October 5, 2009

Stream of consciousness.

Time zones. I interact regularly with people from other time zones. I need two clocks on my wall. One for GMT and one for my local time. You do too. If you give me international references with your local time, I just get confused.

Procrastination. Why is it that when I'm facing some of the biggest deadlines of the year I am here? I am here. Never mind.

Waking. Waking up to cold weather and rain. I stay in bed. Breakfast. Breakfast warms me. And yet, I sit here with the cold gnawing at my bones. I need more insulation. I need to remove myself further from nature. Sustainability. Sustainability is not about maintaining the status quo. Sustainability is not about tradition or keeping things the way "nature intends". Sustainability is about ethical progress. Progress that does not harm our own, and others, future.

Future. The future beckons me. My own future bobs in the sea, as a dinghy. I can see the stars. Where's my paddle gone?

Today's word, boys and girls, is backups.

This word is much on my mind recently. About a month ago I lost my external drive on my iMac, which contained a) my backup of my main drive (whew, the main drive was fine) and b) my iTunes library. GAAAAAAH. I managed to recover 99.9% of the iTunes library, and in the process, moved it back onto the main drive so that my replacement external drive now serves as a backup for both my data and my music.

The experience, however, was enough to finally drive me to buy an external SATA drive dock (one that accepts 'raw' internal 3.5" and 2.5" SATA drives) and a couple of drives. This past weekend, I finally achieved something I'd always mumbled about doing - in addition to the 'main' backup that sits on my external hard drive, I now have a snapshot of my main machine and music from last weekend, on a bootable drive, at my cousin's house. This, I have found, actually literally makes me sleep (very slightly) better at night.

Now my problem is email - I run my own server in an internet colo, which is great because I'm a paranoid cypherpunk. However, that server now has an uptime measured in years, and is running a linux distro too old to really run modern backup service software (or anything else cool), and that colo is back in the last state I lived in. Which means if that server....*shudder* I don't want to think about it, I really don't.

So I'm investigating outsourced email providers. I hate Gmail, so Google is out. But FastMail seems to have what I need. We'll see. I only have three users who rely on this domain email as their primary address, so it should be affordable.