Jamie Thingelstad

This weekend we were in a store and I saw this t-shirt. It was a must have for Maze!

If you have trouble reading that, it’s:

AB/CD
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO WALK
WE SALUTE YOU

Awesome!

Impressed by an actually interesting Super Bowl! Congrats to the Giants!

Another “Proud Papa” post. This landed in my voicemail a day ago. Made me melt.

Oh boy…

I love Delicious Library. Why? Delicious Library to me epitomizes the belief that software can always be better. Fundamentally what Delicious Library does could be easily done in a basic spreadsheet, but that would be incredibly boring. Delicious Library 2 is the long anticipated Leopard-only upgrade to this great program.

Just won the Change Game on $5.67!

I was checking out Edward Tufte’s site the other day and I noted that he is going to be returning to Minneapolis again for his seminar. I’ve been to his seminar twice and would consider going a third time but I’ll be out of town.

If you haven’t been to his seminar before I really recommend it. It’s like taking a bath in high quality analysis of visual displays. Even if your day job doesn’t directly involve designing it is still a very worthwhile and educational way to spend a day. Plus you get copies of all four of his books.

For the last few months I’ve had a Jumpnode appliance in my house keeping a tab on all of my computers, the network and other infrastructure. The Jumpnode is an appliance created by a Minneapolis startup that allows people to keep an eye on technology in remote offices, server performance or anything else that you can query via SNMP or WMI. It delivers on it’s promise of ease-of-use and exceptionally simple setup.

When you get your Jumpnode you simply unbox it, record the unique serial number and plug it into your network. Everything else is done with a slick Flash application that is hosted by Jumpnode.

Nobody likes to deal with backups. It’s a chore. It usually has some expense to it. But we all know it’s critical. Your probably backing up to a USB drive that you picked up and plugged into your machine. That’s good. Maybe you’ve actually progressed with another computer in your house or a NAS device and are backing up over the network. This is a good idea to provide some separation between the backup and the computer the data is on.

But, what if there was a real catastrophe? What if your house burned down? What if someone broke into your house and stole all the computers? Bad things happen, and those hard drives no longer just have letters and check book accounts. Those are your family photos and videos, and if your like me you cannot lose that. There is only one way to guarantee your data and that is offsite backup. I’ve finally implemented a robust offsite backup regime that I think works best.

The first thing about doing offsite backups is that it requires pairs of storage. You could get by without it, but that will double your trips offsite to insure that you always have storage offsite. My approach is to have an A-set and B-set of disks, and swap them via a safe deposit box at the bank. If the A-set is at your house or in transit, the B-set is in the bank. If the B-set is in motion, the A-set is in the bank. There is always a safe set.

Now what kind of disk do we go with? There are a lot of options for USB and FireWire drives that will do the job, but there are some challenges with that approach. First, these drives have custom power adapters that are unique to the drive. They also have a lot of air in those cases, greatly increasing the phyiscal space required to store the disks. This is important if you are placing them in a safety deposit box with limited space. The answer is to just use bare hard drives, just like you would put inside your machine.

IMAGE OF DISKS

But it’s crazy to open up your machine all the time. That is where a USB drive adapter comes to the rescue.

IMAGE OF ADAPTER

$8 for the MnPASS lane!? I’ll pass on that.