Birthday Boy

Today is My Birthday. It's also National Day in Bhutan. Republic Day in Niger. In 1903, the First Flight took place -thanks Wilber and Orville! In 1777, France offically recognized the Unites States of America. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union would ceast to exist after New Years. In 1843, Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol" was published. My day wasn't that historic. But, it was good enough for me.

Nancy made me whole wheat pancakes for breakfast. A departure from our normal Sunday morning french toast. Not sure why I chose that, but I did. We clean up, rested a bit -Nancy's still a bit under the weather, and got read to go to the dog park. We spent about an hour there. Kibbles and Bits was there for a promotion, and Ginny was up for a shot:

Abby got a shot with Nancy, and Chili just couldn't stay still enough. The photos were for their "Most kissable Pup" contest. We just wanted the free stuff. Thanks Kibbles and Bits.

After that, my friend, Doug Spratt, dropped his sick Mac PowerBook G4 off. It's a nice Titanium version; 1.1 GHz, I believe. Working on this show's me why I like Open Source software better than proprietary products. Mac OS X and Linux are similar, but a lot of OS X is closed source. With a bit more education, I could learn about more about the OS X system. It has the FreeBSD as it's base, Darwin as a shell, and Aqua as the GUI. It's secure, but it can be difficult when things don't work. I want to learn about fixing Mac and Apple products in the future, but the training on that cost major $$. That will be post graduate training for me.

Nancy took me to dinner tonight at Seasons 52. It's the Winter Menu, and I had the Sesame Crusted Tuna. She had the Pork Medalions. Seasons 52 is probably one of the best restaurants I've ever been to. I've never had a bad meal there. No, there's not a CoachDANNY affiliate, just a really good restaurant. When she feels better, we'll go the Universal/Islands of Adventure this week.

Back to the Mac: Parts of the PowerBooks' hardware isn't working right; the Airport, Ethernet, CD/DVD, even the USB ports are being picky. At first, we couldn't even get to the desktop. After a bit of nasty hacking (interpetation - Unix commands), I was able to get the desktop up. Not very well, but well enough to reinstall the system, without losing any data. After a bit more hacking, I got one of the USB ports to work, and I'm transfering all the old data on it. I'm going to reinstall the system, as brand new. I'll report on that tomorrow.

This experience reiterates what I've done for awhile, and have said on this blog before: Backup whatever you don't want to lose! The computer isn't perfect -Windows, Linux, or Mac- and the users are even worse. Things happen; hardware breaks, software quakes, and data goes bye-bye.

Ask yourself this question: If a flood, fire, or other disaster happen, and you lost EVERYTHING, could you still get your data?? I can!

There are files I could lose, and shrug them off. No biggy. My music files, podcasts, and other files I could get again if I wanted, with some time. But my audiobooks, ebooks, personal documents, and especially my pictures are backed up in three places:

1. External Hard drive: With the size of the small USB thumbdrives -4 GB at the moment, and getting bigger every three months, this is an option for current important data. Otherwise, a bigger -200 GB or more- drive is recommended.
2. CD/DVD's - A copy of things you want most, especially the pics, should be available. Also, keep a copy of the same disk at someone else home or office. You can get them quickly if needed.
3. Upload to Xdrive.com or MediaMax.com. The basic accounts are free. If you need more, buy extra storage and upload limits. If you have a Yahoo ID, you have a Yahoo briefcase -about 30 Mg of storage. Keep you more current important items there.

Keeping everything on the computers' hard drive is simply waiting for disaster to strike. And, it will. Eventually. It always does.

The more I work on computers, the more my decision to use Ubuntu Linux as my main OS is confirmed. I like Macs. I really do. I like Mac OS X. For awhile, I'd go back and forth between wanting a Mac and a System76 laptop. Unless they go belly up, System76 it is!