I’m pretty good about backing up work in progress, and doing occasional mass backups of my documents, but not as good as I should be. I have a “Sky Drive” on Windows Live where I upload material so there’s an off-site backup as well. I finally decided it was time to get an external hard drive and start doing regular incremental backups. For about $80 I got half a terabyte of storage, which should do me for a while, since the hard drive on my main computer is only about 180 GB and it’s about 60% empty.
I also bought a cheap utility to backup my iPod, too. I tried just plugging it into my USB drive on a computer that didn’t have iTunes, but the folders it showed me didn’t have any of the music files. For about $20 I got a gizmo that just dumped the whole thing to my new external drive, so now I don’t have to live in constant fear that I’ll drop it, or it’ll just crash and I’ll “lose” the over 6000 music files currently on it. Lose in the sense of having to reload them all, mostly from CD. Now I can sleep easier at night.
I also ran the Windows Live Safety Scan on all of my computers after reading about the upcoming Conficker worm deployment announced for April 1. I wasn’t all that concerned about anything virus/worm related, but the utility also did a registry scan and found/repaired errors that can bog down the system, something I’ve never bothered to do before. So my computers should all be in tidy shape at the moment. I’m going to try to keep a regular schedule of backups going.
I’m not sure that Life on Mars is going to end well. Or at least satisfactorily. There’s only one episode left, and I don’t care much for this nanobot idea that has crept into the US version. Whether it’s real or fantasy remains to be seen. The UK version ended really well, I thought. I only hope they can pull off something as good here. I liked the idea of Windy vanishing when needed, and the implications of apartment 2B somehow evaded my notice before.
We had a major rainstorm last night that brought with it 80+ mph winds in places and constant tornado alerts and warnings. CBS cut into programs completely about every 10 minutes with weather updates, whereas ABC chose to shrink the program video into a corner, like picture-in-picture while the weatherpeople gave the updates. Without audio, the picture-in-picture solution didn’t really help much. I missed the entire scene from Lost where Hurley dished about Sawyer and Juliet. I had to catch up online. The rain we received was much needed, and I didn’t hear of any reports of damage, though there was one confirmed tornado around Huntsville.
Speaking of Lost:
There has been a lot of discussion about the episode’s parting shot, so to speak, but I haven’t heard much talk about Jin. Didn’t his neck snap? Aren’t we to assume he’s a goner? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Most people don’t seem to be disturbed by that development.
I loved Sawyer’s line about the three years without any burning vans and you guys are back one day… I also liked his dilemma, finally deciding that he needed leadership advice, going to Jack’s place, but getting interrupted before he actually gets to ask for help. Also, Kate getting interrupted before she gets to give him her reason for coming back.
I thought for sure Sayid was going to snap the kid’s neck the second he was out of the cell. He had such restraint! Someone observed that the “torturer” is the same guy who played Larry on the Newhart show, the guy with two brothers named Darryl. He always cracked me up. Do we think the kid survived? Seems like he almost has to, at least according to Farraday. Remains to be seen, of course. Lost Untangled had one snippet that gives credence to the survival theory. Their production values are growing week by week, too. Dharmaville is really coming to life.
