Day In The Life of Baz

Introduction

Once again, we enter the world online backup. Enter iDrive.com. Free online backup. These guys pamper you with a whooping 2GB of online storage to fill your heart’s desire.

Features

The main difference between this and other online backups like EggDisk is that iDrive requires you to download their application, whereas other services have an online interface. This, I take as a slight disadvantage, since my main use for online backup is as an intermediary between where ever I am and my house.

Your backups are encrypted with 128-bit SSL encryption on transfers. This seems to be standard among most online backups that I’ve seen.

One thing I haven’t seen before is the scheduling feature. You can schedule backups to occur in the background with no user interaction.

Virtual Drive

This is one of the advantages of using a standalone program. You can set this up on your system as a virtual drive (e.g. F:). Then you can use it like any other Windows Drive, with one exception, it’s read-only. Huh? Why would they temp users with this feature and then make it read-only? Oh well.

About a month ago I’ve been trying to make a decision as to whether the web site host, 1and1 sucks. There is a blog that I manage, which I have hosted at 1and1. About a week ago, I noticed that some posts had mysteriously vanished.

Step 1: Request Back Up

The database was screwed, royally screwed. So, I figured that they’ve got to have some sort of backup right? Um, sort of. Now before I go on, let me state that this is totally my fault. I didn’t follow the advice in my post, which is do your own backups, so what the hell was I expecting? So, moving on: I called up tech support and asked whether they could help me. Yippie, they do do backups. Yay. Just one small problem, the only backup I could get was of two days before. No big deal. Since the whole database was somewhat screwed, restoring posts from the past two days would be no problem. So I said sure, and waited.

Step 2: Wait for Back Up

I called them at about 2:00PM while I was at work. I was told that they would get with the techs and they would place the on my site, where I could access it by FTP, and they would email me when this is done. Cool, I thought. I got home at 5:30PM and dived into my email, nothing. I hunted one the FTP server, nothing. What was going on? So, I called tech support again. Now, I’m being told that Database Backups can only be delivered between 24 to 48 hours from the time of request. O…..K? Maybe they have all the backups archived in some sort of solid archive and to restore my database they need to extract all of them? I don’t know, whatever. I figured I had no choice, so I waited. This was Thursday, and just to recap the best they could do was give me a backup done on Monday or Tuesday. No problem.

Popularity: 22%

After a long trip and a wonderful weekend in Wichita Falls, I got back to Plano and gas was still $2.79 at my favorite RaceTrac gas station. I could not believe my luck. I purposefully did not fill up in Wichita Falls because it was like $2.89 up there. When I came back down, I was wondering whether or not I had made a mistake. I expected to be slapped in the face on Monday with gas at $3.10 or something, but I wasn’t. I went through Monday almost empty and finally filled up today.

My luck seems to have held out so far, but with the summer quickly approaching, I’m not looking forward to shelling out $3.00+ per gallon. I suppose it cannot be avoided. I do have the slight comfort of using my gas card, that gives me an introductory (first 3 months) rate of 6% cash back on gas purchases. So at $3.00, it would be the equivalent of paying $2.82. 18 cents, not a big deal right? Wrong, it’s a very big deal to me. I’m sure if gas was 18 cents cheaper right now it would be a big deal to you.

For years now, I’ve wondered. Why do people talk about having four (4), five (5), and sometimes seven (7) or more credit cards? They claim that each one has its purpose. I found that hard to believe. In my mind, you should only need one, and your choice should be simple enough: pick the card with the lowest interest rate. It all seems so simple in my mind. You may have two or three if your lowest rate card, doesn’t coincide with a proper available limit. But essentially, your choices should be limited, so why the hell should people need tons of credit cards? Now, I know better :).

It’s a funny story actually. Not funny, ha ha, but just funny. Now I’ve just moved to a new city about three (3) months ago. I’ve very new to the area. One of the things you always think about when moving (and especially after moving) to a new place is the relative safety of the neighborhood. Since it was on the outskirts of a major city, I was hoping that crime would be limited here. But as with all things, this was a general rule and all rules have exceptions.

I was getting ready for work this morning. I was in the kitchen hurriedly trying to get something to eat. As usual, the morning news was on the the television. Then I heard something familiar. I heard my address. I ran into the bedroom and glared at the TV and saw some apartments that look a hell of a lot like mine. Actually they were mine. They were live at my apartment complex. Apparently there is a missing person and foul play is involved.

Usually when I hear these stories on the news they seem very distant to me. It’s a bit new to me to have it happen two buildings down. Such is life I guess.