PolarLava::Blog

"It's not going to stick because the ground is still too warm.  We nearly always see snow —at least flurries, in October."

Those would be my now immortal words to a coworker who moved to Buffalo from Florida last year.  I guess I was a little (!) wrong.  The official total was 22.6" at the airport.  At my house we were probably at about half that, but it's hard to tell because it was so wet that it packed down a lot.  And then it warmed up and started melting rapidly.  But in any case this was basically a "once a century storm" sort of thing.  There were predictions that we could see a few inches of snow with the "chance" of conditions producing "the perfect storm".  Which is exactly what happened.

I spent two long chilly days at home with the family, but had plenty of work to do around the house.  I don't have many trees in my yard, but my neighbor behind my house has two huge maples at the back of his lot.  These two trees dropped a good deal of limbs and debris in his yard, two other neighbor's yards as well as mine and  on my garage.  Thus there was plenty of cleaning up to be done.  Next up was hauling in wood and getting the fireplace going as it became clear that we might be without power for days.  Fortunately for us, it was "only" two days.  Others have not been so fortunate as they are still without power and in some cases, will be for the next week.  Compounding that was the rapidly melting snow and many have also been flooded.  Again, not me as we sit on ground that is always high and dry.  You can see the effects on my neighborhood from the pictures.  Fortunately the only tree casualty in my yard was my Japanese Maple that had a large branch fall on it and snap one of it's branches.  The other problem was my phone line's anchor pulled out of the house so the line fell in the street.  The wires remained connected so once the power came back on I still had phone and DSL internet access.

And that coworker?  Well, she unfortunately lives in Amherst, one of the hardest hit areas.  They got closer to 3 feet of snow and will be without power for quite some time yet.

So last Friday I decided that Amazon's S3 was the way to go so I opened up an account and started playing with a few s3 tools.  I've started collecting the useful things I've found on my s3 del.icio.us tag for those who might be interested in following suit.  Not something I'm looking for, but if you are simply looking to backup a Windows workstation, Jungle Disk looks like a good choice.

One thing I hadn't considered before was storing my mp3's ripped from my music collection.  That's a quick 7-8GB (and growing) I hadn't considered.  But to store that is still only $1.20/mo and $1.60 to upload it.  I'd say that's pretty reasonable and it seems safe and secure in the long run.  Thus the big upload push has begun…  Next up will be figuring out how to backup/rsync my website on a regular basis.

So for some time now I've contemplated the prospect of online backup/storage.  I don't have a lot of confidence in my home PC, nor do I have the time or mental fortitude to build and maintain a backup server.  I simply have other things I'd rather do with my time these days.  Thus I always thought that having secure remote storage would be ideal.  But when I first thought about it it wasn't a viable option because of the cost and the bandwidth to shuffle things back and forth.
——

This past week I read with interest Jeremy Zawodny's blog entries Replacing my home backup server with Amazon's S3 and A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools.  Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) seems just like the sort of thing I'm looking for although I haven't had time to really look into some of the tools available.  One thing that I wish it did have was SFTP or SCP access.

Among the comments some suggest using DreamHost to do something similar, but at a lower cost.  I'm all for that and for file storage I this would probably be workable even though I'd never consider using them for web hosting…I've read too many bad things even with all the talk I hear about how wonderful they are.  Thanks but no thanks.  Besides, this is outside the scope of what this entry is about.  It would also be nice primarily because it would be readily available via SFTP and SCP.  But the real downside is that it violates their Terms of Service which states "The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Webhosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website…" so at any time they could shut your file storage down.  Plus their infrastructure surely isn't as fault tolerant or distributed as Amazon's.

So at this point I'm looking at it a bit, but without any clear decisions.  I know I need to do something as most of my data at home is not reliably backed up and my photo collection just keeps growing.  At this point I know I would need 3-4GB right out of the gate to store all of it.  I'm sort of waiting to see what else Jeremy has to say on the matter, as well as his commenter's.  But if you're reading this, have some experience with online storage and have some ideas, please point me at anything you think might be useful.

So out of the blue I got an email today from a former co-worker, Eric Nagel who stumbled into my site.  Eric felt my original lava lamp didn't look good enough.  So he was kind enough to send me a new one that actually matched my color scheme.  Cool, but it had a white background so wasn't going to workout immediately.  So from the double cool catagory, Eric sent me a new one with a transparent background.  So if you jump over to the PolarLava front page, you'll see this nifty little change.  Thanks Eric.  :)

Knowing the ills that having a "mailto" link on your site brings, I've finally gotten around to creating a Contact page.  These have their own set of potentially exploitable ills, but I believe I've got that covered via data validation and not using the PHP mail() function.  So there you go…yet another feature that will rarely if ever get used.  :)

So I finally managed to drag my butt out of bed and ride outside this morning.  Between the cooler weather, rain, tiredness and general laziness, I haven't been riding outside much.  So it was nice actually get outside and have a good ride in decent weather.  And it was a very nice ride the first 90% of the way…

But just before I got to Deerwood Golf Course, heading south on Sweeney St. a car passed me from behind.  Not a big deal, it happens all the time.  But this time of year it's still pretty dark even near the end of my ride (6:15am).  So once this car passed and just as I started to look up the road, I see a guy on a bike sort of weaving right towards me from the other side of the road!  No lights, no reflectors and obviously no concern for me or himself.  Fortunately I had room to swerve to the right and avoid plowing head-on into this assclown.  I really believe that many people who don't ride seriously have no concept of how fast you may be moving.  In this case, I believe about 22mph.  I don't think they want to know what getting hit at that speed feels like anymore than I do.  Regardless, this is easily the closest I've come to being hit on my bike since having a car pull out in front of me a couple of years ago.

Needless to say he was barraged with some choice words after the fact.  I don't know if he was just a clueless "I ride on which ever side there's no cars on" knucklehead and/or whether he was making a long (i.e. straight line) turn into the golf course.  In any case, I don't have a lot of use or respect for somebody out riding their bike in the dark without any lights or reflectors of any kind.  That's just asking to get killed, trust me.  I've been riding in the dark for a number of years now and making yourself visible is rule #1…and #2…and #3.  And regardless of the time of day, KEEP RIGHT!