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 Polar Bear At Columbus Zoo Rebecca, Katherine and I met up with some friends at the Columbus Zoo yesterday. It was my first time there this year and I hadn’t seen the new Polar Bear exhibit yet. It is a decent exhibit that has an underwater viewing area that gets really crowded when the bears jump in and try to get fish. I guess we happened to catch one of them during an afternoon nap.  Amish Buggy I recently attended my grandfather’s estate sale around Rushsylvania in Logan County Ohio. While walking to Grandma’s house from where we parked, we noticed this Amish horse and buggy tied to a tree in Grandpa’s walnut tree woods. So much about this picture evokes the notion of a simple life. It is peaceful, quiet and serene. For me, this is a big part of what I like about going home. It relaxes me. Still, it is a bit of a paradox. Simple does not mean easy. It doesn’t really take much to care for and maintain an automobile. Feeding and caring for a horse on the other hand — not so much. How about enjoying that nice grove of trees? That only took ~30 years to develop A whole month went by and not a single post. Of course, this isn’t the first time that has happened. What happened? Here are a few highlights: Fourth of July in Rushsylvania Throughout my life, this has been virtually a yearly event. Rushsylvania is not the most exciting town, but that’s where our family gets together and that is nice. Also, this year, my nephew Greg was visiting from North Carolina and it was great to see him interact with Katherine. I think they like each other.  Katherine and Greg Air Conditioner Failure During one of the hottest stretches of the year, our air conditioner went out. This is never fun and really not fun with an infant in the house. Thankfully, it was just a blown capacitor that was fixed quickly and didn’t require a new unit. Mega Sports Camp I spent a week of evenings volunteering as a football coach for children at our church. I had a lot of fun doing this and thought it was great that there were two girls who played football as well. I have worked with kids before, but never as a parent myself. I caught a glimpse of what our future will be like as Katherine gets a bit older. Goodbye, Jacob After a very tough time and decision process, we had to say goodbye to our tabby cat Jacob. He was a part of our family since 2003. He was a very sweet and affectionate cat and required a lot of attention. I think he never adjusted to Katherine being in our house. We thought that since he never acted up when she first arrived, he would be fine. However, as she got older and more animated, I think it must have just stressed him out more until it was too much to the point that he was not using the litter box appropriately far too frequently. Thankfully, the shelter we adopted him from could take him back. This was a terribly tough decision, but I like to think he’ll do great in the right home.  Jacob Celebrated Dad’s 60th Birthday We had a nice cookout with family at Mom and Dad’s house. I think it was 95 degrees, but in the back of their house are a few shade trees and there is always a nice breeze there. It felt great. There are few things in life more refreshing than moments like these. Katherine Started Swimming Lessons Rebecca and Katherine started lessons in the pool to get her comfortable in the water. She won’t be doing laps soon, but I think it is great for her to get use to it and she seems to have a great time in the water. Rebecca and I Kayaked We haven’t done this since late 2008 in Huntington Beach, CA while visiting Rebecca’s parents for Christmas. Last year, Rebecca was pregnant for Katherine and didn’t feel comfortable in situations that might involve slipping and I didn’t end up doing it alone for whatever reason. Yesterday, Mom and Dad babysat Katherine so we could get out on the water again. It was better than I remembered — hope to get out a few more times this year. I probably missed a few things, but that was kind of a fun way to jot it all down. I guess this post was more like a Christmas letter. Christmas in July — ahem– August? Last week, I came home and noticed a really loud clicking noise coming from my MacBook. That’s never a good sound, particularly when you aren’t actively using it. The hard drive was toast. While I wasn’t completely thrilled, I figured I would at least find out how well my backup strategy worked. I use Time Machine for my home computers and have apparently been completing their tasks successfully. However, I had never tried to restore from it before. While I am now back up and running, I did learn about a few problems with my backup strategy that didn’t work seamlessly which I will pass on along with things that did work. Perform Regular Backups This is a no brainer, right? If you don’t backup routinely, you’ll lose data. The aspect of this I never really thought much about is that psychologically, you will be most concerned about the data you were working with most recently. This also happens to be the stuff you will lose if you don’t regularly backup. For me, this is the best part about Time Machine. When it is enabled, you get hourly backups and you can’t configure it with any other frequency. Until you have a failure, this may seem overkill. When the failure happens, you will be very happy about this feature. Make Offline Storage Part Of Your Backup While your computer is down for the count and in need of restoration, you may need access to certain documents while this is occurring. Dropbox is a great solution for this and they offer 2 GB free storage. This amount of space is typically enough for document syncing. It also doubles as a convenient way to use these documents any time you are away from your computer. A bonus is that since you get a chance to utilize your synced content before a failure happens, you can feel more confident that restoration will work. Do NOT exclude your iTunes Library Files From Your Backup If you have chosen to exclude your media from backup because you have stored it elsewhere such as a network share, etc. make sure to backup your iTunes library files. I made this mistake while choosing to exclude my Music folder from my backup and found out the hard way that this also means your iPod can’t sync files back to your library. Apart from the hassle of re-importing the files, you lose playlists, ratings and more. Further, if you exclude like I did, you may lose apps you have as well. Exclude VM’s From Backup When configuring Time Machine, you have the option of excluding files from the backup. You might do this if you have a different backup strategy for certain files, and in the case of virtual machine disks, you really want a different strategy. Time Machine will determine