Blessed by the Potato

Ok, I finally got the backup figured out (I hope). Next time I should be able to do it with just a few seconds of downtime, rather than the half hour or so that we just had.

Oddly enough, phpmyadmin wouldn’t let me log in as root, but if I tried to login as wordpress it worked just fine (I couldn’t back up my other DBs, but that’s not a big deal since they just have crap data thrown in there while I was learning stuff).

We all know, at least in some vague far-off academic sense, that backing up is an essential part of this whole computing thing that we’re so fond of. Saving every few minutes when working with something, backing up every few days/weeks to CD/DVD, tape, or external hard drive just to be sure that those 5-minute saves stay around, because, well… shit happens. A lot.

So what are your philosophies on backing up?

As far as media goes, my personal favourite is to just ghost the harddrive to an external one, since you get everything, and can restore the image to get up and running again in minimal time. Unfortunately, that’s really only available to me at work, so for home use I burn what I deem my “essential” files (website, school documents, email folders) and then just figure that the rest (games, their save files, mods, and whatever battlestar galatica episodes I have on my hard drive, etc.) are not a huge loss in the case of catastrophic system failure. This system worked well for me since I was pretty good about keeping all the important stuff in two directories, and since it all fit on one CD.

But now that I’m spilling over onto my second CD, I wonder if there’s anything else I should be including. And that constant nagging fear that there’s something important that I’m forgetting to backup… For instance, what about my instant messenger conversations? With ICQ I could back those up (though now that it’s sadly defunct for all intents and purposes, I suppose I’ll have to figure out how to export that so I can read it in the future in another program), but I have no idea how MSN handles that. I think it’s an XML file somewhere, but haven’t checked in detail yet… Edit: Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s pretty easy, it’s buried in “my received files” as a series of xml files.

Beyond that, what’s your backup philosophy? Do you have mirrored drives and just do spot backups? Do you not even worry about it, figuring you can always use low-level utilities to restore essential data in case your drive fails, and just focus on the program crash 5-minute saves? If you do regular backups, what’s your schedule like? I found that I planned on backing up weekly, and for a while actually attained a monthly backup status, but found that for the last 4 months or so I’ve only been backing up my thesis (to CD and uploading it to off-site storage :) and haven’t touched anything else. As I tried a backup just now, my power supply started making some godawful grinding noise, so I had to turn my computer off and hit it a few times (believe it or not, that did the trick). I’m thinking that letting my computer know that I’m doing a backup was probably a bad idea, so I’ve resolved to sneak up on it with backups on a random schedule, and to take a running leap at it, to try to catch it off-guard… savvy?

Leave me some comments, and let me know how you handle this very important issue in your own life (or a thank you note for reminding you to backup, which you haven’t done since 2003).

Can’t sleep, so I’m up early. It sucks, since I know now the day is pretty much a waste: I’m already seeing spots in my vision and thinking crazy. I’ve got something akin to a stomach ache, except it’s really high up in my chest, more of an esophageal ache. I’m not sure if it’s just one of those random things that happen but suck, or if it’s due to stress (closely related to the first thing), or if it’s because I’ve had my 3rd can of Alphaghetti in the last week. It’s good stuff, to be sure, and a great 2-minute meal every now and then, but I really don’t think it’s meant to be eaten at such a frequency (every other day!). Anyway, my point is that there’s a tightness there that’s keeping me up something fierce.

The drive home last night was really fast, there wasn’t even the usual slowdown of traffic near the 427, just smooth sailing the whole way, me and my cargo of Kleenex. The one interesting part was just past Guelph, with a particularly eerie lack of cars in either direction, when I saw a large animal dart across the highway just at the edge of my headlights’ range. It was so fast, I barely had time to get my foot to the brake pedal, let alone any to actually press it and slow down.

I think it was a werewolf.

Well, in all likelihood, it was probably a deer, but it was a really pale deer (or perhaps one that had been rolling in the snow), and it moved really fast. It’s one of those events that just flashed by so quickly you’re not sure what you saw — only that something was there — and you strain first your memory, and then your imagination to their limits in order to fill in what exactly it was.

But yeah, werewolf, totally. It wasn’t just that it looked slightly more werewolfish than deerish, though such subtle distinctions are hard to parse from a fast sampling, it was the look it shot me as it crossed. To my mind, deer look at headlights of an on-coming car and freeze up a bit from the light, like, well… like a deer caught in headlights. Now, I could totally see this only happening to deer that happened to be loitering in the road, and not ones that were already tearing at full speed from the median, but it just strikes an odd dissonance that leads me to conclude that it must have been a werewolf. That, and the soul-piercing dread I felt in that split-second look it shot me, as though it could kill me on a whim. Of course, the deer could also kill me on a whim by jumping in front of the car before I could stop, or some other dastardly deer action (don’t put anything past deer, seriously). To put it succinctly, the whole thing gave me the heeby jeebies and the creeping horrors rolled into one for the next hour or so on the road. After I got to the exit, I also experienced that brief moment of euphoria that follows avoiding death in a situation that very well could have gone in that direction (or similarly, those situations potentially leading to a pencil-sized medical instrument being inserted into an orafice that is so small it is not usually enumerated among the many other ones in which one might conceivably put something). This feeling was later replaced by brief thoughts of how cool it might be to be a werewolf, which were quickly displaced by practical considerations (chocolate kills dogs).

