Passover Weekend

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This weekend was the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Now I never claim to be a religious person but on a holiday like this I do get together with my family and do the whole family holiday thing. If anything, it is nice to get together with my family.

On Saturday I went with my parents to my mom’s friend Martha’s house for the first night of Passover. It was a nice night. Thankfully I wasn’t the only person my age there. I was the only guy, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Overall it was a nice evening. Carrie and the kids were in Jamaica, or shall I say coming back from Jamaica so we didn’t see them on Saturday. What is so weird about going to my mom’s friend Martha’s is that my mom actually met her through me. Martha was actually one of my High School history teachers. I actually did well in her class, and ended up doing service work for her in I think the attendance dept. Turned out that she went to the same beach club my family went to, so my mom and dad would meet up with her and her husband every so often. After I was out of school I guess the began hanging out more, and last spring my mom went to europe with her. Martha is a knowledgeable traveler. Well I just find it a funny side story, so i decided to throw it in here.

Sunday the entire family went to my sisters father in law’s apartment in Manhattan. That meant that besides Zachary & Morgan there where 3 other little ones. Lauren and andrew were there with the twins (Ethan & Tyler) and Evan. There was lots of yelling and running around, but they are all so cute! It wasn’t a restful night but it was fun getting together with everyone.

My Presentation

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We had our annual division town hall meeting last Friday. It is where the entire division gets together to talk about what we did and where we are going. It is kind of boring, but very informative at the same time. On Monday I ended up volunteering to present my departments slides for the presentation. The other manager who did the slides ended up scheduling a day off on the day of the presentation and they needed someone at the last minute, so I volunteered. I know why would I volunteer? I don’t know. I figured the other manager in my department isn’t a native english speaker, and if I didn’t volunteer he would get stuck with it or my boss would have to do it. I figured not a big deal i’ll do it. Sorry dad, I know you always said never volunteer for anything unless there is more money in it for me! I am a disappointment!

As it turns out the preparation for the presentation (an hour plus long meeting) was worse than the actual presentation. I did my slides perfectly or so I think. I only started fumbling on my words when I tried to ad lib my summary. Oh well. It was a long afternoon but at least I got out of work at 4PM and headed over to the House of Brews to celebrate John’s birthday.

Personal Wiki

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Years ago Gus showed me a personal wiki software package. I think it was active words. I am not even sure if you would call that a wiki, but it was a personal organization program. At the time I wasn’t interested. Recently however I have wanted to have a place where I can put important or repetitive personal information in. I had been keeping notepad items on my smart phone for years, but when I last looked I had like 50+ notes. It was too much to manage in that system. After some searching my favorite productivity sites (Lifehacker, 43 Folders, etc.) I stumbled across VoodooPad for the Mac. I actually remember reading about it a while back but never used it. This week however I downloaded the free version and I already moved all my notepad items into it. I am about ready to buy the paid version to get the extra features. I like its functionality, and also the ability to export everything to XML, TXT, or HTML. With that option if I ever feel like leaving the program I am not locked into some proprietary format. I like that.

More opinions as I use the software.

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Deduplicate Photos

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My entire childhood memories are stuck on 35mm slides and tons of photos stacked in baskets at my parents house. The storage of the photos has caused allot of damage to the photos. It has also caused everything to be disorganized. I have tried to get my dad to scan as many slides and photos into the computer as possible. I have also taken as many photos as I could and scanned them. I figure i have the ability to do it, so why pay someone to do it. The issue is it is time consuming and not a perfect system. I have had a problem with duplicate photos in my photo archive for some time. It has been really annoying, but I haven’t put any effort into fixing it. This morning after cleaning up my apartment I decided to figure out how to solve my issue. 5 minutes of google searching later I found Duplicate Annihilator for iPhoto.

One dry run with their shareware version of the software got me hooked to buy the full software that will scan my entire iPhoto library. For $7.95 it was worth it! My only issue is that I keep the original photos and my iPhoto archive. I don’t trust a program that won’t let me get easy access to my original data. My paranoia paid off a few months ago when my iPhoto library got corrupted and i needed to restore an old one and then re-import the more recent files i created. Once I am done de-duplicating my images I now need to export what I have from iPhoto to replace the stand alone files.

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Too Much Drink

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Last night I went out to celebrate my friend John’s birthday. It was John, Jayson and a bunch of John’s friends. We went to the House of Brews. It was fun, but I didn’t realize I drank as much as I did, or the desert I had for dinner hurt me. Either way I had a horrible night. I felt sick all night and barely slept. I ended up lying around my apartment the entire day trying to recover. So I learned that no I shouldn’t have chocolate peanut butter cake for dinner, and I shouldn’t drink that much! I knew the later part, but I never learn!

Sick Day

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I woke up this morning with a head ache. For me that is never a good sign. It means a migraine is soon to follow. Because I knew I haven’t been sleeping well this weekend, and the head ache, I was pre-emtive and took a sick day off from work. I am glad I did. I went back to sleep and woke up at around noon. I needed the rest. I was bored the rest of the day though. I hate sick days. I usually need the rest but it is boring stuck at home.

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I Want A Time Machine

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Since I cannot afford a Tardis, I am settling for the Apple version of a Time Machine. After much delay (October) I finally am setting up Time Machine. The delay was not really my fault. I didn’t want to use Time Machine on a local disk attached to my Macbook, but Apple hadn’t released the software to allow you to backup to a remote share. Yesterday they finally updated the software on the Airport Extreme base station to allow this neat function. Firmware 7.3.1 now lets me use Time Machine to a 250gb drive plugged into my base station. I had to plug my printer directly into my Macbook to free up the USB port but it should be worth it.

I am currently running my first backup now. Lets see if this touted feature is really worth it. Time Machine wont fully replace Synk just yet. I will need Synk to continue to backup data I have on an external drive.

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The Piano Bar

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Last night I went back to Sweet Caroline’s with some friends. My friend Grechen’s friend was having a birthday get together there so a bunch of people went. Like last weekend, it was allot of fun. This time I didn’t drink as much, but it was a good show.

The Drobo

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My friend John told me about this neat external drive unit a few months ago called the Drobo. I took a look at the web page and was instantly curious. My only issues were the price and how they actually got RAID like data protection. After some reading I was comfortable with the units functionality but the cost was still a factor. The dam thing is $499 for just an empty chassis. My problem is the Drobo could solve many of my storage issues. I currently have no less than 8 external drives in my home computer setup. This doesn’t count my portable drive I have VM’s on that i shuttle back and forth to work, and the external units (that are mine) at work. Most of them are 250 gig drives. I have slowly been consolidating when I buy newer bigger drives. The problem is I am getting more and more drive space but I have no good backup for all this data. The really important stuff is replicated to a backup drive, but the stuff that would be a pain in the ass to replace but too costly to replicate is still a problem.

That was until Tuesday. I finally broke down and spent some of my tax return money and got a Drobo and some drives. Even with its cost, the benefit of having some true disaster recovery ability at home was too much to pass up. So far I am very happy with the unit. I will slowly add 2 additional 1TB drives over the next few months. I started out with 2 1TB drives in the unit. That gives me 1TB of usable space. What is good about the Drobo is that it gives you RAID1 or 5 like protection but allows you more flexibility when upgrading drives.

The Drobo

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