Category: Personal

Congratulations! By reading this post, you have demonstrated that you are among one of the better-informed people on earth. Not only do you have a computer and access to the internet, but you are aware of blogs and evidently subscribe to or read at least one. Good job.
Granted, my humble scratchings are certainly not the most best around — if you want timely, witty, and funny writings, you’d best find those elsewhere.
That said, you — like myself — clearly use a computer for various purposes. Perhaps you have a blog of your own? Almost certainly some music, digital photographs, and important documents? Do you keep your financial and tax records on your computer? What about an inventory of your guns? Health information and medical records?
What would you do if your computer was damaged or destroyed and that data was lost? Whether it’s something “ordinary” like a computer virus, dropping the computer, theft, a house fire, storm, or flood, or something less common like the ATF raiding CavArms and confiscating every computer, disk, CD, and piece of paper in their offices, the risk of data loss is very real. Hard disks are delicate pieces of precision machinery and can fail for any number of trivial reasons — I’ve had one work just fine, and five minutes later be dead as a doornail with no warning.
What if your email provider suddenly locked you out of your mail, or mistakenly deleted your mail or account? It’s rare, but Google Mail (among others) have done this on occasion.
What, then, can one do? Easy: backup your stuff.
It doesn’t need to be fancy, but you should seriously consider the frequency and type of backups based on the importance of each item. Since your tax documents aren’t updated frequency, it might be prudent to just copy them once a year to an external drive and put the drive in your bank safe deposit box. It might be also be a good idea to print out the documents and include them with the drive, in case the drive fails somehow. You might want to back up your business records, scientific research, or Ph.D. dissertation once (or more) a day to somewhere off-site. At the worst, you’d only have to re-do one day of work. Burning a DVD or CD with your family photos and mailing them to your sister in Omaha might be good, so long as your sister doesn’t lose or break the disk. Making a copy of a WordPress MySQL database isn’t that hard, and one could keep it at home, ready to restore if things go wrong.
Of course, having to manually do backups is a pain and external hard disks can be expensive. After the first month or two, you might just say “to hell with it” and just not bother anymore, defeating the purpose of keeping backups.
Fortunately, some smart people have come up with a good solution: online backup services. You simply sign up for an account, install a small program, and for a nominal monthly fee they’ll store all your files off-site. Everything is done automatically over the internet, with your data being transmitted and stored securely using strong encryption. I use Mozy and pay $4.95/month for unlimited storage. If you need to backup 2GB or less, there’s no charge. Other services include Carbonite and JungleDisk, the latter being a client for Amazon’s S3 enterprise-grade storage service.
The first backup with Mozy can take several hours or days depending on how much stuff you have and how fast your internet connection is. After the first large backup, only new or updated files are copied, making future backups very fast. My first backup took about 12 hours, and subsequent ones only take a minute or two. The backups take place in the background, so you likely won’t notice any slowdown of your computer or internet connection.
Restorations are easy: you can restore a file or folder by right-clicking on it and choosing the suitable menu option. You can access your files securely on their website using a different computer if your main one was damage or lost. If downloading the files from Mozy would take too long due to their great size or a slow internet connection, you can even pay them a nominal fee and they’ll FedEx you DVDs of your data.
I have Mozy set to backup files on my laptop twice a day when my computer is idle, and will often execute a manual backup immediately after saving an important document, just to make sure that it’s securely stored offsite. Sometimes I’ll email a copy to myself as well.
All this talk about backups may seem silly and very Chicken Little-esque, but after losing critical, irreplaceable data for the first time (several years ago), I developed a “never again” mindset. Since then, regular backups have saved my hide (and two years of digital photos, in one case) on several occasions. Very well worth it indeed.

