This post is authored by Live Writer, instead of the Word Press back end.
Squee! I’m becoming a MS fanboy. Can it do picture easily?
What is I modify it and save again?
Flickr plugin for Live Writer. sahweet.
Technorati Tags: Live Writer, Microsoft
That is the old adage from the times of text based Adventure gaming, yet something that you always ignore until your hard drive craps out. Or in our case, a laptop gets yanked to the ground embedding the read heads into the platter of the spinning hard drive and in 10 seconds the whole she-bang goes up in smoke. Getting and new HD and reinstalling the OS, no problem. Salvaging years of data and photos. Not so much.
So after that I started thinking about how to keep our tenuous laptops backed up in an easy manner.
For about two years I’ve been using a Linksys NSLU2 as a mini home server. I had a 200GB USB drive hooked up to it, and had installed an alternate firmware that enabled it to run as a mini Debian based Linux server, hosting shares for the home network. It worked, but I never really fully integrated the sharing or backups on Angie’s computer, because, okay well I was lazy. But it was also a complicated multi-step process, and sometimes
trying to yank the computer out of SweetBippy’s hand is like pulling a porter house steak out of a rottweiller’s mouth. So I never fully implemented it. I had copied over her pictures here and there, and so I was able to restore some data to her new machine, but it wasn’t everything, and it certainly wasn’t current.
Post crash, I taught her a bit more how to back things up to the network shares on the SLUG, but again, not something even I do automatically. Backing things up is a chore, and a hassle. Setting up automated backups is something that everyone should do. It is sorta like going to the Dentist.
Then I read a few posts and articles about Microsoft’s new Windows Home Server (WHS), supposed to automate backs up, yadda yadda. All well and good, but c’mon this is Microsoft… easy? fast? Certainly its just another money grab from Uncle Bill. But then I read that they’d opened the Release Candidate to anyone that signed up. Well… my geek creds needed some polishing, and the kids computer needed to be upgraded, hard drives redone, etc… So why not.
I backed up their stuff to DVDs, including another old copy of Angie’s pictures (ugh, there’s gotta be like a frillion of these attempts scattered to the winds in my dusty network!) Then plopped in the Home Server RC1 DVD that I had burned from my laptop. It didn’t want to install. Oh yeah, I have the hard drives attached to some funky sooper speedy blah blah card, that really wasn’t faster than the motherboard’s IDE slots. Open the case to change the hard drive cables. Two hours of dusting later, I uncovered the cables and moved them (o.m.g. more dust!) to the other slots, and re-try. huzzah! success! (beware, this install will want to totally wipe any attached hard drives, so use caution when installing, hard drives with stuff you want can’t be added back in post install to more quickly copy stuff… more later)
Booting.
Hmm… Windows Server 2003 based, coolness, since I’ve spent the last two months muddling with SBS Server at church, maybe this is a solid platform. Booted. Login screen. Windows Home Server Console. Okay, lets install this connector disk thingy to my laptop and see what that does.
Plop in another burned disk (another fyi, the connector software is also present on a network share on the server, if you ever lose the CD…) and the lappy finds the server and I have a neat little icon in my toolbar, that when I click I can log into the Home Server Console. I set up the backup parameters, have it skip my 20GB of movies and music, and let run. The first backup failed (chkdsk on the lappy fixerated it) then a manual backup took.
Also the Server has a set of Shares (Music, Video, Pictures) that it installed automatically to the lappy. Cool.
Install the connector thingy on Angie’s laptop, and same thing. handy. Do the automatic backups really work? Yes. Wonderfully. The WHS is an intelligent backup, and smart for home use (well any use really) and saves a ton of space from a file-based backup or even an image based backup. For all the computers in the house it stores a file only once. So if you have a house full of Windows XP computers, the OS and applications will reside in one backup, saving a TON of space. Also for things stored on the network shares, if you have more than one hard disk installed, WHS will balance that and make sure that each file will be stored completely on separate hard drives.
For the non-techies, this is uberneat. For techies, it isn’t a RAID array, or as complicated to set-up as a RAID array. If you want to add another disk, connect it via USB, or internally, and then add it to the pool via the console, and that space gets added to the store of disks.
Simply for just the back up qualities WHS fits the bill. There are some other things that it can do as well, but those are for other posts. Seriously, this install change my perspective. I’ll be pushing this to anyone with more than one PC, especially laptops.
Since I’ve installed it, I’ve copied my NSLU shares to the WHS (over a wireless connection, it took a while) then moved that hard drive to the new WHS.  So the NSLU is looking at me like a puppy that lost its bone. But I’ve still got a job for it to do, just won’t be with big hard drives.
More on WHS coming, there is just too many goodies to fit into one post.
Not a bad week last week. I took Tuesday – Friday off, to spend with the Fam, and to help with the timing of going to VBS each night at our church. I taught the 4th grade class, using LifeWay’s Game Day Central curriculum. I had three awesome helpers, and a class of 8-10 each night. Pretty good week of getting to know some new kids, and enjoying time spent with the rest of the PCBC VBS team. The whole week was well planned, and also a lot of work.
Also got to do some vacationy things, Tuesday we went in the morning to a splash park in north Dallas. Then later swam at the pool. Then swam a couple more times during the week. Caught up on a lot of sleep, and then stayed up late to make net sleep deficit practically nil, but at least I’m caught up.
Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I got cool cards and drawings from my girls, and hugs from my boys. Then in the afternoon Dan and I went golfing with Bobby2, and the younger Bobby passed onto Danny his old clubs. So we got to play 9 holes (and it was free thanks to the rumbling stumbling rainstorms that deluged us the past few days … soggy course … free golf… bout evens out) of carefree golf with no one rushing us. If only I could hit a golf ball close to where I want it to land. I guess I need to practice more.
