Brian @ Wongside

I spent the majority of the last couple weeks sick with pneumonia. I got sick on Tuesday 12/28, spent the the morning of 12/31 in the ER, and was finally feeling about 95% last Friday.

Lots of coughing, phlegm, fatigue, and sleepless nights. No fun.

On top of that, just as I was starting to get better, Charlene came down with a cold. So it was the sick caring for the sick around here for a few days.  After 2.5 weeks, I’d say I’m finally about 98%. I still have a lingering cough, but the rest of my symptoms are under control. Praise God!

We were super blessed that my accountability partner, Andrew, was willing to go grocery shopping for us to buy food. My brother-in-law, Jeremy, was also kind enough to stop by with some chicken noodle soup from Safeway. Thanks guys!

Funny story: Jeremy bought two different kinds of soup. I don’t remember exactly what they were, but let’s call them “regular” and “organic”. As is typical of Charlene and me, we couldn’t agree on which one we liked. I preferred the “regular” one, but she liked the “organic” one. The noodles and the flavor of the regular one were much better to me, but she didn’t like the noodles in the regular, and preferred the organic noodles. The good thing is that meant we got to split the soups, and we both got what we wanted. No sharing necessary That’s the way it is around here.  Go figure.

The quote of the day comes from my lovely wife Charlene:

I’m old and slow, but I work.

We’re both sick right now, and we’re feeling it.

I can’t believe it’s already been two weeks since my last post. The days just seem to fly by. I can hardly believe Charlene and I have been married 236 days–nearly 8 months.

But here’s what’s been running through my mind the past few weeks. It’s a random stream of consciousness, so proceed at your own peril.

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Charlene broke nearly a week of silence yesterday. As I posted previously, she was under a doctor’s orders to remain silent for a week. Yesterday, she broke that silence. Her voice is still a tad raspy, but it’s not nearly as bad as what it had been.

I have a mute wife for the next week. Charlene got back from the doctor’s office today, and he has ordered her not to speak until next Monday. So needless to say, this will be an interesting twist in our first year of marriage. We’ve already begun working out our own sign language, which I’ll call WSL (Wong Sign Language). Frankly, it’s a hilarious mix of finger spelling, and wild gestures For some of her most hilarious signs, you’ll have to ask her in person.

On the positive side, I’m pretty sure that Charlene and I will have an unfair advantage at any future game of Charades or Guesstures.

I finally bought my grill yesterday. It’s a Master Forge, and it has four main burners with a side burner. Now I’m ready to Grill! It! Up!

Summer at the Wong household can finally commence.

Andy and I are going to assemble it this morning, and we’ll cook dinner on it tonight. I already went shopping at Costco and Safeway for our dinner. We’ve got to inaugurate the grill in style, so I’ll be cooking up the following:

• Grilled Butterflied Chicken
• Tri-tip
• Kielbasa
• Zucchini
• Mushrooms
• Roasted Potatoes

The first five items will be on the grill. The last one will be in the oven, but if I get a little crazy and adventurous, I might try some on the grill as well.

Can’t wait!

I’m in the market for an online backup solution. Historically, I’ve backed up my stuff to CD and DVD. But since I now have over 100GB of photos, it’s getting a bit unwieldy. The 1TB hard drive likely won’t help the situation either.

I’m looking at a few solutions, namely:

• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• Mozy

Backblaze is probably the newcomer to the group. I first heard about them on my favorite tech news site: Arstechnica. I think the thing I like about them is tye keep it stupid simple, and have a pretty nifty restore function no one else has: if your computer dies, (for a fee) they’ll mail you a DVD or USB hard drive full of your data. The one concern I have about Backblaze is the very fact that they are young. They seem to have an all-star team of leaders, but they’re such a young company, it’s hard to tell what their future is. I did find at least one user who switched from Mozy to Backblaze. Backblaze costs $5/month or $50/year

Carbonite seems pretty similar on the backup side, but doesn’t seem to offer a similar restore process. I think the one thing that concerns me about them is that they lost a bunch of their customers’ data earlier this year. Carbonite costs $54.95/year.

Mozy seems like a decent company. I think the one thing they have going for them is that they’re a part of storage and infrastucture giant EMC. That means they’ve got some serious backing, and likely won’t disappear anytime soon. I also like the fact that between Mozy and Carbonite, Walt Mossberg prefers Mozy.  The downside is that someone else found that it was a pain to restore from them. The fact that they give 2GB of free space is nice, but I’ve got almost 200GB I’ll need to backup, so that’s really immaterial to me. Mozy costs $4.95/month or $54.45/year.

