Late in 2005, I made this journal "Friends Only". I was not thrilled with making it so, but it solved a problem I was having.

Since that time, it's a mixed bag. Some posts are readable by anyone, some are "Friends Only".

Readers are welcome. If you would like to be added to my "Friends List" (what a poorly named feature!), leave a comment here.

• 20:25 Technically, if I'm wearing bike gloves and a helmet, I'm not naked. Right? #MultnomahCountyBikeFair #

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I just noticed this neighborhood banner on NE Alberta Street. See the little wind cups at the bottom, which spins the red plate as well as the spiral above it. Lovely!



And what a gorgeous day! I think we're facing a solid two months with no rain before Portland resumes its usual weather pattern. Hello, Portland Summer!

• 17:14 There's a line out the door at PQN. Don't these people realize, I gotta get mah taco on! #

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• 11:46 Farrah Fawcett died. I'm waiting for the inevitable "Charlie's Angels" jokes. #
• 21:12 I'm waiting for a version of Boulevard of Broken Dreams featuring Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. On black velvet. bit.ly/5sfzK #

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• 13:40 @michelletoich The southern tradition is food. For anything. New baby? Food. Death in the family? Food. #

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• 16:16 Asked a girl to get me some rope while she was at the store. She cames back with rope that is white and pink. Hot pink. #
• 17:48 Mowing the lawn isn't so bad when you can reach out, pluck and eat cherries and raspberries as you pass the right tree or bush. #

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• 12:03 Lots of people out at Sunday Parkways! Waiting for #Pedalpalooza Milliped event to begin. #

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• 11:53 I'll say this for the new iPhone; it's fast enough that Katamari is actually playable. #

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A couple of weeks ago, my big 1TB external hard drive died an ignoble death. I tried every trick I knew to recover it, with no success. I even took it to a local repair site to let them try their voodoo; no dice. Thankfully, some parts of the drive were reliably backed up, including all of my photos. *whew* However, I lost my entire music collection. *groan*

What have I learned from this?

• Don't be an idiot; backup yer stuff. In a stroke of good luck, I acquired an Apple Time Capsule a couple of months ago and have been using it for backups. Quelle suprise, it does just what it claims to do, and does it really well. Three cheers for technology that "just works"!



• The drive that died was a Western Digital My Book hard drive. Notice how big and chunky that case looks? If you open it up, you'll find out there are two 500GB hard drives inside, plugged into a little circuit board that stripes the drives together a 1TB RAID. This works, but it has a pretty serious implication; with a striped RAID data is scattered across both drives. Which means that if one drive in the RAID dies, you've essentially lost access to the data in the entire RAID. So a striped RAID basically has double the odds of a catastrophic failure compared to a traditional single hard drive. Yikes! Had I been thinking clearly, I never would have bought this drive in the first place.



• I've purchased a modest amount of digital music online from the Amazon MP3 store. I respect the fact that their music library is DRM-free, and encoded at a high bit-rate. But I was really sad to read this in their FAQ: "We are currently unable to replace any purchased files that you delete or lose due to a system or disk error." That tears it; I will no longer buy music that way. It's back to CDs for me.

Thankfully, I've been able to retrieve about 2/3rds of my music collection from raiding a friend's music library (not pirating; just retrieving copies of stuff I own and lost on the dead drive), and I recovered a little more from what tiny percentage of my music was on my little 8GB iPhone. Now I've pulled eight (8!!) boxes of CDs from the attic and am selectively re-ripping stuff to fill in the holes in my collection.

• Keep your CDs; don't sell them to the used CD stores unless you really don't like them. You'll never know when you might need that media again.

I'll conclude this little blog post with a relevant bible verse (you didn't know I had it in me, didja?):
To write the same things again is no trouble to me, and it is a safeguard for you.
- The Apostle Paul, Phil 3:1, advocating backups.

