Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

What Is Your Backup Solution?
June 14, 2006

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.

Things Go Soft
June 13, 2006

It’s been quite a day. I’m up pretty late tonight for no great reason, and am still tapping out this post — on my phone, no less.

What struck me at such an hour that I needed to write about it right away; that I couldn’t wait until my computer restarted, much less until morning?

Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality
June 09, 2006

I preface this piece with the warning that my political rants are usually uninformed screeds of little value, but I hope that you at least find enough value in what I’ve written here to become interested enough to search out and find more information on your own.

What is Net Neutrality?

I use Vonage for phone service at home, even though Verizon provides my broadband internet connection.

Verizon obviously could provide my phone service, but I choose to use Vonage, which provides very good phone service using my existing internet connection at a cheaper rate than what Verizon would.

Network Neutrality is what prevents Verizon from restricting my access to Vonage’s service based on the kind of data that we exchange.

Without net neutrality, Verizon could dial back the amount of bandwidth that Vonage’s service usually uses to complete my calls, making my calls garbled and unintelligible. Technically, they wouldn’t place a restriction on my use of Vonage, they would simply reserve their best service for their own phone service, relegating services like Vonage to use what’s left over.

This is just the beginning of bad things that could happen as a result of letting service providers select who gets the best bandwidth. An example of a more globally-affecting change might be helpful…