Data, backups, and CrashPlan

Posted on by

Wow, we almost got through October without making a post. I’m not ready to let this journal die (or be updated less than once a month) yet, so I guess it’s time for a general update.

Theme of the past couple weeks have been hard drive deaths. It started a couple weeks ago with Greg’s work, where they had a RAID drive fail (apparently resulting in data loss because the RAID controller hadn’t previously reported that the other disk was dead… so both disks dead == unhappy data).

Not to be outdone, last Wednesday, my external hard drive decided to start issuing checksum errors everywhere, and slow reads and writes down to unusable speeds. This prompted a panic and a rush to get new drives and restore my backups. (At least I’m super anal about backups, so I didn’t lose any data.)
(This is actually my first hard drive failure ever, which is kind of interesting. It’s not my first data disaster, as I previously had rogue virus scanning software wipe the hard drive while trying to clean a virus, but it’s the first time a drive has actually become unusable.)

Now today, Greg’s laptop seems to be having problems and freezing shortly after boot. Hopefully it doesn’t indicate another hard drive failure. But regardless, it seems this is not the month for technology.

Ben has previously written about cloud backups. I’d previously written them off (after all, I do local backups and off-site backups at my parents’ every time I visit them), but after the recent not-really-a-problem-at-all-but-still-scary “disaster” that was my hard drive failing, I took another look at them. After all, my data is priceless to me (especially my photos), and all of my careful backing up would be worthless in the event of theft or fire.

The service of choice for a lot of people seems to be CrashPlan. We use them at work, and I have 4 friends who use it (including Ben), so it seemed worth a look. The main benefit there (in addition to their great pricing and support for external drives) is their $125 seeding service, where they’ll send you a hard drive in the mail for you to do your initial backup on instead of having to upload everything over the internet. For me, with over 1TB of data to back up, this was a no brainer, and combined with their extremely reasonable prices, I decided to take the leap.

It took less than 24 hours from my order for the drive to ship, and less than 24 hours after that for me to actually receive it. This was last Friday (before my backup had even finished restoring onto my new drive!), so I kicked off the seed backup and it ran through the weekend. After it completed Monday morning, I realized I’d forgotten to exclude a couple directories, so I excluded them and ran an archive maintenance on the backup to permanently remove the files. Little did I know this process would take days to complete… it’s now Tuesday night, and it’s on the third step (of who knows how many) of maintenance.

So, as far as CrashPlan goes, a few first (and second) impressions:
1) Their customer service is amazing. Their reps are polite, knowledgeable, and responsive. It’s everything you want in customer service. So bonus points for that.
2) Their client is written in Java and therefore hogs memory like nobody’s business. My backup actually crashed on Saturday because the client had exceeded the default 512MB RAM limit, and I had to increase it to 2GB. Woke up some mornings to it using over 1.5GB, and had to reboot to get it back down to reasonable levels.* Negative points for that (although the Java aspect means they do support Linux, which I suppose is a plus).
3) Don’t do archive maintenance on your archives. :P It takes literally days to run (at least when you have 1TB of data like me), and there isn’t any warning beforehand about how long it could take. (And, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to cancel or delay the operation once it’s started.) Negative points for that.
4) Seeding service (assuming it works, of course, since I still haven’t sent back the drive) is awesome and totally worth the money if you have a lot of data to back up. It would have taken me months (like… almost a year) to send my 1TB of data over the internet. Seeding gets it done in a matter of days. So bonus points for offering that service.

*This is actually concerning to me, as my laptop only has 4GB of physical RAM, so CrashPlan regularly consuming half of that would be a serious problem. Fortunately, memory usage seems to only spike while a backup is actively occurring, and it otherwise uses a reasonable 150MB of RAM to run in the background and monitor files.

Anyway, this post has gotten a bit longer than I would have liked. I haven’t had a chance to do anything with photos while my computer has been restoring and backing up and maintenance-ing, so there isn’t anything to break up this wall of text for you today.

But yay for cloud backups. And boo for hardware problems.
(Also? Boo for the NSA being able to easily access my data now. But I suppose that’s a given for anything you put online, and I’d rather have a safe backup than worry about the government seeing my not-at-all-interesting files.)

Duck!!!, Renaissance wedding, games, race, Tartan, People Wars, and macarons (phew)

Posted on by

Life has been full of lots of awesome things recently.

In probably the biggest (ha ha) thing, a giant rubber duck is in Pittsburgh! It is super cute.

Greg, Eric, and I went to see it on the night it arrived, at which time they were throwing a huge bridge party for the duck.