• 11:47 @magn0lia Congratulations! You're a "chiroprac". Or a "ropractor". One of those. #

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• 08:34 Strong black coffee; further evidence that I'm turning into my grandfather. (Albeit, with a french press in place of his percolator.) #
• 17:54 Up at 8th and NE Dekum, waiting for the start of the Portlandia Obscuria ride. w00t, #Pedalpalooza ! #

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• 11:02 It is possible I spend far too much time cleaning my bike's drivetrain. Maybe. #
• 18:01 Easily 5x the people at the #Pedalpalooza Taco Ride than were at the Chocolate Ride. PDX has a thing for tacos, I guess. #
• 22:00 Why expect CNN and NYT to be all over the election fraud in Iran? Seems consistent with their investigations of election fraud in the US. #

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• 18:50 This is the first time I've realized how much the coach of the Orlando Magic looks like Ron Jeremy. I'm totally distracted now. #

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• 07:02 Out in the yard before 7 am, edging the lawn. Yeah, I'm not sure it made sense to me, either. #
• 11:43 Had to leave staff meeting early. Didn't get to enjoy potluck, or even hear response to what I brought. (chocolate-orange cheesecake) Sad. #
• 12:10 At the #Pedalpalooza Chocolate Tour ride. I am cracking up at stickers on bikes. "I wish my boyfriend was as dirty as my bike." #
• 13:26 @gorthx One of us, one of us, one of us... ;-) #
• 15:14 Technically, the Morrison Bridge is not bikable. "Ooops." #
• 20:04 Sublime bumpersticker: "I'm not sure about John Travolta anymore." #seeninpdx #
• 00:06 Staggered at the size of the crowd at the MMR! #

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• 12:56 My shiny new 14.7 megapixel camera came with a 32 meg memory card. Yeah, _that's_ useful. #
• 13:58 @mmmmbobo A hi-res photo is 4416x3312 pixels. On disk, that photo is 4.4MB. So, the stock memory chip would hold about 7 photos. Sheesh. #
• 17:50 The crowd slowly builds for the #Pedalpalooza Kickoff ride. Sad to be doing it stag, but excited about the next two weeks. #
• 18:33 John Deere made bicycles? Who knew? yfrog.com/1550rj #
• 19:58 Nothing like biking up SE Hawthorne with several hundred people. -big stupid grin- #pedalpalooza #

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• 08:08 Here's hoping today car repair goes as fast, cheap and painless as yesterday's bike repair. #
• 12:14 So much for fast, cheap or painless. Looks like someone backed into parked Element with trailer hitch and borked the radiator. $$$$ Wahh! #

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• 09:25 Trying to remember how to be sociable with strangers. #
• 19:52 Oh good, I _needed_ car problems. #

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I saw a group dynamic interaction that amused and puzzled me this morning, which I felt like sharing.

I joined some people for a "coffee klatch" this morning; the hostess is someone I know from about a year ago and had fallen out of touch with, so I decided to show up and catch up. As is often the case with these events, a number of the attendees showed up with their laptops, taking advantage of the coffeeshop's free wifi in the midst of conversations and chit-chat.

A new person came in, and I jokingly said, "Where's your laptop? You didn't get the memo to bring yours?" Apparently, this was the wrong joke to make. She immediately frowned and went into a minor rant about how rude it was that people brought laptops to these events, and they kill conversation, and she just didn't understand what people were thinking, being so inconsiderate!

Oookay, so I pushed a button there. Thankfully, I hadn't brought my laptop with me today, so in her eyes I wasn't included as "one of them" (though I so very much am). I stepped away for a bit to get some coffee and to ponder my reaction and a reasonable response. My first thought was, "Hmm, so bringing a laptop to a klatch is rude, but immediately joining a group and complaining about how rude everyone else is, that's fine. Alrighty then."

My other observation was that I hadn't noticed the laptops stifling conversation. It's not like people were head-down clacking at the keyboard ignoring the group. Instead they were bringing up photos of things they wanted to show, looking up articles on wikipedia to share information about a particular topic being discussed, looking up the event calendar to tell people about upcoming gatherings. To me, the computers felt like definite accessories to the conversation, not impediments.

Pondering all this, I got my coffee and returned to the table... to find the entire group in conversation... except for the ranter... who was quietly ignoring the group while she read her newspaper. I considered trying to point out the obvious, and decided to let it go.

• 10:31 @Lonnerz Read things backwards. Really, from right to left, bottom to top. You'll catch all sorts of typos that way. #
• 13:33 @Lonnerz Also, make sure one of your last edits happens on a print-out. Dunno why, but you'll see many more errors on paper than on screen. #
• 18:10 Just learned about single track on Powell Butte. (duh) Biked from Springwater up to gorgeous lookout at top. (pant) #

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