Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2007-01-28
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2007-01-27
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2007-01-24
What a very cool thing to do:
bq. Last weekend, Darren Barefoot posted “Get a First Life,”:http://www.getafirstlife.com/ a hysterical parody of virtual world Second Life’s website. The creators of Second Life responded with a letter that is so right-thinking and clever that it would horrify the over-reaching copyright and trademark holders whose missives litter the archives of ChillingEffects.org
bq. Instead of a cease-and-desist letter, “Linden Labs sent a proceed-and-permit letter.”:http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2007/01/my-project-du-jour-getafirstlifecom.html#comment-75509
Major, major kudos to some attorneys that get it…
Via “EFF Deep Links”:http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005085.php
I’ve joined “Twitter,”:http://twitter.com an interesting new RSS-based service for keeping track of friends online. If you join or already belong to Twitter, search for me by name or my most commonly used email these days if you want to add me to your list of friends.
“This guy”:http://applelostmydata.blogspot.com/ screwed up, and doesn’t even realize why or how. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have a backup before he went into the Apple Store for a repair, it wasn’t just that he doesn’t understand how repairs to HDD’s work - it’s that he didn’t check his own, older backups at some point to determine that they could be restored. Had he done that, and had his older backups been reliable, he would have had a) a leg to stand on with Apple, and b) most of his data in a form he could recover. The fact that his primary backup device went south _months_ before this and he took no steps to replace it guaranteed that he was going to experience some amount of data loss in the near future. He managed to hit the jackpot and lose it all.
Everyone has a job to do. If you use a personal computer and the data on that system isn’t subject to routine, verifiable backup by some third-party that you absolutely trust, it’s _part of your job_ to make sure you can recover your data in case of disaster. What if this guy’s Powerbook had been lost or stolen? What if it had been accidently destroyed in a fire or flood? He’d be in exactly the same circumstances he is now, but he would have anyone to try and shift the blame to. What he doesn’t get is that his data was already essentially lost, because he hadn’t verified that it even _could_ be backed up and restored before he got himself into a desperate situation.
“But wait,” you say “he paid Apple a whole _$50_ to perform a backup! They should have checked!” So, what this guy is saying is that the value of handing his data integrity over to someone else, the value of him not having to be concerned with reading warranty contracts and understanding them, the value of him being able to ignore all sensible data retention precautions and then just turn over his data to someone else for safekeeping is…$50. The data on that drive that he is so terrible concerned about losing was worth $50 to him.
Frankly, I’m not sure it was even worth the $50. He clearly wasn’t willing to invest one cent or one minute to fix a problem even he admits he should have fixed and was aware of.
Sometimes Apple does evil things, and sometimes customers have a legitimate gripe. This guy doesn’t. He was irresponsible and got burned. Don’t be like him: do regular, verifiable, and if possible automatic backups — and before you take a system in for repair _anywhere_, be sure you have a tested, recent backup available in case the worst happens.
Enjoying the Tour!!
Originally uploaded by Nancy Miller.
A family picture taken by my mother this summer when we visited Frank lloyd Wright’s Wescott House.
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2007-01-13
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2007-01-10
Upgraded to “WordPress 2.0.6″:http://wordpress.org/development/2007/01/wordpress-206/ this morning. It seems that there is a 2.1 release coming from the WordPress folks real soon now, but I’m not sure I’m going to continue down the WordPress road. Since I’m doing so much “Ruby on Rails”:http://www.rubyonrails.org work these days I’m thinking seriously about exploring Rails-based blogging engines. If I can find one that supports one of the standard blogging APIs and Textile/Markdown, so I can continue blogging in “Textmate”:http://www.macromates.com and has a relatively easy database migration from WordPress I may very well make the move.
If you’re upgrading your installation of WordPress, don’t forget to backup _both_ your files _and_ the database itself. While you’re at it, get your weekly system backup too, okay?
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