Yay duck! I was actually expecting it to be much bigger (not having read anything about it beforehand), but apparently it’s only 30 by 40 feet. It’s still extremely awesome.


I think downtown is enjoying the attention the duck is bringing. Here’s Noodles & Co at Market Square that evening. It’s significantly more packed than usual. (The soda machine was constantly out of ice as well as many kinds of soda. And it’s one of those newer ones that has hundreds of varieties of soda and that makes its own ice.)

So yeah. Greg’s undergrad friends Eric and Dan were in town for the wedding celebration of Vicki and Brett. It was held at the Pittsburgh renaissance fair, which was an interesting venue.


Besides the usual wedding food and things, we had access to the fair with things like jousting (which turned into an “attack the good guy and force a ‘joust to the death’ tournament” thing), strength testing, hatchet throwing, arrow shooting, and fire manipulating.




Naturally, there were also board games.

In other recent board game funness, I acquired the Leaders, Cities, and Wonders pack expansions for the game 7 wonders. I also printed the official Catan board, the “official” Cupertino board, the official Stevie and Esteban and Louis leaders, and some boards from the fan-made Empires expansion. The result is an awesomely complex, awesomely large, awesomely 23-wonder-ful game that I am really enjoying.
(More photos of this, and other board gaming adventures in September, can be found here.)

This morning was also the Pittsburgh Great Race. Eric, Dan, and I went to watch Greg run.

The best outfit was a guy running in full Penguins ice hockey gear. Yes, including ice skates. (Word on the internet is that this is actually Tom7, who I actually know [but only in the ‘I have met him once or twice’ sense], so that’s awesome.)

There were also people with awesome signs cheering on the runners. (My favorites were “Worst parade ever” and “Why do all the cute ones run away?”.) They also cheered on the ambulance, police car, and bus at the end of the long line of runners, which was awesome.

There was also Tartan production today. The situation there is rapidly improving, which is awesome. Swathi is doing a good job as the new layout manager and leading a good group of layout staffers. The section editors have started getting their shit together (well, mostly). Papers are slowly (and sometimes painfully) becoming longer than 8 pages. Let’s keep going like that.

But in fun Tartan things, there was also a Kate tree constructed, which rapidly turned into a Tartan ed staff tree. It’s pretty awesome. (More photos of it, as well as general Tartan stuff from September, can be found here.)


I’ve finally started working on the next People Wars expansion, Flashback. It’s themed around PPA students (and general effects that look at the discard pile or add traits), and should be fairly interesting… but what’s getting me in making it is how amazingly young everyone looks.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised given I’ve been tracking this stuff on my photo stats page for years, but it’s still kind of weird whenever I actually go back and start looking through high school photos. Baby friends! ZMONGS!

Speaking of photos, June 28, 2014 will be the date when I’ll have been taking (digital) photos for exactly half my life. It’s kind of awesome that, in about 9 months, I will have over half my life documented in photos. I plan to keep up with my photo journal, so it should be an interesting adventure.

Last, but not least, a nice new French bakery opened in Squirrel Hill by Greg’s work. I stopped by and couldn’t resist getting some macarons. They’re a bit pricey at $2.25 each, but so very worth it. Their French bread is also very, very good.

Yay awesomeness.

Connecticut trip, photo stats and graphs

Posted on by

life has gotten an update to both the photo journal and the stats section. People haven’t changed that much this time around. I guess we’re all getting older and more boring.
Patrick makes his first appearance in almost 5 years thanks to his wedding, 8 drops off for the first time since I moved back to Pittsburgh (since he moved to the bay area recently), and Emily and Justin return after more than a year of not seeing them.
Yay for people.

This past weekend, a bunch of us traveled to Connecticut to see Tim and Kayleigh’s new house, their new dog Scotch, and Mars and Dan’s new dog Panda. It was interesting cramming 11 of us into a 2-bedroom house, but it was a good time and full of fun board games, crazy miniature golf, tasty food, awesome friends, and cute puppies.





More photos are at my photos page.

Photoshop organizer now reports that I have tagged 336,971 photos. (The number of photos taken is quite a bit higher given that I actually edit down my photos instead of keeping them all now.) It might be time to update some stats.

Here’s the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo:

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000 175,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days 147 days
175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000 300,000 325,000
July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013
284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days 245 days 282 days

You may remember the camera stats I posted a while back. Here’s updated stats for the two cameras that still exist:

Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – August 16, 2013 1481 days; 4.05 years 20,033 photos $70 13.5 photos per day 0.35¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – September 3, 2013 1285 days; 3.52 years 135,774 photos $780 105.7 photos per day 0.57¢ per photo

Also here’s some updated graphs (first posted here).

