimited space (like carbonite).  And a family type plan that would let me backup multiple computers.

Well, I happened upon crashplan.  Here’s the pluses:

Their client will let me do local AND cloud backups
They have a family plan for $14/month
They offer unlimited space
They have Mac and PC and Linux clients
They offer 3 levels of encryption (I picked the second).

I’m in the middle of the 30 day trial.  I’ve found one thing I hadn’t thought of before this:  speed.  While crashplan doesn’t seem to limit my upload speeds (like I found out carbonite does more here).  I seem to have dummed into that one because of my wanting encryption.  But, I’m still limited by my ISP.  I can upload at a blazing 1Mbit/sec (that’s .125 Mbyte/sec).  Our initial seed is going to take forever!  The better part of a month, if it is to be believed.

So, I think I’m going to keep it once the trial is open.  I just didn’t think about the logistics of the initial seed.

Oh, I should add:  crashplan offers a seed service where they’ll fedex you a hard drive, you back up, and send it back to them (they’ll do the same for recovery too).  But it only works in the US.

Image from lmorchard via flickr

Umm….

Our Guns: Goose hunting

how does one shoot someone through a door on “instinct.”  I’ve got to be missing something.  Here’s a quote:

“When you are a sportsman, you act even more on instinct,” he said. “It’s instinct – things happen and that’s what you do.” 

Allegedly–this is pretrial–he shot his girlfriend through a door while she was hiding in the bathroom.

Perhaps, this wasn’t premeditated.  I’m willing to believe that he got upset–for some reason–decided to get a gun and shoot her. But that isn’t instinct.  Instinct would be reflexively shooting someone when you walk downstairs at 3am to investigate a noise.  You then find out what you thought was a bad guy was your girlfriend.  Both result in a person being dead; however the first is cold-blooded murder and the second is a horrible accident.

As a hunter myself, I have a problem with his dad’s statement.  Hunters do anything BUT act on instinct.  One of the things drilled into you is to KNOW YOUR TARGET.  Don’t shoot a noise.  Get a positive ID, evaluate the target, verify there is no danger, and only then fire.

Image from chicagopublicmedia via flickr

Like England?

AR-15 ex

This morning in the Telegraph, there was this article:  NRA’s Wayne LaPierre’s gun warning for Obama: ‘We don’t want to be like England’.

Here’s what Lapiere said:

 “We don’t want America to become like England, where some of that nation’s outstanding rifle competitors keep their hobby a dark secret from their neighbours for fear of social disapproval,” said Mr LaPierre. “We’re not going to let the anti-gunners push us into that zone.”

Here’s what someone here said:

 “Of course you have to go through a series of checks to obtain a licence,” Mr Scanlan told The Daily Telegraph. “But if you want a gun for legitimate sporting purposes there are no real barriers.”

No real barriers, huh?  Here’s the truth:

You can’t own a handgun.  There is no “legitimate sporting purpose” in the eyes of the government.  Nope, not even a TC Contender.  They had to pass a special law to let the olympic events have pistol shooting here.  The UK Pistol team can’t even practice here.
You can’t defend yourself.  There’s no right of self-defense.  You are supposed to retreat retreat retreat and let the bad guy do what they do.  There’s certainly no castle doctrine of “legitimate” use of deadly force.
There’s no “legitimate sporting purpose” for semi-automatic firearms.
Every firearm is licensed for a specific purpose.  Use it outside of that purpose and you can lose the license.

The only thing worse than this will be when/if the US media picks up on it and runs the story there.  The low-information voter will believe these lies just like they believe the lie of how great the NHS is (it isn’t…but that will be another post).

Don’t let the media lie to you.

Image from simonov via flickr

Explain to me….

Budget

….how Obama is going to spend all this extra money and not raise the debt?  Where’s he going to get it from.  I’ll believe it when I see his budget….although, I’m not holding my breath as there hasn’t been one the past 4 years.

Oh, and rights don’t deserve a vote.

[Update 2013-02-13 06:50:55]  I needed to edit my post.  Pres. Barak has submitted a budget to Congress…the Senate just hasn’t passed one.  Oh, and my criteria when I look at his budget:  it better be balanced.  0 borrowing.  That is the only way it won’t add to the national debt.  

Image from tax credit via flickr