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.

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.

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.

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.