On the geek front, I’m evaluating the Microsoft Windows Home Server (RC1) on my old home built machine (800MHz PIII, 512 RAM, a few hundred gigs of hard disk space). For an RC this is fairly well polished. The jist of Home Server is to automate backups and provide a place to share files within a home network. The guts are Windows Server 2003, and it is designed to run headless (no attached monitor and keyboard). Cool concept, and the implementation is actually pretty good. After installing it Saturday, both of our laptops have been backed up twice, and I’m moving over files from the drive attached to my NSLU2 onto the server. The kids have given up their WinXP machine, but I’ve figured out how to give them console access to give them computer time (fyi, this isn’t what this is designed for, and really not a ‘best practice’ but until a new PC falls on my doorstep, I gotta do what I gotta do). Another post with a review is most likely forth coming.
The Lostians walk away from their beach… (click to embeggin)
Walking away, backs to the audience water on our right, and since their backs are to us, it is on their right as well.
cue Lost swoosh, cut to commercial, return from commercial we get.
Now they are facing us, water is still on our right, but has switch to their left. Impossible to do on an island without a switchback change in elevation, which given the wave, they are still at sea level, and thus is a production error.
first a nitpick. If your on an island and you walk along the shore with the ocean on your right, the only way the ocean ends up on your left is if you turn around. Yeah, I’m looking at you Damon.
Thoughts on the bigger picture. Lost, in my opinion has largely been about the dilemma of faith and reason. Much like the first season finale’s name ‘Man of Science Man of Faith’, Jack Shepherd and John Locke personify those two supposedly separate people. Lost’s hangup of name dropping a virtual who’s who of philosophers and the panorama of literary references often explore the dichotomy of faith/reason, free-will/fate, etc…
The first three season of Lost have focused on getting to the point of rescue, and the exploration of ‘fate’ in describing and detailing our favorite castaways lives. Some accept their fate and enjoy their new digs, Locke & Rose for example. Others desperately try anything to escape the island Jack, Sayid. The rest fall somewhere in the middle neither thrilled with being lost, nor rejecting the idea of rescue. Locke’s journey has been an exploration of faith, or accepting his situation and finding the best way to realize it. This season he’s been somewhat militant in trying to force his view that the island is the best place for them by systematically destroying everything that can aid in a rescue. Jack journey this year has been trying to find someway off the island that he sees as being counter to his whole life. He rebels and forces Ben to provide him a way home, though foiled by Locke’s interference, then left behind when Locke went with the Others, Jack has wanted desperately to escape, never happy with accepting his fate, or having faith that crashing and surviving on the island had ‘meaning’. Through the lens of Locke’s actions this year, I think Ben’s deceptions begin to make sense. He is also on the side of accepting fate, and living on the island where faith in its powers is somehow rewarding.
The game changing rattlesnake in the mailbox flash-forward of last episode, closely mirrors last seasons’ finale when Locke faced his dilemma of faith in the button pressing, and realizing that he wasn’t entirely wrong to blindly press the button. Jack is shown to struggle in the present day, because of his decision to force the rescue of the survivors against the better (arguably) judgement of both Ben and Locke. Things didn’t turn out as rosy as he had reasoned, and now he wants to go back to the glory days of the island, having power and leading (often rashly) other people.
I expect in the last three seasons this thread between ultimate faith, and extreme reason will continue with a happy middle being where both Jack and Locke end up. Maybe opening a bar up in Cabo or Key West.
Well I didn’t call that our next American Idol would be Jordin Sparks, but DialIdol certainly alluded to that despite our desparate dialing for Blake that upped his votes by something around 500, yer welcome B-man.
I’m talking about LOST. Totally called that the finale would be all on-island flashbacks. I won’t go further in case you haven’t watched, and don’t want to be spoiled. But for me, it was worth staying up until 2am.
What am I in college? Totally Feeling IT too.
mea culpa, &tc. Last week was a bit hectic, so let me kinda give a summary for my 2 1/2 readers, so you don’t think I fell off the end of the world.
work: last week was our staff meeting, which srsly cuts down on my ability to think outside of work. It is fun in an exhausting sort of way. That couple with
church networking: which I’ve spent too many hours working on getting a windows small business server up and running, sorta, kinda, *sigh*. the hours spent on this has meant less time spent
watching tv: which I haven’t been doing. I’ve caught up a bit with the reality mix (survivor and the amazin race) and the entertainment mix (idol and dwts), and I did catch LOST (expose) which I thought was wonderfully done, and left some interesting questions and plot devices just lying around the island (spiders, walkie-talkie, diamonds). But I’m behind on everything else. Trying to watch The Riches which is good stuff, FX does a good job with the darker dramas, but I’m at least two episodes down, good thing for DVRS.
FPU and Family: We’ve done some work around the casa, last week we (the kids and I) did some yard work, which helped beat back the jungle a bit. FPU budgeting is in the house, which means we are controlling our spending, and using a plan. Good discussions at church during the FPU sessions, have realized that we are in the same bag as many others. Discussions at home on the budgeting planning mix have been mixed, but at least we’re having them, instead of just ignoring the elephant in the room. It will get better, and our debt snowball has us debt free in 30-36 months. We can do it faster if we allot some bonus money, or extra employment income. So it’s all good.
What going on in your neck of the woods?
I’ll have my LOST recap up later, busy with real life work work work.
But last night’s Jericho wasn’t half bad, at least had a twist in it… But I’m losing interest in the show.
America kicked Brandon off Idol, so we have at least one more week of Sanjizzle to snark about. VFTW is crowing and denying that Sanjizzle was in the bottom two. Dial Idol had Brandon in the bottom three, so they can crow that they were right as well.Â
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