That wasn’t very succinct, to which I say “you get what you pay for here.” Or rather more, as the case may be.

So, being unable to sleep due to the discomfort in my chest (I’m almost positive it’s not a heart attack, despite the “esophagus in a vice” feeling. If I’m later found dead in my apartment, I hereby release the rights to this story to the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada to be used in educational/promotional videos/recreations/handouts/webpages/etc. I further encourage Inx to come up with a better way to end the movie about my life, of which I haven’t heard any progress for almost 3 years) I decided to google myself. Well, my webpage to be precise, since I know that trying to google my real name () will just produce a lot of meaningless hits. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) I’ve dropped a lot in the search rankings, and basically have to search for “Blessed by the Potato” or “holypotato” in quotes to get on the first page. Turns out some blighted potato, when cut in half, formed a vaguely cross-like pattern (of blight on healthy potato) and a crazy person tried to ebay the mouldy remains, which caused a lot of people to talk about and link to it.

On one hand, I think it’s fine that I’m not really ranked well in the search engines (even for “my” specific terms), since most people get here by word of mouth rather than searches, and that has benefits vis-a-vis keeping spammers out and bandwidth costs low. On the other hand, it limits my commitment to updating regularly, and makes it impossible to even consider getting advertising support (I don’t think I will, but it is something I consider). On the gripping hand, that might not matter since I’m getting new highs for hits every week: this weekend was 56 (some of those were me, since I was once again visiting my parents, but at least 50 were other peoples). For today, even though it’s only 10 am, I’ve already got 9.

On to other news: my dad has finished his radiation therapy, and is on the long road to feeling like a normal human being again. Sadly, tragedgy has once again struck my family as my mom fell down the stairs on saturday and badly cut her face, bruised her eye, and sprained her wrist. This harks back to the top of the post where I discussed filling in details with your imagination, particularly in times of stress. I called my mom while at Wayfare’s, looking for some advice on how to thin out some dipping chocolate for my peanut butter balls (turns out it was just a bad batch of chocolate chips), and got my sister instead, who said my mom had fallen, hurt her eye, and gone to the hospital with my dad. My sister is on the edge of 16, so she’s lost the ability to communicate like a normal human being (not that I would really know what that’s like), so she left it at that and I made her promise to get mom or dad to call me when they got back from the hospital. Given those details, I naturally inferred that she had fallen on the ice, since it was, at the time, snowing outside, and they were up North at the cottage. I relayed the story immediately to Wayfare and the company assembled there (who overheard my half of the conversation), including what turned out to be my embellishment: that it was the ice she slipped on. The next day, after getting to speak with her myself, I found out it was not ice but rather the stairs she had fallen on, and in providing this clarification, Wayfare jumped down my throat (not literally, for those of you prone to reading between the lines) and said that I was “such a liar” for “making stuff up all the time.” I thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to infer (indeed: I visualized the scene as my sister relayed the sparse details to me, and I assure you that in my mind’s eye, there was most certainly some quantity of ice — much like the stuff I had slipped on in Wayfare’s driveway not 30 minutes earlier). And when the real details came to light, I did (what I believed to be) the proper, responsible thing, and told the corrected set of events to everyone who was present for the ice version earlier.

Anyway, my mom’s in fairly rough shape, with 12 stitches above her eye, which is swollen almost completely shut. She took some sleep aids and was in bed by I think 7 pm last night; stealing my sleep, no doubt.

In other news, I’m trying to decide which section of the website to work on next (further ignoring for the time being the matter of hosting). My preference right now is to reformat some of the archived news posts short stories from the old version of the site. Some of those were gems, if I do say so myself, though many of them are long-winded, boring, pointless, and now dated as well. But it doesn’t involve much work on my part (depending on how hard it is to reformat them — if I have to run through and fix carriage returns all over the place I think I’ll go looney). I’m also thinking of creating a section to archive some of my microstories (where a short story is 1-100 pages, a microstory is generally 1-10 lines) and other pieces of writing that are scattered in the greater Ether of the interweb, things like forum posts, comments left on other people’s blogs, and the like. For example, my new year’s resolution post from the WoW guild website:

It looks like many people have resolved to lose weight. Perhaps we should start a guild weight loss challenge?

