Omega Point

Catherine’s Guide to Backups, Part 1

So there I was at Best Buy, finally tak­ing care of that “back­ups” busi­ness.¹

Since Apple added their super-convenient Time Machine app to Mac OS X 10.5 Leop­ard, I’d been mean­ing to get around to using it. A year later, I bought a sim­ple exter­nal USB drive, a West­ern Dig­i­tal MyPass­port. Easy. Tiny. USB-powered.²

So I finally made it to the counter to pay for the thing. No, I hadn’t shopped there before. Would I like to sign up for the Best Buy blah blah card thing? I sure would! And I pro­ceeded to do so. Take that, peo­ple behind me in line.

“Oh, my email address? Cer­tainly. It’s ‘catherine’…”

*tap tap tap*

“at”

*tap tap tap*

“cather­ine–”

*DELETE DELETE DELETE*

“Uh…no. I mean, yes, my name is Cather­ine. You spelled that cor­rectly. My email address is Cather­ine at CatherineWinters.com.”

*tap tap tap*

“Cather­ine with a ‘C’.”

And so on and so forth. So that was pretty fun.

Pro­tip: Once Best Buy secu­rity agrees not to call the police if you promise never to set foot in the store again, you can par­ti­tion your exter­nal drive as half Time Machine and half stor­age, for­mat­ting it for convenience’s sake as NTFS, not MacOSX-native HFS+. The NTFS 3G dri­ver for OSX allows you to both read and write NTFS-formatted dri­ves, and you’ll still be able to con­nect to Win­dows PCs should need arise.

If you do this, how­ever, you have to be really care­ful about eject­ing the stu­pid thing prop­erly. If any files get dam­aged, you’ll lose write access to the NTFS par­ti­tion and the result­ing error mes­sage will in no way be help­ful. If you sud­denly find that you can’t write to an NTFS-formatted disk, plug the thing into a Win­dows PC and run chkdsk on it to fix the errors.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, I just saved you three hours of Googling.

Next Time: In Case of Fire.

1. Yeah, you know that time that your com­puter died and you lost every­thing and you said, “next time, I’m going to do reg­u­lar back­ups” and then you didn’t? I’m mar­gin­ally smarter than you. [↩]
2. Unfor­tu­nately, my 5-year-old Dell 24″ mon­i­tor has a crappy, crappy USB hub that causes my Mac­Book Pro to ker­nel panic when­ever Time Machine starts–Windows users: that’s the OSX ver­sion of a blue­screen. There’s an app for that. So I lose a USB port; no hub for you, WD My Pass­port! This is actu­ally a good rea­son to use Firewire, come to think of it. [↩]

Catherine Grows as a Person

Since attend­ing Media that Mat­ters 2009 at Hol­ly­hock this May, I’ve been feel­ing very introspective.

To say I was skep­ti­cal of some aspects of the con­fer­ence before­hand would be a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble under­state­ment. On the ride up with for­mer coworker Jnet:
Her: “So are you recov­ered from your flu?” [Swine flu, I swear.]
Me: “I guess, yeah… I’m still not very hun­gry.“
Her: “Well, you’ll have lots of good veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing at Cortes.“
Me: “…Whaaah? Awwww.”

I know! For­tu­nately, said veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing turned out to be deli­cious and, con­trary to our hosts’ warn­ing, I didn’t totally fart the entire time. Upon leav­ing Cortes, Jnet and I imme­di­ately went to a Wendy’s in Camp­bell River, but that’s nei­ther here nor there. It was good, trust me.

Now, I’m not a super-huggy per­son, and there was a bit more hug­ging than I’m used to, which is hon­estly say­ing a lot, com­ing from the Van­cou­ver social media scene. There was also a sub­stan­tially greater-than-usual amount of talk­ing about ambi­tions and goals and feel­ings and things. On the other hand, there were parts I was really inter­ested in, such as answer­ing the ques­tion, “is it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a new medium and use it for artis­tic pur­poses with­out the first few years of its exis­tence being used expressly to dis­cuss that medium?” (See pho­tog­ra­phy, cave paint­ing, the web, Twit­ter, etc.) The answer: maybe?