There are a few downsides to doing online backup, and they certainly deserve special consideration:

1. Uploading takes forever. I’ve got a 6mbps DSL line, and Speakeasy says my upload is only 650kbps, meaning I could upload about 6GB per day. (Speedtest.net generally confirms this.) If I have to upload 200GB of data, that’s 33 days straight.
2. These services are subject to failure. I don’t worry about security as all of these solutions do proper encryption. But as noted above, Carbonite lost the data of 7,500 customers. I don’t think Backblaze was even in existence yet, but their data center of choice had a power outage in 2007. I’ve yet to hear of any problems at Mozy. Fortunately, neither of these issues is ultimately catastrophic to the data (the issue of credibility is entirely different). Since these are backup services, Carbonite customers should have been able to do a re-upload or “re-backup” and have their information be safe once again. Assuming they were in existence, Backblaze customers merely would have needed to wait for the servers to come back up in order to continue a backup or restore–no data was lost.
3. What happens if the companies disappear? Upline was a backup service provided by tech giant Hewlett-Packard. It shut its doors earlier this year, proving that even Mozy–as a part of EMC–might not be immune to being shutdown by it’s corporate backers.  Backblaze might not have to worry about the corporate bueracracy, yet. But what if they aren’t profitable, or run out of funding before hitting the black? They could very well shut their doors as well. And if they get bought by another company, their policies might change to the detriment of consumers, or their new overlords might shut them down for whatever reason.

All in all, I think an online backup service will serve as a secondary or tertiary backup solution around here. I’ll likely keep backing up to DVDs (or Blu Ray when I can get my hands on a burner) and to Charlene’s computer, and have an online, continuous backup solution in the cloud.

I’ll keep you posted as I find more, and when I make my decision.

I got a new hard drive from NewEgg two weeks ago.  It’s a whopping 1TB of space, and it was a steal at $75 with free shipping. Of course the bummer is that the marketing makes it sound bigger than it is.  When formatted, I lose about 70GB of space and am left with 931GB of space.  Talk about shrinkage. I remember the days when a 256MB hard drive was 256 megabytes. They didn’t have any of this funky messing with bits and bytes, decimal and base 2. Oh well. Times have changed.

In any case, I’m very excited to start filling it.  My current hard drive is 250GB (really 228GB). One of the partitions is 180 GB, and it is nearly full of pictures and other data. Between my 10.1 megapixel dSLR and 8 megapixel point-and shoot, I’ve got over 110GB of photos. I’ve also got about 30 GB of iTunes data including music and videos. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I had the 5D Mark II or the Sony Alpha A900. I’d be shooting 1080P HD video (4.8MB/sec = 289MB/min = 17,370MB/hour) and 21 megapixel twenty-four megabyte photos. Ouch!

The one thing I was worried about was if the drive came DOA (dead on arrival). If you look at the user reviews on the right of that NewEgg page, there’s a fair number of people who have complained about that. So in order to mitigate that risk, I took out a couple of insurance policies. The first one is almost literally an insurance policy. I paid extra for the extended warranty.

The second one is that I took the time to stress test the drive. Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, or what utility to use, but that’s what Google is for. The first entry on the list was for something called Barts Stuff Test. Doesn’t sound that compelling from the title, but I figured I’d give it a look. And apparently Google found exactly what I was looking for:

Bst5 (Bart’s Stuff Test v5) is a small win32 application for long term heavy stress testing storage devices. Bst5 supports testing at file and device level.

That ought to do it! And it even supports hard drives of my size and larger:

Bst5 supports very large volumes, up to 16 exabyte (17.179.869.184 Gigabyte) enough to last for at least 30 years.

Perfect!

So I downloaded it, started it up, and let it run. And run. And run. It ran for almost 5 days straight. Nothing broke during that time, so I’m assuming that we’re good.

Thanks Barts! Time to start filling this sucker up.  See ya!

It took us a mere 15 minutes to setup our new dining room table tonight.

We opened the box, put four bolts into the legs, put the bolts into their respective holes in the table top, threw on a washer and nut, and flipped the table right side up.  We even had time to open up the table to add the leaf, pull it back apart, and fold the leaf back into the table.

Amazing!

I am admittedly grateful that we didn’t have to setup the whole leaf and bracing mechanism. That likely would’ve taken hours to assemble. But with a setup that quick, I find it hard not to love this table. It also means disassembly for transport (when we eventually move, or sell the table) will be a snap.

A “bur-What”? you might ask.  A Bjursta.  I briefly mentioned it a few weeks ago when we had that delightfully relaxing Saturday. It’s our brand new dining room table courtesy of Ikea. Charlene and I are really excited about it, and we’re looking forward to getting it all put together so we can start having guests over for dinner again.

It wasn’t as cheap as I had hoped, but we looked a few other places, including Target, and we never found anything that we liked. But I figure it’s OK. Being the business major I am, I figure we can amortize/depreciate the cost of the table over the time we end up using it, and it won’t really cost us that much. In other words, we’ll get plenty of use out of it, and the value of the time we use it far exceeds the actual cost of the table for that particular period of time. Geeky, I know. But it’s really the only way I could justify the purchase in my mind. But that’s my random musing for the day.

Thanks to Jeremy for driving to Ikea to pick it up with us, and for helping to deliver it to our apartment.

I’ll post a picture after it’s setup.