Second Ultrasound
May 11th, 2009
Three Anniversaries
March 11th, 2009
On March 11, 2006, my friends and family gathered at an isolated lodge in the woods at a local state park. I wore a white dress that made me feel like a Roman goddess. The band played Love Me Tender as Eric and I stood in front of the same preacher who officiated my parents’ wedding over twenty years earlier. On this day, three years ago, I was getting married.
Pocahontas State Park - March 11, 2006
On March 11, 2007, Eric and I had been living in our new condo for six months. We had been sleeping on futons on the floor in our sparsely decorated bedroom. We shopped for a proper bed and left the store with an assortment of new furniture that we didn’t know we needed. Eric loaded our purchases into the back of our Subaru. On this day, two years ago, I was shifting new furniture around.
Our Bedroom - March 11, 2007
On March 11, 2008, a three-hour journey from Osaka delivered us to a small town at the top of a wooded mountain. I drank hot coffee in a can purchased from a vending machine at the train station. After leaving our backpacks in the temple where we’d be spending the night, we walked through a Buddhist graveyard in the darkness. On this day, one year ago, I was in Japan.
Koya, Japan - March 11, 2008
On March 11, 2009, I listened to my favorite Nick Cave & The Badseeds as I drove home from treating myself to a hair cut at an Aveda salon. I made sushi with shrimp and imitation crab meat for dinner, then Eric and I watched season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fell asleep early under a quilt on our sofa. Today, on an otherwise unremarkable day, I took a pregnancy test. It was positive.
Homemade Sushi - March 11, 2009
Home Network: Backups
February 28th, 2009
Click for larger image
With four computers in our house, we have data everywhere. We knew that we needed to maintain a backup of the data in case a hard drive dies, but we weren’t sure of the best setup. We also wanted to have a networked device for our music, movies, and pictures. After scanning two shoeboxes-full of our old photos and disposing of the originals, it became even more important to have redundant backups. We set up the network illustrated above to have all of our data backed up to a central location that we can access from any computer and where it can be copied to an external hard drive and stored in a fire-proof box for even more insurance that we won’t lose anything important.
Beginning on the left of the diagram, our blogs, which are hosted off-site, are backed up to our laptops by a manually-run script. Our laptops are our primary computers for web-browsing, e-mail, listening to music, and watching movies. The data on our laptops, including the backups of our blogs, are then backed up to our network-attached storage (NAS) device along with select folders from our desktop computers. We use our desktop computers solely for playing games and using Photoshop, so we only need to back up our game-save files and the Photoshop files that are currently in use (I don’t save the .psd files after I finish editing a photo).
We also ripped every CD and DVD that we own to the NAS. The originals are stored in a plastic bin in our closet. When we want to watch a movie, we connect to the NAS. Same for music, since I only have enough space for a few GBs of music on my laptop at a time. Finally, all of our photos - nine years worth of photos together, plus scanned photos from our childhood - are also stored on this shared device. I dump all new photos here and copy them temporarily to my desktop computer when I want to edit them.
The NAS holds two 500 GB hard drives making up a RAID 1 array. This means that whatever is put on one hard drive is automatically synchronized on the second hard drive. If one hard drive dies, we have a redundant copy. This data is then copied a few times a year to an external hard drive which we store in a fire-proof box in our closet in case our condo burns down.
Coming next: Home Network: Organizing Photos
