Month: August 2008

EdmontonTweetup2 – August 14th

Next week we’ll be having our second tweetup here in Edmonton. It’s a great way to meet other Twitter users from Edmonton and area – there’s quite a few of us already and the number keeps growing! The event is fairly informal and relaxed, the goal is just to have some fun meeting new people! You can read about our first tweetup here. Hard to believe it’s been three months already!

It’s always a challenge to find a date and time and venue that everyone can make it out to, so we’re trying something different this time. Here are the details:

WHO: Twitter users in Edmonton!
WHAT: An event to meet one another in meatspace.
WHERE: The Billiard Club on Whyte Avenue (map)
WHEN: Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 6:00pm
WHY: To chat about anything with other Twitter users!

If you’re planning to come out on Thursday, add your name to the list on our wiki. You may also want to follow edmontontweetup and/or myself on Twitter for updates.

See you there!

Thoughts on backups with MozyPro

At around 1:30am on August 6th, a hard drive in one of our database servers died. It took down our mail server and WordPress blogs, but everything else (such as Podcast Spot) was unaffected. It sucks, but it happens. We’ve had many drives die over the last few years, unfortunately. All you can do is learn from each experience.

In this case, we had a full image of the server backed up. All we had to do was stick in a new hard drive, and deploy the image. That worked fairly well, though it did take some time to complete. The only problem was that the image was about 24 hours old – fine for system files, but not good for the data files we needed. For the most up-to-date data files, we relied on MozyPro.

(I should point out that we generally configure things so that data files are on separate drives from the system. In this case, we had about 250 MB of data files on the system drive. I have since reconfigured that.)

For the most part, Mozy has worked well for us. We’ve had a few bumps along the way, but no major complaints or problems. Until I tried to restore the data files yesterday, that is. The first problem was that I couldn’t use the Windows interface. The Mozy client would not “see” the last backup, presumably because the image was older than the last backup. You’d think it could connect to Mozy and figure that out, but apparently not. So I tried to use the Web Restore. It eventually worked, but it took about four hours to get the files. I don’t mean to download them, but for Mozy to make them available for download. Thank goodness it was only about 1000 files and 250 MB or it could have taken days!

So I learned that Mozy is reliable, but certainly not quick. If you need to restore something quickly, make sure you have a local backup somewhere. If you’re just looking for reliable, inexpensive, offsite storage then Mozy will probably work fine for you.

My next task is to upgrade this server particular to a RAID configuration, something we had been planning to do anyway. Should have done it sooner!

How do you keep track of things?

post it notesI’m a bit of a scatterbrain at times, I’ll admit that. I generally need to write something down if I want to have any hope of remembering it later. If an event is not in my calendar, I’ll almost certainly miss it. I also find that I’m terrible at keeping track of paper, so I try to avoid post-it notes whenever possible. Here are some of the tools I currently use to help me keep track of things (tasks, ideas, events, etc):

As you can see, it’s not a small list. You might think that there’d be quite a bit of overlap between these, but there isn’t really. For instance, I use RTM for tasks, things I actually need to do something about. In contrast, I mainly use OneNote for brainstorming.

For the most part, this toolset helps me keep track of things. It’s not the most efficient system in the world though, and I wonder if there’s something better? For a creative person such as myself, who loves to read and has a million thoughts and ideas a day, what tools exist to help keep track of it all? It’s like I need something to help annotate my life.

Maybe a new tool isn’t the solution. I don’t regularly review the items in each of the tools above, which might be something I should start doing.

Notes for 8/4/2008

In keeping with tradition here are my weekly notes, posted on Holiday Monday:

From The Onion:

EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.

I love The Onion! Look for Gore to make a splash at the DNC later this month.

The New Delicious

delicious On July 31st, the new Delicious.com finally launched. I consider myself a fairly heavy user of the service, with over 4200 bookmarks and 3700 tags. It’s something I use on a daily basis, so I noticed the new version almost immediately. My first reaction was “wow” but after using it for the last few days, I’m not so excited about it anymore.

What it all comes down to is that there just isn’t anything new, besides a fresh coat of paint. At least the Delicious team didn’t try to hide that in their post about the changes:

The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.

They dropped the dots, cleaned up the UI, and made the backend faster. I appreciate all of those changes, but I’m somewhat disappointed that there’s nothing new and exciting for me to play with. The “new” domain has actually worked for a long time now, and the old domain will continue to work, so that’s not much of a change. The new layout and UI can be best described as “long overdue”. I guess I’m happy about the performance improvements, and I have definitely noticed it, especially when searching.

Apparently the changes will allow the team to make improvements faster, but only time will tell if that is actually the case. I think Delicious could definitely use some work around the social networking aspect of the site – starting with allowing me to specify a profile picture! They could also probably do a lot with recommendations and trends, to help me find things I might be interested in.

Even though the new Delicious has launched, I feel like I’m still waiting.