Scott has as much as threatened (or at least demanded vehemently) that you attend the Philly Blogger meetup this Saturday.

Likewise, I emplore you to show up a mere hour earlier than that for the Philadelphia WordPress June Meetup. Even if you're not a WordPress user, we have some propaganda to distribute.

No really, if you're a blogger in the area (and by "in the area" I mean "anywhere closer than where I live") and want to chat In Real Life with some people who also enjoy your hobby and share at least some of your interests, we've got the place to be. We're teen-friendly, but the Ten Stone has a great selection of beers on tap, too, if you just want to hang.

Please also join in my evil plan to move United WordPress Meetup Day to the third Saturday of the month (that's when our meetup is) by at least stopping by the Meetup.com site to make your account "active".

Moving United WordPress Meetup Day to coincide with when Philadelphia does it is one of my personal goals, and hopefully will help expose the really lousy attention that typically-West Coast techies give to the overwhelming number of East Coast bloggers. Can we please get a conference for bloggers in NYC or Philly? Maybe I'll end up organizing the thing. That would be a hoot (in a "haven't we bent reality?"-way). Call it "Asydex".

Anyway, come on down to Ten Stone on South Street at 2pm. We'll be expecting you!

Can you buy insurance to protect against the loss of data? That seems like a bad company to start up. Since nobody is going to compensate you for the trip to Australia so that you can re-take your irreplaceable vacation photos, you might want to consider what your backup strategy is.

Maybe I'm lazy. I bought an external drive for backing up downloaded applications and registration codes. When the computer died, I used the external drive to restore everything. It worked great. Unfortunately, I did not duplicate the drive back onto the computer, I merely re-installed directly from the backups. Later, when I switched the drive to a brand new PC, I performed the same procedure.

Well, that PC was struck by lightning or something. The booting SATA drive in that PC failed, but the data drive was left intact. The external drive (the one with all of my software on it) seemd fine and lasted long enough to rebuild most of that system, but suddenly died two nights ago.

I'm still in shock, I think. We're talking thousands of dollars of software here, not to mention some photos of Abby when she was really little.

So. While I consider how I might still get data off of that drive, I'm trying to figure out what backup strategy is best for my needs.

The main problem with my data at the moment is that I have a decent about of it that I would want to keep safe, and it's not all in one place. I suppose that it is all in a neatly delimited area, but there's good stuff mixed in with bad stuff, making it difficult to simply backup the entire area.

Moreover, the data is large and impractical to move. This is, I think, one of the main reasons why people don't backup their data - it's a pain in the butt to find a place to put it.

Face it, if backup was as simple as pushing a button to get an instant, perfect copy of everything, we'd do it all the time because we could automate it very easily. But the truth is that most consumer backup solutions want you to backup to CD or DVD. I'm sorry, but my backup will not fit neatly on a single DVD, nor can I automate the task, since I would need to keep fresh blank disks in the drive for that to happen.

Tape drives are too expensive and unreliable. I've never really understood why this is so. My very first computer used a standard audio cassette tape and a standard cassette recorder for external storage. That should cost virtually nothing to reproduce with today's technology and production. I would even be willing to pay 10 times the price of a cheapie cassette recorder for good tape backup, but the good tape drives cost in the thousands of dollars, have flaky compatibility, and require expensive software to run properly. For the price of tape backup, you could buy three computers and mirror their drives to maintain a better backup than tape.

RAID seems promising, but as Berta points out, if lightning strikes the PC and wipes out both drives, you're just as dead in the water as if you only had one burnt-out drive. Plus, if your PC is damaged, it might be difficult to get your RAID-stored drives to be recognized in another RAID-capable PC to retrieve your data.

Internet backup seems promising, but there are so many things that aren't quite up to my needs yet. First of all, there is no easy software that is well-designed for performing backups on a Windows PC to a self-hosted external service. What I mean to say with that statement is several things:

• There is no simple internet backup software
• The software does not allow you to backup to your own server
• The software that does exist typically doesn't run under Windows
• Your mom doesn't run Linux

I've toyed arond with the idea of building a nice front-end to a Windows-based Rsync (that's what the Linux folks will tell us we could have been using if we were all running Linux instead of Windows) and providing some instructions for its use. It could do incremental rolling backups over the internet, provided you had the bandwidth to make that practical.

I think the bandwidth problem is the limitation we had the last time I was discussing this. I was trying to push 80GB of backup over rsync nightly with five days of changes, and the bandwidth was the trick.

Someone should offer a service that does this. I know about StrongSpace; I use it. But it doesn't seem like a backup solution to me. StrongSpace feels more like external storage. Maybe that's just because that's how I use it. And certainly the price is not right for the volume of backup I want to push.

The solution that I've implemented in the mean time is one of Netgear's home office SAN boxes. It looks like a toaster, holds two drives, and connects to the network. I loaded it with two drives and told it to mirror them, and it seems to work.

What I don't like about it is that it does not use SMB shares, but instead uses its own driver to find the drive. The driver must be installed on any PC that would use the drive, which is kind of inconvenient. With all of the trouble that installing network printer drivers causes at my house, I see this having the same ill effect.

