Gems

Mark at Wood s lot just celebrated six years of doing what he does so well, without apostrophe, comments, and a syndication feed. He also seems to be very happy, as well as a member of a community of people who hold him in both affection and respect (which implies that one doesn’t have to have the ‘trappings of technology’ in order to be part of something).

Jeremy Zawodony writes on using Amazon S3 as backup and the concept is intriguing for those of us with multiple discs full of photos or movies or music or whatever. Unfortunately, though I thought tools were helpful (especially Jungle Disc), I found the backup to be abysmally slow and failed more often than not. Another approach that might be better is to get one of the monster accounts at Dreamhost, where you pay 9.95$ a month for 200GB of space and 2T (that’s terabytes, that’s huge) of bandwidth for the express purposes of backup. Then I can just use FTP to upload all my stuff. 

Why do this? For redundant backup in case my primary backup fails. Additionally, if there’s a fire I’ve got my stuff all backed up offsite. Plus, if you have multiple machines like I do (Mac and Windows), this allows you to access the backed up material from both machines, or when you’re on the road.

I like the S3 approach if the bugs ever get worked out. In the meantime, I may look at DH as a backup site.

Any other options?

I’ve been critical of much of the Ajax stuff, probably because there’s a dangerous amount of hype in some of it that will backfire against the tech. But I did want to point out some of the more positive things I’ve seen recently.

Fellow O’Reilly Ajax author Chris Wells pointed out this site providing free mind mapping software.

Ajaxian pointed to new photo slideshow software, called Smooth Slideshow. I have my own slideshow software, but I may end up ‘stealing’ some of the ideas from this, because I think it’s a really nice implementation AND it validates!

Reading 3 Quarks Daily on a regular basis is a guarantee to boost your IQ at least 10 points, but I especially wanted to point out a recent post, The Real Lady Chatterly that, in turn, posts to a fascinating article on Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Bloomsbury group.

Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society points to a wonderful story and new artist exhibit based on Humbolt’s parrot: the parrot that was discovered by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1900’s that could speak 40 words from a extinct South American tribe.

Sheila Lennon’s Subterranean Homepage News is becoming another one of those must read sites that point out fascinating stories you might not hear about otherwise. For instance, Twisted Sister does Christmas, and this story in how not to apply for a job.