Nine days ago, I made a post where I cursed my foolishness when I ended up washing (and thus destroying) a Bookmans credit slip, thus being out $45. All that was left were a few small scrappy pieces of orange paper.
Of course, this was completely my fault, and I completely understand when one of the staff at the local store said “Well, without the amount actually printed on the small bits of papercredit slip, we can’t replace it.” If I were in their position, I’d probably do the same — I’d be concerned about frauds and liars.
Imagine my surprise when a few days later, the self-described Web Monkey at Bookmans posts a comment asking for my address, and saying she has something to send me. After doing some basic checking to ensure she was, in fact, a Bookmans employee, I provided my address. Today, I received her envelope: it contained a $50 (!) credit slip (with a handwritten note on it saying “Warning: not laundry proof!”) and a few bumper stickers.
Now, over the years, I’ve dealt with good and bad customer service. Some have offered what I would consider to be excellent customer service, while others have offered customer “service” in much the same way that a bull “services” a cow. Bookmans just blew them all out of the water. Not only did they proactively seek out my issue (when I called to ask, I had done so without giving my name or number, the only record of the question was here on the blog), but they took my word on the amount I had accidentally destroyed, and even gave me $5 more. They did all this even though I was completely to blame, and I didn’t expect even the slightest bit of reimbursement for my own foolishness.
Never have I seen customer service quite so incredible. Truly, my hat is off to them.
They even have a highly competent Web Monkey, who evidently regularly reviews her server logs. Always a good thing. (Hey Heather, if you’re reading this, there’s a new version of Google Analytics code that you should replace the existing urchin.js with. Just FYI.)
If I wasn’t already a loyal Bookmans customer (both for their excellent prices, selection, locations, and people, but also for their unwavering support and defense of the First Amendment), I would certainly have been converted as of today.
At the risk of sounding like some sort of commercial shill (which I most certainly am not), if you’re in an area with a nearby Bookmans, I strongly encourage you to check them out.

The state of Arizona just mailed me my vehicle registration renewal form for my Camry.
Total damage for two years of registration: $427.49, which includes $50 for my Veteran’s plate (the money goes to help various veteran-related organizations, which I support).
While the $365.82 for a “vehicle license tax” is a bit steep, what irks me is that they charge me $0.42 for postage to mail me the bill. You’d think that’d be considered a “cost of doing business” for the state, and they wouldn’t pass it along to the taxpayer so blatantly. That said, it is nice that they show it as a line-item, so I know exactly what my costs are.
They list what percentage of my vehicle license tax goes to various purposes — highways, roads, and general funds for the county and city. Oddly enough, more money goes to the county and city general funds than it goes to county and city roads. That’s annoying, considering how many [expletive] potholes Tucson has.
Also strange is that they list how to compute the tax savings for having an “alternative fuel vehicle”: multiply the existing VLT by 0.02381, which would bring my tax to $8.71 if I had an alternative-fuel vehicle. Paying less than $9 for two years of registration and taxes certainly is appealing, but there’s no places around here for refuelling an alternative-fuel vehicle. Maybe I could get a natural gas hookup if I had my own house, but otherwise it’s a no-go. It seems really strange that the tax would be essentially negligible for owning such a vehicle, particularly when alternative-fuel vehicles cause the same wear-and-tear of roads that gas/diesel vehicles do. Go figure.
I also find it really odd that they have a section where one can consent to release personal information contained in my driver license and vehicle record, and that such consent “applies to all requests from any and all individuals or organicationz for any purpose, until revoked…in writing”. The form provided makes no mention of the fact that such consent is completely optional, and that the default state is “keep my information private”. The online form for renewal has the same section, but mentions that it’s optional. Why would they even put such a section? Why would anyone willingly consent to releasing their license and vehicle records to the general public, with no restrictions?

Last week, I sold a bunch of books to the local used bookstore (Bookmans, which is an awesome store). They gave me a normal store credit slip saying I had a credit of ~$45 good for anything in the store.
Unfortunately, that same slip ended up being in my pants pocket when I did laundry this weekend, and is now in very small pieces on my desk. Alas, this also means it’s now worthless — Bookmans doesn’t keep records of credit slips, and they encourage you to treat them like cash. Unfortunately, the credit slips aren’t as durable as cash.
That’ll teach me to check my pockets prior to doing laundry.

About 30 minutes prior to New Years here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I asked my Sarah, my girlfriend of nearly three years, to marry me.
She said yes.
Now, if only those butterflies in my stomach would quiet down, I’d like to get some sleep…

After a pleasant 12-hour drive from the Phoenix metro area, I’m back in San Francisco to visit friends and family over the winter break.
Alas, I didn’t bring any of the guns.
If anyone in the Bay Area wants to say hello and meet up in person, let me know.

I’m seeking a small, high-quality, wifi*-based webcam.
It must have the capability for live streaming access over the web (that is, I can access the camera remotely and see live views of its coverage area), and the capability for motion-based taking of photos/videos (can be either or both). Must be able to send motion-based taking of photos/videos to a remote location, such by email or FTP.
Why? I tend to be out of the apartment a lot. While the guns are secure in the safe, a potential thief would have little problem entering the apartment and having near-unlimited time to open the safe. If that occurs, I’d like some evidence to present to the police and/or my insurance company.
Any advice? I’ve been looking at these cameras, but they’re pricey.
* Must support WPA2-PSK with AES. WEP is absolutely out of the question.