At least I have some redundant storage now. Now I've got to recover the files from that USB drive. Anyone have any tips for restoring data from a messed-up Maxtor One-Touch?

I'm not sure if this will last, being as it looks well-produced and will probably be removed from the net somehow, but...

This is a video of comedian Robert Newman providing some history of oil production and use, and the wars that were required to keep the oil flowing. It's long, but it's pretty darn good.

It's good when we can laugh about these things because really, we are utterly doomed. Nobody has ever told me any different, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.

I might have mentioned that Berta's sister, Therese, is pregnant and expecting her baby any day now. Really, any day now.

Berta was talking to her on the phone recently, and they were discussing all sorts of baby things, as they usually do. But a new topic arose, something that is often left unconsidered until the nurses at the hospital bring it up - What happens to the baby if the parents die?

Well certainly, most parents would rather than someone they know take care of their baby, rather than for the baby to enter the foster care system. In many cases, I would suspect that an extended family member would be able to adopt the baby if the parents didn't leave explicit instructions.

But the thing is, you're supposed to have plans. As parents, you're supposed to know who would care for your child if something happened to you. And the decision might be difficult for you to decide who to ask, sometimes the decision on how to respond is pretty difficult, too.

I don't want to be one of those people that people talk about and say, "How could he say ‘no'?" It's the gut reaction. The response that people expect anyone to say when they're asked to care for a child of a relative in the case of their death is, I would expect, a resounding yes! But the issues seem more complicated than that to me.

I guess there would be some advantage to selecting someone who already had kids; who already had experience and know-how, and had demonstrated an ability to perform the task. You wouldn't ask your spinster aunt who despises children to care for your orphaned child.

There would also be some advantage to selecting someone who you knew could provide for your child. You wouldn't ask your destitute uncle to care for your orphaned child when he often can't even afford to feed himself.

You want stability. You want more certainty. You need a good backup plan with someone who you trust.

Likewise, that person should be confident that they can do it. I don't know about other parents, but to me parenting seems like it asks the same question daily: "Why do you think you can do this?" I feel the pressure of screwing up my own kids irrevocably by letting them stay up too late, or eat the wrong foods, or climb trees that aren't meant to be climbed. What keeps me going is knowing that it must be done, that it's my responsibility to make my kids turn out right and to do my best in that regard. But I have little idea what I'm doing!

When Riley was born, I was still wondering how the heck Abby was going to turn out with such inexperienced people taking care of her. Even with Berta, we were still trying to figure everything out, just like any parent. And with the second kid, it's even more of a shock, now juggling the demands of not just the two kids, but the interpersonal conflict that exists between them as they get older. That is to say, if we could raise them separately, it would be so much easier than having to constantly tell them to stop beating on each other and taking and destroying each other's stuff. The difficulty isn't simply doubled, it's like 2.5 to 3.0 times.

Sure now, we could also afford another child. Although we've been wise enough so far not to do such a thing. We are in the middle of buying a new house that won't strain our resources, but won't leave much left for really big things, like whole new family members. And maybe there would be insurance money to help pay for another kid, but would it be enough?

Would I be able to love that kid as my own? Would I make the effort to provide that kid with the same opportunities that I would want for my own children? It's not like adopting children, when you make the conscious choice to do it. Agreeing means you're agreeing to do all of that in advance. I'm not saying I wouldn't, but I worry that I would be a horrible person. If I wouldn't love that kid as my own, then I surely would never agree to take him in.

On the unthinkable chance that something happened to us, who would take all of our children then? Would another child place even more of these same burdens on the people who we'd want to take our kids?

And truly, I just don't want another kid. I'm bad. I'm the most selfish person in the world. Where is my humanity?

Is this really another one of the things in life that you just do because you have to? Because it's the responsible thing to do? Because they're family? Does that type of obligation factor greatly in this decision? Should rational thought and wants factor in at all?

I'm reminded that this is only "in case", and that it's note even likely. But wouldn't ask you to do it if wasn't a possibility, would they?

This is a very difficult decision to make. You don't just ask and expect an immediate "yes". Anyone who would answer that quickly and thoughtlessly probably isn't the person you want to ask in the first place.

Does anyone know how long it should take for two painters to paint two rooms and a set of stairs? We've reorganized our lives around the painting that's taking place around the house. They're supposed to paint the kitchen, living room, foyer, and stairs up to the second floor, along with a couple of things outside.

So far, they've done a lot of patching and no painting of walls. And while I've been informed that "slow painters do a better quality job", I'm still wondering when we'll be able to move back into our own house.

Perhaps we should just continue packing the remaining rooms, too. But the thing that's mostly messing with our routine is not having access to the TV.

Everyone will say that less TV is good for you, but most of those people either already have a lifestyle that doesn't involve TV (and so don't remember so well what it's like to go cold turkey), or would never consider doing it themselves.

And the fact that all of my novels seem to be in boxes isn't helping, either. My brain is feeling starved for entertainment, and I think my demeanor lately is greatly associated to the lack of TV, and possibly all of the other stresses one might experience when access to two vital rooms of your house have been curtailed.

I'm about to stop at Barnes & Noble to pick up a book of some kind. It's been a while since I've bought a book other than because I've wanted to read that book. Hopefully I can find something good.