Israel Hyman’s Personal Blog

Fire!

Originally uploaded by wili_hybrid

It’s hard to sleep when I know that all of my video, from all my different shows, could forever disappear with just a small fire. I have 4 hard drives in my Mac Pro, and they’re nearly full of data, most of it video. Three terabytes of data. I also have external hard drives which I’ve been using to backup, but I’ve now arrived at that point where I no longer have room on my external drives, or on my internal hard drives.

I am almost out of space. I clearly need to go bigger. But that’s just part of my problem.

At the same time, I want to back up the data off site as well.

For the local backup solution, I’ve been looking at the Drobo with four individual terabyte drives in it. It’s an expensive solution though. All together, the package would run around $1,500 with all the drives in it. Still, most of the reviews rave about what a great backup tool the Drobo is. I can’t help salivate over the thought of the Drobo and Time Machine working in combination.

But what about the off site solution? At first I tried Mozy, an online service that would upload my data onto the internet, to store it “in the cloud” as it were. I started the backup, and after 3 days of uploading, I hadn’t even completed 1% of the data uploaded. At this rate, it would take more than a year to backup my one computer. That wasn’t feasible, so I canceled the service. Then I registered for JungleDisk which uses Amazon’s S3 service. At 15 cents per gigabyte, how could I go wrong? I started uploading, and at my upload rate, it was much faster than Mozy, but it was still going to take about 5 months. And, once you add up all the gigabytes, it was going to be an expensive solution as well. And that leaves me…

Well, I don’t know. I’m thinking that at this point, I’m better off simply copying my backups onto hard drives and storying them at a friend’s house. Maybe once per month we could swap. I’ll store their data, and they can store mine. I guess that means I’ll also have to secure my data with some sort of encryption.

What do you do for backup? Do you have any recommendations for me?

I was already short on spare time before I took on this project. Now it appears that I’m in way over my head.

My son, Blake, who is ten years old, told me that he wants to learn how to program computers. I thought I could probably help him because when I was his age, I did a little programming with Basic. In fact in elementary school, I was part of the Computer Club. I was a wiz with computers back then. I figured once a wiz, always a wiz. I was wrong.

It turns out that programming (anything useful anyway) takes a much higher level of programming language than Basic, and since we’re on Macs, we need to learn how to Program in Objective-C using a Cocoa framework, Xcode, and Interface Builder.

What does that last part mean? I don’t really know. It’s very, very confusing.

Rising to the challenge, I thought I could learn just enough to turn around and teach it to my son, so I bought a book called “Beginning Mac OS X Programming” and started studying it one chapter at a time. It seemed ideal. Both of us would end up learning it together. As the teacher, I would really learn it, because the best way to learn something is to teach it, right?

Now 150 pages into the book, I’m completely confused.

We covered variables and some basic conditional statements. And now we’re stumped. Rather, I’m stumped — which means he’s not getting much further. I feel bad for him because he wants to learn to program right now, and I can’t help him. I realize that there are probably classes out there, private tutors, maybe even audio/visual resources available for check out, which would cover the material in a way he would understand. I suppose we’ll start looking for those types of resources.

Lesson to be learned here? It’s difficult to teach something I’m clueless about.

Additional lesson? Research, then commit. :-)

Because of my relationships with other folks on the web, I’ve been discovering several new social networks lately. Although I’ve been signing up for all kinds of sites, some of them have stood out above the others. And they all are far superior to MySpace.

My favorite right now is Facebook. This is a social site that is all about relationships. It’s difficult to describe the benefits of using a site like this, without simply experiencing it. My favorite benefit is that I get to see what my friends are doing all the time. I love finding out what groups they’re joining, what new friends they’re approving, and my favorite updates are the status changes. Facebook has brilliant execution. Check out my profile and invite me to be friends, if you’re also on Facebook.

I’ve also enjoyed Virb. It’s another social network, probably the best looking one. It lets you customize the look of your profile page, and there are many attractive profiles. My profile is currently very basic, but you can still invite me to be friends if you want.

One website I think is very smart, but I haven’t spent a lot of time inside is Maya’s Mom. It’s a great site, with brilliant execution, but because I’m not very motherly (I wouldn’t even say I’m all that fatherly), I haven’t invested much time into getting to know the folks in there, which would explain my nearly blank profile.

This last one isn’t a social network. It’s a new kind of blog which is gaining in popularity called a tumblelog, and this one is hosted by Tumblr. I’ve assigned my own domain name to mine called Little Phenom. If you visit Little Phenom, you’ll see what a tumblelog is. The concept is that you quickly post photos, videos, quotes, links, and text items, without having to do a long elaborate post. I use it as a bookmarking tool. When I visit a site I like, I click on a bookmarklet in my browser called “Share on Tumblr” and the site is posted automatically on Little Phenom. Very cool, very fast, very well executed.

A normal person wouldn’t explore all these sites, I know, but keep in mind that these are just a portion of the ones I’ve joined. These are just the good ones.

Geocaching is such clever idea. If you don’t know what it is, follow the link, and you can read a thorough explanation. It’s perfect for my family because it gets everyone focused on one combined objective. It’s safe to say that usually doesn’t happen during the course of a normal day.

One thing that concerns me, though: geocaching has been out there a while, and I just recently learned about it. What other things like geocaching am I missing?

I recommend strongly that you stop what you’re doing, and follow this link. You’ll end up smiling, and you’ll be glad you took my advice!