Category Archives: Uncategorized

I don’t blog much about technology anymore, but here is a good tip for people who are concerned about their data. Since USB drives are very inexpensive now, and all newer computers can boot from a USB drive, why not combine your backup data with an operating system?

What I do is have a 1G USB key plugged into my computer. I back up all of my personal files and bookmarks (less than 50mb, scarily enough, I use IMAP for my e-mail) to a USB drive with Mandriva Linux USB edition installed. There are many USB Linux distributions out there, DSL and Knoppix are others. Google it. This way, if a hard drive fails, just change my boot order, and I have a working machine with my data until I can purchase a new hard drive. The performance under USB is excellent, equal to or better than my hard drives. You won’t have your 25,000 song music collection, but you will have a working computer that can do 99% of what you need to do right now. I think you can do this with Windows XP as well, but it is of little interest to me. I think this is also a good tip for business travelers. Why worry about a delicate laptop or if a client’s computer has all the software you need installed? Load it all on a USB key and keep it on your key chain. Enough geekdom for now. Back to collecting watches.

Had Glenn’s second birthday party today. Everything went very well, the food was not seriously burned and all the gifts were great. He has tons of cars, trains, fake food, art, and other stuff to play with (at least until Christmas). He is at an odd age, when 2 year old toys are boring to him, and big boy toys are not really tested with 2 year olds in mind. He is pretty good about putting stuff in his mouth, I think he is past the oral stage. All in all a good day. Lots of work, but it was worth it for our little boy.

Taking a week of vacation this week. I like taking off the first week in July. My last job was closed the first week of July, and I just got used to it. More importantly, it is the week Glenn was born, so it is nice to be off on his birthday. The weather is perfect this week as well. Went out shopping today, bought a few things to see if it helps my morning sneezing fits. Sometimes when I wake up, I will sneeze 20 to 30 times, until all of my sinuses are empty. Gross thought, but it is really annoying and wakes everyone up. I hope tomorrow brings new hope.

In other news, Glenn is learning more words than I can remember. One of the latest is Cho Choo for trains. When he is older, we will have to take him to at least the Heston steam museum.

Finally finished the bathroom. Really makes you appreciate not doing home repairs. I am sure Tiff will post photos soon. What a pain, but it looks so good now. It was the last major thing to do in the house, thank goodness.

I was one of the millions who downloaded Firefox 3 today. They FINALLY fixed the memory hole(s) (at least under Linux). Firefox 2, if left running overnight, would consume something like 2 to 4 GIGS of swap space. 3 has not exhibited this behavior yet. I’ll let you know in the morning. One thing is for sure, it is really fast, almost Opera fast. A little ugly though. It has an “integrated’ to the OS look, which is actually kinda ugly and Gnome looking, so I changed to my normal theme, Qute, which looks more like KDE.