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Archive for June 15th, 2009

How can you improve on perfection?

For the first time in 85 years, iconic Australian food spread Vegemite is getting a makeover.

A creamier variation of the product will go on sale early next month alongside the original, which has been a staple in pantries Down Under since its invention in 1922.

Strewth! Vegemite to get its first makeover in 85 years as Australia’s iconic food spread is mixed with cream cheese

I was really taking my life in my own hands yesterday as I was out riding on the anniversary of getting run down by a car last year. And strangely enough, some FC must have known about this and tried to make a repeat of last year’s event.

It was June 14, 2008 when I got sideswiped by a car while out on a ride with said driver then disappearing into the distance without stopping. While there has been no permanent damage and I still ride every chance I get, I am hesitant about riding on the street, at least by myself. Perhaps I was feeling overly confident yesterday or perhaps it was the light traffic, but I decided to go out on the main road in front of my neighborhood. Since it was Sunday, traffic was quite light and it’s very common to see cyclist using the right lane to ride in. Most people are fine with this and simply move over or stay in the left lane and give plenty of room.

But not this little sweetheart. I went zipping past her as she sat waiting to come out of one of the feeder neighborhoods. I was moving along at about 20-25 mph with all the cars giving me plenty of room. And then FC comes by. Instead of getting all the way over into the left hand lane like everyone else had done, she feels that is far too inconvenient and straddles the line between lanes, which makes her about 2 feet away from me, or just slightly past arms length. Then as soon as she’s passed she comes back over in front of me, perhaps two car lengths. At the speed we were going it made me a little uneasy. If I were to fall, the damage would be severe. And I could scratch my bike.

I was already making rude hand gestures and slinging vulgarities when she decides that the right hand lane really isn’t where she wants to be and whips over to the left so she can make a left hand turn at the light, just a few hundred yards ahead.

So I have to ask? What the hell was she thinking? Was it really that inconvenient to actually move completely over and not get that close to me in that stupid Honda SUV? Is it really that hard to see a guy on a pink bike and bright yellow shirt and think to yourself, “Aha! A cyclist, I won’t run him down and get him stuck in my wheel well.”? Is it really necessary to pull back over right in front of me only to realize that you have no idea how to drive and then swerve over two lanes in order to make a left?

Just another cycling adventure I suppose…

Setting up drives and making a backup schedule is about as much fun as, well I’m not sure, something pretty dreadful to be sure, but it’s necessary and you can make it extremely easy with the right hardware and software combination. There are really two ways to go about getting your backup in place, you can go the cheaper but slightly more manual way of using two separate hard drives, or you can go the slightly more modern but more expensive way of using a single unit with dual drives in a Raid 0 configuration.

Personally, I recommend getting two Western Digital My Book drives of at least 500GB and a program like SyncBackSE to copy files between the two of them. I like external drives since most computers you buy today don’t have the space inside to accommodate multiple drives. In many cases you get slots for two drives and that’s it. The way my system gets configured is one large drive is the boot drive and a second large drive for additional storage. I still need two additional drives for my photos and since they can’t go inside the case I get the external ones. They are very easy to setup and install.

500GB drives are running about $90 these days and 1TB drives can be found for around $120. It’s hard to say no to so much storage for so little money. If you shoot thousands of photos a month and in RAW format the 1TB size is probably where you should start and 2TB maybe a better choice. Just as a reference point, I have filled up about half of the 500GB drive with my pictures so far.

So you have two drives, now what? To make this process work you need to get a sync program like SyncBackSE, SecondCopy or GoodSync. These programs make it very easy to copy files from one drive to another without having to copy every file each time. When I download pictures from my camera I put them all on the primary external drive. I then go through to see which files should just be deleted due to blurriness, bad lighting or other factors. Once that’s done I run the sync program and all the new files are copied over to the second drive. It also goes through the rest of the disk to make sure I haven’t missed any.

You could skip the sync altogether and just copy the folders between the two drives, but I prefer the sync so I can exclude files I’m working on or the images I’ve modified in DxO.

If you want to get more fancy you can get a setup like the 4TB My Book with two drives already inside it that automatically copies files from one drive to the other. The drives mirror each other so what’s on disk 1 is created on disk 2 at the same time. Hardware does all the work to make sure the data is backed up and considering both drives are within an external enclosure all you need to do is plug it in and you’re ready to go.

The Raid setup is much more hands free, but getting two 500GB or 1TB drives on sales is a lot more likely, in fact they’re on sale for Father’s Day. But either way it’s a worthwhile investment and while it may seem like a big budget operation – $250 – you have 10x that invested in your camera and lenses. Losing years worth of photos could bring you to the point of tears and no one wants to see that.

Yeah it’s really that simple, so now is a good time to get some extra space and make sure you’re pictures are protected.

If you want to read more about backing up and syncing files, check out this article:

The holiday backup strategy