Why not Time Machine?
A couple of commenters asked why I use the ChronoSync + SuperDuper! combination instead of just Time Machine. The main reason? Time Machine uses too many resources. It's also slow. For awhile I avoided it because I wasn't sure how to make a bootable backup, but Mac OS X hints has instructions.
I don't always have my external hard drives plugged in since I'm rocking a laptop and am pretty mobile. Time Machine complained every hour, on the hour, that it couldn't find the drive it wanted for long enough to annoy me. Eventually it stops complaining about not being able to find the drive it wants.
Even if you leave the drive plugged in while working at your base location, for me it's my home office, Time Machine sucks up resources to do those intermittent backups. Even when I'm working on my dissertation, my data is not so mission-critical that it needs to be backed up every hour. Mac OS X Hints has a solution for changing the backup interval too.
ChronoSync can do in 39 minutes what it takes Time Machine over an hour to do. SuperDuper! beats the initial setup by about 20 minutes. So, the ChronoSync + SuperDuper! setup saves me resources, time, and headache.
One more thing - I have an Airport Extreme router, and I hang a hard drive off it via USB also. That drive is open to anyone on our home network. Apple's not kidding when they say Time Machine does not support network backups except to Time Capsule. When I tried using Time Machine to backup to that USB drive off the Airport Extreme, it would run my CPU up to about 80% and break many of my network connections. You may have better luck there. I didn't troubleshoot or try to fix it; I just gave up.
I ordered a rocstor ROCRAID from mwave last week, and that should be here on Tuesday. I'll try out RAID storage for my stuff and see how that goes. It has FireWire connections too, and I'm interested to see how much faster that can really be. I really don't want to have to give my laptop to Apple for a week. They won't let me keep the hard drive and send it in with a different one, and they won't give me a loaner. So I paid $2500 to have a laptop 98% of the time. Would I get it 100% of the time if I'd spent $3000? Sorry for the minirant, but having to get my MacBook Pro's fan fixed is what prompted this latest round of backup chatter.
Blogging on the bus
It occurs to me, while riding the Microsoft Connector bus (MSFT's private, wireless-enabled buses that shuttle us through a reverse commute between Seattle and Redmond) back to my sublet, that I have changed. When you read what I have to say, you may think that only what I think has changed and that I remain the same. I assure you that’s not the case, but that rather, I have changed, my very being is different now than it was. First, I’ll tell you how I know this is true. I prefer Ann Arbor to Seattle.
That’s right, I admit that I prefer Ann Arbor to a bustling city more than twice its size and complete with public transit, professional sports, excellent restaurants, and a slew of other things I’ve been missing for years. The trouble is, working a “real” job with real hours means I don’t have the time or energy to enjoy these Seattle offerings. At the end of a day like today, what I most want to do is to sit in my yard or one of my friends’ yards, drink a beer, grill some meat, and talk about nothing and everything. If I were really lucky, it would be a grilling night at Bill and Jolie’s or I'd be sitting outside at Zingerman’s.
Ann Arbor and Seattle are the sum of their parts, and right now, I miss Ann Arbor’s parts. I miss my roommates, my yard, my friends, my cats, my home office, my 10 minute commute, my kitchen, my chef’s knife, my fellow social scientists. Sure, Seattle has fresh food, hiking, Microsoft, old friends I haven’t seen in a year or longer, poker rooms, a new and interesting research project, and many other things to recommend it. The trouble is, I made a home in Ann Arbor. I thought I’d made some friends and rented a house, but I made a home. And I miss it.
Oysters!
I had oysters for lunch today; woot! I visited Emmet Watson's Oyster Bar in Pike Place and had Hunter, Penn Cove, and Fanny Bay oysters. Oysters are salty and slippery and yummy and wonderful, and I'm very glad to have so many reasonably priced raw bar options here in Seattle. Emmet's was a nice place to start, and half a dozen little buggers set me back only $9.50. Hear that, Zingerman's Roadhouse? ($9.50 might get you three at my oyster spot in Ann Arbor.) Here's a peak at my tasty lunch:
Dessert came across the street at a fruit stand in Pike Place Market. White peaches are ripe and ridiculously juicy. I got peach juice all over my arm, but man, that was a fine fruit.
More poker, please
I arrived safely in Seattle yesterday and am settling in to my summer city. I tend to be a bit restless right after moves like this one, so I took myself to a very calming place last night - a poker room. Washington State has relatively liberal gaming laws that allow small (~10 table games, no slots) casinos, and some of those casinos have added poker rooms now that Texas Hold 'Em is booming. I checked online before I got here, and was led astray. Don't bother relying on the information you get by searching Yahoo! or Google for "seattle poker rooms." There is no poker room at the Riverside Casino in Tukwila. There is across the street at the Golden Nugget though. (Don't bother searching for Washington's gambling laws either; they don't make much sense. Bottom line, gambling's around.)
The Golden Nugget had two games running - $3/6 limit and $4/8 limit. I play both games in the Detroit casinos every once in awhile, but I generally start low until I know more about the place and its players. This place was nice enough - it's a poker room, afterall. It's players, however, not so much. I was playing from seat 2, not a bad spot to see the cards and everyone playing. The woman in seat 3 was completely uninterested in talking to anyone she didn't know (she knew one of the dealers and her husband across the table). She spent most of her time playing crazy tight poker and slurping barbecued pork chow mein. No, I've never been to a casino that brings Chinese food to you at the table. None of the players were chatty, which is odd for a poker table. Of course, we were playing almost 40 hands a hour, so maybe we just didn't have time to chat.
