greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: March 2023

  • Fifty-One

    Right smack dab in the middle of the week, here we are at another birthday. It’s not a round-number birthday, I’m not doing anything special to celebrate (beyond taking the week off from work), and there’s definitely no party planned.

    The weather decided to give me a present this morning anyway:

    There shouldn’t be any sound, I was doing my best to remain silent and fortunately nobody was revving their car’s engine or walking any barking dogs at the time.

    It didn’t last or stick, but seeing snowfall while sipping cocoa on the couch certainly cheered me up.

    Oh, and Vyx got me a little something:

    That’s Edelgard von Hresvelg from the Fire Emblem: Three Houses (and Three Hopes) game(s). Behind her is the From The Earth To The Moon DVD boxed set, alongside is a little bit of Fullmetal Alchemist merch in the form of a tiny mug, and all around are CDs, Blu-Rays, and manga.

    Her Imperial Majesty fits neatly on a DVD shelf, which she’ll continue to do until I need that shelf space again some day. (Speaking of media, I also received a Blu-Ray of Princess Mononoke. Excellent!)

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall return to my vacation plans… mainly goofing off. See you next time around, I hope.

  • Backups & Archives

    It’s 7pm on a Monday night. Do you know where your data is?

    OK, good. Where else is it? Which is to say, if “where your data is right now” goes kaput for some reason, is your data somewhere else as well?

    Are you sure about that?

    I spent the afternoon of the first “real” day (not a weekend day, which I’d normally be “off” for anyway) of my vacation making sure my backups are pointed at the right folders and are working, complete with testing file restoration.

    (Rule One of Backups: Assume that if you haven’t tested them lately, they’re broken somehow.)

    Then I updated my archive drives.

    My what, you ask?

    I have a pair of high-capacity solid-state external drives that I use for media files archiving. Two of them, so in case one goes kaput for some reason I still have another to copy from. These don’t get used regularly for enjoying media (I have other devices for that), they’re just archives to backup (& potentially restore) music and videos. While the process of keeping them updated is a bit cumbersome, it beats paying for the kind of online backup storage I’d need to keep all those gigabytes of shows and songs “professionally” safe.

    My music library also gets a couple other copies made, including an upload to a virtual private server I control, because it’s kind of important to me. Okay, a lot of important.

    Anyway… backups are good. If nothing else, a tiny bit of peace of mind can’t hurt in these chaotic times, now can they?

  • One Foot In The Mailing List

    There’s nothing quite like getting a letter with “Happy Birthday, [your name]!” stamped on the envelope…

    …from the AARP.

Calendar

March 2023
S M T W T F S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

My Links