Photos taken by month (log scale):

Photos taken by month (linear scale):

Photos over time:

Summer

Posted on by

I guess summer is coming to an end.


It’s been a fairly quiet summer, except for the trip out West. I didn’t really pay attention to the freshmen moving in this year, and didn’t bother with Playfair or House War photos. Meh.

I also kind of ragequit The Tartan (at least its senior staff) recently because I was unhappy about the way things were (or, I suppose, weren’t) getting done. Not much to discuss there. We’ll see if things improve.

I’ve been playing a lot of board games lately, which has been awesome. We recently got 7 Wonders (during a board game sale on Amazon), and I’m really wanting the Cities expansion now.
All the board games!

Ground Floor

Nertz

Carcassonne

Viticulture

7 Wonders

Ingenious

Thurn and Taxis

The basil plant cutting Yubin gave us has grown into a full plant, and yielded some tasty results.

Also the burgers finally happened. They taste disgusting, although they’re also a few months expired so that might be a contribution. Chris tried eating one of the french fries and had an unhappy stomach that night. (Whether those things are related are not, who knows?)

In sad news, Anna moved away this past weekend to start a job at the York Dispatch in York, PA. She’s doing copy and pagination for the sports section there, which is awesome for her. She had a going-away party where there was lots of Nertz and also Cranium.


Yay for life and people and games and things.

Life, walks, travel, and games

Posted on by

I suppose it’s time for another update.

Today we went on a 12.5 mile walk to Riverview Park north of the city. It would have been longer except it started raining by the time we hit downtown on the way back. After taking the T from the north shore, the rain really started picking up, so it made more sense to bus home. It was a nice walk though.






I recently went on a trip to San Francisco for work followed by a trip to the Northwest to visit Ben in Seattle and to attend Patrick’s wedding on the Oregon coast. Photos of the adventures can be found on my photo site.




Also, as followup to the edit on my last post, Southwest never sent me a voucher as promised for the baggage issues. At this point, I’m mostly apathetic (and I certainly won’t stop flying with them because they still do a better job than pretty much any other domestic airline), but it’s still a rather unhappy end to a terrible flying experience.

My Kickstarted game Pixel Lincoln finally arrived (almost 7 months after its initial delivery estimate). The shipping experience was a huge mess, and has pretty much convinced me never to back another Game Salute game again, no matter how interesting it may be. The games sat in their warehouse for two weeks before they event sent out information on paying for shipping. It then took another week after payment before the games started shipping, and it took three days after receiving tracking info for them to actually get the game to Fedex to ship. Overall, it was over a month from the time the game arrived at their warehouse to when it got to me… which wouldn’t be as terrible if it wasn’t for the absolute lack of explanation from them.
Combined with the already-sketchy expansion Kickstarters they ran before we got the game, it has really been a bad experience.
All of this would be less terrible if the game itself was awesome, but I can’t help feel like I got ripped off terribly. After $49, I got fewer cards than a basic Dominion set and a game that somehow feels not as fun as I was expecting it to be. It seems that there isn’t enough variety in cards (despite me getting a couple expansions offered during the initial Kickstarter) to make interesting enough levels (especially since you need to make two). The characters, mini-boss, and boss cards have no flavor (and no abilities that differentiate them from any other character, mini-boss, or boss card). The rulebook is terribly written and editted, and several important things (like using cards for symbol abilities) are not explained at all. The game itself therefore plays rather clunkily.
Meh. Lesson learned, I suppose. At least I only lost $49 on it.

KoL has been going rather well. The BIG! challenge path that was recently released has made getting the full sea outfits much easier (yay for immediate level 16 aftercore), and I’ve also managed to get down to 3 day ascensions reliably. My last run was a 702 turn run as a Sauceror, which I feel good about (especially given that I do 100% familiar runs).

I’ve been watching quite a few Smosh videos lately and as Zeke says, “Alan’s Law: Anything he spends over 30 hours consuming, he shall make into a card game.”
I’ve hammered out some basic rules and general cards for the game, which is turning out to be a customizable shared-deck game (so a card game where everyone draws from a single deck, but where that single deck can be customized as desired). The rules are drawing from Bohnanza and Investigations, where the goal is to collect cards to complete episodes by trading with other players. Hopefully the player-interaction and fixed deck aspects of it will make it more readily playtestable with my usual Thursday gaming group.
We’ll see if this project actually manages to get anywhere, or whether it’ll fall prey to my laziness like the RPG Get! revamps and the Investigations CCG.

Yay life and things.