if a file needs backed up based on modification date. Since virtual machine disks modify this date at every use and they are in the many-gigs size category, they would quickly fill your hard drive, unless of course you never used them. Include System Files In Your Backup I had read in some articles the notion that it made sense to exclude these from your Time Machine backup, and I did. The idea was that you would save space because you had the installation disks. Big mistake. Firstly, relative to everything else they don’t take up that much space. Secondly, if you don’t back these up, you lose out on a very nice feature of the Leopard/Snow Leopard installation process, which is to restore from a Time Machine backup. As it was, I needed to go through the installation process and then do my restore, which takes longer and is more manually involved. It’s OK to Backup iPhoto/Aperture Libraries Due to the same reasoning about backing up VM’s, one might be led to think that a large iPhoto library or Aperture library might not be a good idea to backup since they end up being large over time and change frequently for the typical user. While these look like very large single files to you in Finder, they are actually bundles. This means they may be expanded by you for examination and Time Machine does this too. The result is that it makes incremental updates within the bundle. Secondary Backup For Important Stuff When faced with a hard drive failure, you really reflect on what files are important. This is the stuff you should have a second copy of — just in case. Redundant hard drives and optical are fine for this, but I found that while I was re-installing things, I considered how if a fire or theft occurred, I would need something offsite. There are many offsite backup options such as Mozy, Carbonite, JungleDisk and DropBox that I suppose fill this purpose. For me, the big thing is photos. I store my photos on SmugMug that offers unlimited storage with their plan. Unlike the other solutions, this is geared also for photo sharing, so the bonus is that I get some value out of it even before using it to restore photos. If interested, use this code for $5 off at SmugMug: Z072MKPtbXNgA. In short
I had a wonderful Father’s day thanks to Rebecca and Katherine. Katherine stirred from her sleep this afternoon and allowed me to rock her to sleep. She hasn’t let me be the comforter in quite a while so this was nice. There isn’t anything that can compare to looking down at your child while they sleep and a grin comes over their face. Rebecca surprised me with pictures she had taken of Katherine just a few weeks ago, ~6 months old. They are beautiful. I dare say we have a very photogenic child — and I admit to being biased  Katherine ~ 6 months I am feeling extremely blessed today! If you are looking for better or more frequent communication, I think I found where to begin the search.
Last week, we drove to Charleston, SC for a wedding. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time touring downtown and tour but had a few hours to explore. We started out around Vendue and Concord and walked to the Battery via Church Street. We then came back via East Bay . I greatly enjoyed viewing the historical houses and landmarks along the way.  Carriage Ride in Charleston The picture below is of the South Carolina Bank and Trust building. On the side of the building are some historical plaques explaining that it was a Freemason Lodge built in 1736. For America, that’s pretty old.  Solomon's Lodge #1 I would love to have more time to tour the city and take more photos. As it happened, we didn’t have a lot of time and had our 3 1/2 month old daughter with us. We learned that the history was so well preserved that it really isn’t very friendly for strollers. Apart from the bumpiness of the old sidewalks, several areas, like going from The Battery Park to the path across the waterfront didn’t have a ramp at all. We managed fine, but I did wonder about those in wheelchairs. Since I spent a lot of time looking out for hazards to navigate the stroller through, I did notice that the sidewalks had metallic inserts in them to show the name of the street. I thought that was neat.  East Bay Street  Inlandia After my Grandpa Jacobs died in 2008, my family started going through a lot of old family stuff. There were old brochures for world’s fairs that were funny to look at in retrospect and there was also a pamphlet about some proposal called Inlandia. I don’t have that pamphlet, but as it was described to me, it was to be some sort of man made waterway that would tap into Lake Erie and wind its way through Ohio. I guess the idea was that since the Great Lakes were tied into the St. Lawrence Seaway, this could provide duty free trade routes through Ohio. I found the picture above in some old photos that came from my Grandpa Curler. Apparently they must have been promoting this idea in parades throughout Ohio — that or it was a local hair-brained scheme. According to my information, this photo was taken in 1958 and I can’t tell what town, but I would guess Rushsylvania, Ohio. I would love to know more about this, but I can’t find anything about it online so far. If anyone knows more, please share.  Sewing and Football I guess the answer to that question depends on how far you look back. If we allow photos to tell a tale, then this one suggests that perhaps I would be an Ohio State Football player with a penchant for sewing. Obviously this would be to mend my own jersey because I am a bruiser.  TRS-80 fun This photo above tells a different story. I am awaiting my turn to play a game on our TRS-80. While we did buy games to play, dad also bought us som magazines that often contained source code for games that we would punch in and save on an audio cassette tape also seen in the picture. I recall one of these was a downhill skiing game and another was a casino game in which I learned that real life gambling might be a problem for me. The book in front of the T.V. is Getting Started with Extended Color Basic, a simple reference manual. While I don’t write games or even really play them much, I still code as an adult. I’d be interested to see other photos of individuals that hint toward what they might do as an adult. I asked my wife if she had any that indicated that she might be an attorney someday but she isn’t aware of any.  Playing with Oceanic 815 In this photo I am playing with a toy airplane at my grandparents house as a child. I think it looks remarkably like Oceanic 815 from Lost. I seem to recall that I used to imagine that it crashed into a remote island and no one got hurt because the island had magical properties. Unfortunately, that’s all I remember. |
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