Near the end of the night, the guy who always folds a hand that would have one (if you ever play poker, you know this guy), sat down next to me. I'd rather not talk at all than listen to "What? jack, deuce? I had jack, three. That woulda been my pot," when two pair - jacks and twos - win, and "Man, if I hadn't folded my 3-6" when the flop comes 3-King-6. If he were ever telling the truth, I'd care what he had to say because then I'd know more about how to play him. But, since he announces every single hand that he had a better one and folded it, no information is gained, but I get annoyed.
You know what's a good cure for annoying, though? $1.25 ice cold drafts of Miller Genuine Draft. I kid you not. $1.25. That was a nice glass to end a very long day.
On the move again (or Internship, woot!)
I'll be in the Seattle area this summer working for Microsoft Research. I'm excited about my internship with Andy Begel in the Human Interactions in Programming group. I'll get to study newly hired developers and hopefully help make their lives a little easier. I won't be building anything, which is a relief. I mentioned in an SI venue yesterday, again, that I think we need to do some more work advancing social science lest we become theory-anemic tinkerers.
Snow tires
This morning, I ventured out into the five inches of fresh snow Ann Arbor received overnight. I love snow, and I was happy to go out. My roommate needed to go to work; I "needed" to justify my ownership of a 4x4. For the most part, Ann Arborites do a good job driving on the unplowed streets. Why they (including the main thoroughfare) remain unplowed at 10:15am, I do not understand. Anyway, the drivers were cautious and gave one another enough room to maneuver. The same cannot be said for the cyclists.
Ann Arborites like to ride their bicycles. I'm not into biking, so this doesn't make much sense to me. The seat hurts, the sweat comes fast, locks are expensive, you know, whatever. So Ann Arborites ride bikes. Apparently even in five inches of fresh snow. Trouble is, bikes don't work so well in that much snow. I wish I had video clips to show you of the man on a road bike, without a helmet, heading downhill into a busy intersection where pickup trucks were sliding about 45 degrees off straight. He's a smart one. The other helmet-less biker on Tappan was less likely to get mushed between cars, but he also couldn't stay upright for more than a couple feet. If your bike can't handle snow, and you have no helmet, you should walk. Riding your bike in the snow (more like hopping on and off your bike while you push it forward) doesn't make you look tough; it doesn't make you any more earth-friendly than the people walking by in their snowboots; and it certainly doesn't get you anywhere faster than walking.
So, lessons for today: If Ann Arbor gets five inches of snow, you have no car, and they don't plow the streets, walk or get a ride from your Jeep-driving roommate. Everyone will be safer that way.
From DTW with like
I wonder if I'm the only person at DTW blogging right now? I bet not. Given how many bloggers are on the move this week, and how prone we all are to complaining about travel (especially holiday travel), I'm sure someone else in the McNamara Terminal is venting his/her frustrations while I type.
You, dear reader, are lucky. I'm not writing to complain! Instead, I'm writing to catch up. I've experienced some personal and professional turmoil in the last few weeks, and my little blogging adventure had to get pushed down the priority stack. But here I am, on vacation, and I thought a little blogging might cheer me up.
You'll be interested to know that it takes a mere 46 minutes to get from the front door of the Sheraton Four Points in Ann Arbor to the down escalator just past security at Detroit's McNamara Terminal. I know you just shouted, "Liar!" or something even less nice, but it's true. I timed it. I took the 3:00pm Michigan Flyer shuttle from the Sheraton, sat in the very last row of the bus, and still made it through security by 3:46pm. Whatever security does (or does not do) at Detroit should be repeated in as many U.S. airports as possible. (Are you listening, Denver?!)
I hopped on the tram and landed here, near the Taco Bell, by the high number gates. I ran into some of the flight attendants who will be manning (or womanning as the case may be) Northwest flight 757 to Minneapolis. They're chatty and smiley and like their tacos crunchy. Why would I tell you this? Because I'm sure some horrible passenger is going to try to ruin one of their days by being a jerk, and I just wanted you to know that these flight attendants are just like the rest of us.
Oh, that reminds me of my favorite good sportsmanship commercial of the football season. I think it's by the Big 12. It has people yelling at some guy gardening and some other people doing other jobs, and the narrator says something like, "You don't do it anywhere else." That's right. Referees and flight attendants deserve respect too.
I'm off to compile a "what I learned in the last 2 weeks" post. I'll send it over from Iowa sometime this week. May your holiday travel be safe and enjoyable whether you're going across the living room or across the country.
Creative Commons and Flickr hit paydirt again
This time, someone wanted to accompany a news story with a picture I took. Have you heard of this NowPublic thing? Apparently it's citizen-written news. My picture is of 3 very tasty desserts from an apparently sketchy restaurant. Read all about it.
This reminds me of that time in high school that my whole German trip flew on an airline that was closed about 2 days after we got home for violating several FAA safety regulations. I'm pretty sure that airline never flew again, but I'd have to check with Bess.
Creative Commons licensing gets me on the short list
I got an email today from Schmap!! letting me know one of my pictures on Flickr had been short-listed for inclusion in the next Schmap guide to Philadelphia. All my pictures on Flickr are licensed under a Creative Commons license - specifically Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.
What I find most exciting about this particular picture-event is that the picture they may use is one I snapped with my Blackberry while Jude and I were leaving the Mutter Museum to go get our first cheesesteaks of the trip. I find it fitting that I was in Philadelphia for an iSchool doctoral student conference, toured a collection we study briefly in SI's required curriculum, was using a mobile device, had chosen a copyleft license, and now may have contributed to a city guide (resources I love).