Gather round, one and all, and watch as members abandon raids & DKP to build their weight loss score! Shed a tear for the Canadians, who must work twice as hard to shed fat by the kilogram! Cheer on… everyone, as in this sort of game almost everyone wins!

Yeah… anyhow.

I have but 3 resolutions this year:

1. To lose weight & increase overall health. This is necessary not only for purely physical reasons, but also becuase after being sick for so long any time I grab a morsel of Christmas chocolate someone shrieks “Ah! Put that down! Your kidney is going to explode if you keep eating like that!” Even though I’ve come a long way in terms of self-control (in my mind, anyway), that hasn’t translated into very much weight loss. I’ve got a long way to go.

2. To finish my blasted degree, come high water, power outages, new raid content, or further descent into illness & insanity. Note that I do leave open the coming of hell: I figure that if the netherworld should spew forth deamons to swarm over the face of the Earth and bring ruin to all that we hold dear, I should set aside my formal education and focus on mastering the use of a BFG 9000.

3. To write for Kailyyn that story he so badly wants from me; or to get a short story (or, as long as we’re aiming for the sky with our resolutions, a novel) published, which should shut him up

Or just truly random things, like how a physics degree will be more useful in your quest to become a giant squid. Then there are things that other people have said, like Daywalker’s response to my new year’s resolutions above: “Dude, you do not need to master it, remember it is a BFG 9000!”

That reminds me, I always meant to play Doom3 on my xmas break, but instead ended up just watching a lot of TV until I got Civ4, at which point that was all I did for half a week. Maybe I’ll get around to it on reading week.

I’ve rambled long enough for one morning, insomnia or not. Be prepared for site outages later as I try to do a database backup.

I CC’ed my DHL letter to Disney as well, seeing as how those are the guys that I ordered the houses from in the first place, the ones who didn’t warn me about this tax issue, and the ones who at the end of the day stand to lose a customer.

I thought that there was an outside chance that they would cover these additional and unforseen charges, or perhaps at least the service charge on the tax, and that I might get a half-hearted apology. They might even consider giving customers options in shipping like many other mail/internet order businesses do. I figured it was more likely I’d get no response at all.

I did get a response today, actually, and here it is:

Dear Disney Guest,

We like to inform you that all International orders are shipped via DHL.

We apologize about any inconvience that you may have experienced.

Your local customs office will charge you for duties and/or taxes. This information is referenced on DisneyShopping.com, Guest Services, and Shipping Information under “Who pays for duties and taxes?”

Our catalog prices do not include duties or value-added taxes. If assessed, these charges are the responsibility of the package recipient, who will be billed for them by the local Customs office. Please keep this in mind when shipping a gift item to a destination outside the US.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Larry
DisneyShopping.com

So there is a half-hearted “sorry for the invonvenience” apology in there, but I’m not impressed that they tried to say that I should have known: first off, I stated clearly in my letter that I ordered using the phone system, since their website is slow as hell. Secondly, I went and checked their website before I sent it, just to make sure I hadn’t missed it, and again now after being told specifically where to look — and it’s not there. “Shipping Information” brings up a pop-up window that says “Shipping Information” “Print” and “Back to Main Menu” and nothing else. That is to say, no content. This malbehaviour is evident in both Mozilla and Internet Exploder.

I’m getting into a bit of a habit of writing complaint letters, so stay tuned for a new section of the website to appear tracking their progress!

Oh, I’m scheduled to have my cytoscope procedure < shudder > on the 23rd, which is election day, so I’m going to go to the advanced polls to cast my ballot.

Unfortunately, that means I can’t wait for the last-minute estimates to come up so I can decide which way to vote. While I don’t savor strategic voting, it is unfortunately necessary sometimes in our first-past-the-post system.

Here’s my thinking: I’m a fairly left-of-centre guy, so for me the choice is really between the NDP and the Greens. I don’t want the conservatives to get any sort of power, and I’d like the liberals to get a minority or less again. So basically, if the NDP have a decent shot at getting a seat in my riding (say 30% or more support), I’ll probably vote for them. If not, I’ll vote Green and give them the $1.75 for the next election.

The only concern for myself really is getting reasonably accurate polling numbers to determine that over a week before the election.

For others, I’m worried that fears over conservative insanity will lead to another liberal dynasty (Wayfare, for example, is considering voting for them just because she thinks they’re the only party that has a chance against the conservatives, despite thinking that they’re rotten to the core and just need to go). It’s unforunately a fallacy of perception: if many people believe they’re the only ones with a shot, then they’re the only ones who’ll get enough votes. Any party can keep the nutjo–conservatives out of power, as long as enough people believe they can and actually vote for them.

Sadly, I can’t reach quite enough people through my webpage to really get that message out, but I encourage you all to vote your conscience (even if it is for the liberals or conservatives). At the very least, the wide vote-split might encourge the parties to actually go through with some form of election reform so that we’re not faced with this again next year.