I've always liked buying new hardware and assembling new computers, it is my favorite part of a new build. Doing the research and figuring out the right components for my particular situation, just something about it that I have always liked.

I have been formulating my requirements for this particular project for quite some time. Mulling over the benefits of pulling the trigger sooner, or waiting and doing it later.

My house has modest computer needs. We have a few computers with what I consider quite a bit of data (maybe 1.5 TB total). Our computer sittuation looks like this:

• Laura's Computer: Mainly used for day to day tasks as well as Photoshop work for her business and her hobbies. She shoots with a Canon 5D and has been doing so for a while. When you figure in scans from her film days she is quickly approaching the 1TB storage limit on her computer. Laura's data is stored on Striped (RAID 1) array of 2x 1TB drives, she is rapidly approaching full on those. I should note, it is Windows Raid, and her desktop runs Vista Ultimate x64, which if my experience with windows RAID means it could be difficult to recover if, for example, we were forced to reformat and reinstall everything. Though it is protected against a single hard drive failure. She does NOT back up her data (I know begin the boo's now).
• Larry's Computer: This is mostly used for day to day stuff. I too dabble in photography, but to a much lesser degree then Laura. I have probably 100-200 GB's of photos. I also have a lot of music. I like to buy CD's and immediately rip them to my computer (I've been bitten before by the random car theft leaving me musicless). Because of my anal retentive OSS nutcase nature I tend to rip things in a lossless open format, so my cd's are ripped into FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). I have some .MP3 files, but for the most part I'm a FLAC man. My music Collection runs about 100GB's. Throw in my willingness to support the Ubuntu project by seeding torrents of the latest various releases, as well as other .iso's I have accumulated over time and you can see I have a mish mash of data, running around 300GB). Most of this data is spread accross 2x 250GB hard drives that operate completly independently of each other. I occassionally backup the pair to a third 400GB drive that I keep in my case, but it is only irregular and manual backups. This is just on my main computer!
• My Laptop: There is not much stored here, because I am frequently reconfiguring and reinstalling things to tweak it a bit, i'm a glutton. I do on occasion copy things down from my main machine to play around with them, so lets say... 100GB here (an overestimate I would say). My laptop has one 250GB SSD drive in it, it is not backed up at all.

As you can see your storage needs are not insignificant. And adding some data redundancy via a recoverable RAID solution seems like a good idea. So that is what I decided to do!

Every company wants their products to be the best. They want people to use what they have made and be amazed that it works so well that they tell all their friends and the theory of capitalism is proved once again. That is all good and fine until you resort to shady methods in order to produce information that pushes the masses in your favor. There is a difference between putting your best foot forward (read: marketing) and making false comparisons (read: deceiving).

Busting IE8’s Mythbusting

The makers of the Opera web browser have released an Alpha of their new technology to change the landscape of the internet. They call it Opera unite and the basic idea is to decentralize the content of the internet so that every connected computer is a server providing content for its users. It is certainly an interesting concept, but I'm not sure it will revolutionize the web the way Opera is intending. Here is a video that explains a bit better:

The Atlantic has up an article covering President Obama's address to the AMA.

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/06/obamas_speech_to_the_doctors.php

It is a difficult thing to forget the betrayal and deceit. I am an avid subscriber in the time heals all wounds philosophy of recovery. So far it has proved an effective method in dealing with the trauma of divorce. However recent events have made it obvious to me that while time does indeed heal my wounds it definitely does not remove the scars from said wounds.

Two years ago was an interesting time in my life. I had been attending college on and off for 7 years and my time of my formal education was coming to a close . Graduation was around the corner and within weeks I would be finished. All of the money, time, and effort that I had put into improving myself was finally going to be paying off. There was one final push, a large capstone project, remaining. The project deadline was fast approaching and I was starting to feel the weight of the week bearing down on me. It was a stressful time in my academic life to say the least.

I'm going to geek out on everyone for a bit. These are not well thought through ideas, just random thoughts. Any glaring holes in logic I blame on anyone else but me ;)

I have a bone to pick with makers of Operating Systems. It applies to everyone in the game, the makers of Windows, to the people involved with the Linux movement and everywhere in between. For a while now we have been involved, immersed if you will in the Web 2.0 movement. There are a lot of different variations on the differences between the Web 1.x and Web 2.0, let us assume for the sake of argument that the Web 2.0 phenomenon involves partially, or mainly the difference between a web that is content driven, and a web that is user driven.

It's a TED kind of day:

Another wonderful TED talk, this one from Ken Robinson on how out education systems are killing creativity in our children.

It happened one too many times, Amarok (Amarok) stopped playing my music. No good reason, just "too many errors". One last time it refused to play the one song I needed to hear right then. So it was time to switch. Pst... Listen (Listen), that is your queue.

I'm giving up form for function, the aesthetic for the operational. Its a tough choice, I've really loved Amarok, it was one of the first music players I scrobbled (My Last.fm profile) with. Now you can pick up scrobble integrated players at every turn.

First impressions, Listen just feels more like a Gnome app, which is not a surprise since Amarok has its roots so deep in the KDE world, and Listen is written in Python, which in my hobby coder world is my language of choice. We will have to see how things work out, I'm still hoping for something simple and elegant like foobar2000 (my all time favorite music player) or Songbird, and while I know I can run these via WINE, I'd rather support a native Linux option if I can.