Despite my skep­ti­cism, it turned out that there were parts that proved extremely valu­able to me. Incred­i­bly, these were the parts that involved tack­ling issues and feel­ings! And talk­ing about them! If the words “coach­ing cir­cle” make you wrin­kle your nose in pain, you’re expe­ri­enc­ing more or less the same sort of antic­i­pa­tion as I was beforehand.

And yet, the coach­ing cir­cle was extremely help­ful after all. Of course, there were still parts of Media that Mat­ters that I was per­haps a lit­tle too much of a cyn­i­cal prude to enjoy.

So I got back and decided I needed to make some changes. So I’m try­ing new things this sum­mer. First of all, as men­tioned in my last post, my knees have finally recov­ered enough for me to get places with my exer­cise reg­i­men. (I think my prob­lem with the sta­tion­ary bike is that I get bored and always have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that I’m accom­plish­ing less than I ought to be. I might end up buy­ing a trainer for my bike, since there’s plenty on Craigslist, but actu­ally using it with­out feel­ing like I’m just screw­ing around, that will be the challenge.)

So, exer­cise. What else?

• Writ­ing more. Theoretically.
• Actu­ally build­ing a bicy­cle instead of just buy­ing one.
• Knit­ting classes at Three Bags Full on Main Street. I’ve never knit before.
• Going to more art shows. More bar­be­ques. More events.
• Quit­ting my job and going to art school.

Oh yeah. That last one. I’m enter­ing Lan­gara College’s Fine Arts pro­gram in Sep­tem­ber, then trans­fer­ring to Emily Carr to fin­ish up my under­grad. So that’s new too.

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver — Learning in Virtual Worlds!

This Wednes­day, (March 21st, 2007) I and the rest of the Social Sig­nal team will be at Social Tech Brew­ing Van­cou­ver, for this month’s topic, “Learn­ing in Vir­tual Worlds”.*

From the Social Sig­nal blog:

If you work at the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­ogy and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for the March gath­er­ing of Social Tech Brewing’s Van­cou­ver chap­ter. Social Tech Brew­ing brings together folks from social media, non­profit orga­ni­za­tions, com­mu­nity ser­vice, social activism, social ven­tures and tech­nol­ogy to share ideas — and beer!

Beer! Vir­tual worlds! Community-building! It’s got it all! If that sounds like your mug of beer, you should join us!

From 7–8 PM, we’ll be at Work­Space at 21 Water St. (See Google Maps)
After­wards, we’ll be mov­ing across the street to Six Acres.

See the blog post at SocialSignal.com for more or RSVP here!

* You know, like that Sec­ond Life thing.

Why is the Pentagon pentagonal?

One of ben­e­fits of being me is that I have the sort of ran­dom thoughts that other peo­ple can gen­er­ally only expe­ri­ence dur­ing some kind of med­ical exper­i­ment involv­ing the injec­tion of highly con­cen­trated THC directly into the brain. For exam­ple, when drift­ing off to sleep the other night, it occurred to me to ask: why is the Pen­ta­gon pentagonal?

Huh. Why is it? That can’t be the cheap­est design for a build­ing in wartime.
A short getting-out-of-bed-instead-of-sleeping later, I was much more knowl­edge­able about mid-20th-Century civil plan­ning projects than I had been before.

From Wikipedia:

Its unusual shape results from the fact that its orig­i­nally intended site, Arling­ton Farms, fronted on Arling­ton Ridge Road and the Arling­ton Memo­r­ial Bridge approach, which inter­sected at an angle of approx­i­mately 108 degrees (the angle of a reg­u­lar pen­ta­gon). Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt had it con­structed at its cur­rent loca­tion because he didn’t want the new build­ing to obstruct the view of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. from Arling­ton Cemetery.

In fact, Arling­ton Ridge Road no longer exists, its route now mostly replaced by Eisen­hower Drive, which winds through an expanded Arling­ton National Ceme­tery and ter­mi­nates near the orig­i­nal site. The Pen­ta­gon was con­structed as planned, just some­what south of its intended location.