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After reading my post about not be tagged, Davis Freeberg decided to include me in the fun and tag me it. Now, I have to come up with five things that most people don’t know about me. After that I need to tag five other people.

Five things you probably don’t know about me:

1. I plan on buying a MacBook shortly after Macworld. Why wait for Macworld you ask? Well, I’d hate to buy a Mac now only to find out that something new is going to be released shortly after Macworld.
2. I am a proud father of a 22 month old son and my wife is pregnant with our second child!
3. I have a bachelors degree in computer science from Alfred University.
4. The first movie I ever watched on VHS was The Neverending Story.
5. My first computer was a Compaq Presario with a 1.5GB hard drive and a 133 Mhz processor.

Now that I’ve completed my list, I’m going to tag: MegaZone from TiVoLovers.com, Jim Muller (a good friend of mine), Brad Linder from PVRWire, Stephen Mack & Chris.

One of my biggest fears is that I will some how loose all the pictures that I’ve taken over the past six years. Many of these pictures are irreplaceable. Like pictures from the birth of my son or pictures from when my wife and I went to Europe. Needless to say, I’d feel horrible if I lost even one picture from my collection. With that being said, I’ve been pretty good about backing things up. In the past I would backup my pictures to an external USB drive. I would also backup to a DVD at the end of each year. Both of these backup techniques have a number of shortfalls. My external hard drive wouldn’t save me if I were to have a fire in my house or if my computer were some how damaged. My DVD backup system was a little better in that I stored offsite at my parents however, backing up to a DVD is a lengthy process which requires me to be proactive. Needless to say, months would go by without me backing up to the DVD simply because I would forget.

Recently my hosting company increased my storage capacity to 55 Gigabytes at the same time, they also increased my bandwidth to 999 Gigabytes of transfer per month. Being the big geek that I am, I immediately saw this as an opportunity for me to backup my pictures to a remote location which is hopefully better protected from power failures and fires then my computer. With the help of SyncBackSE, I now have a safe and secure backup of all 23 GBs of my pictures. SyncBack is great because it allows me to schedule ftp backups while I’m asleep. I currently have Syncback setup so that it copies any new pictures to my hosting account at 1 AM est. It took me nearly a week to get everything transferred (due to my internet connection dropping and slow upload speeds) but now things are going smooth. I really think this process will work out great for me. I’m still backing up to my external hard drive as well as the DVDs but, now I’m not as worried tha I will somehow loose all of my precious data.

PS: In case you can’t tell, I would highly recommend SyncBack to just about anybody. The software has some many features that it makes a geek like me smile. If you’re a cheapskate and you don’t want to spend $25 for the full version, you can even download a copy of the free version which includes most of the features found in the $25 version.

How do you backup your precious data?

I published this last year but I thought it was so good that I’m posting it again:

1. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18)in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average(census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
2. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west(which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second–3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles
   per hour.
3. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself.On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them–Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
4. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance–this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
5. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

Here’s a great little post that I found which tries to answer this question :).

I think he is a Democrat because he…

• illegally crosses U.S. borders every year
• works just one night a year

I kind of feel left out. Everybody else seems to be blogtagging but I haven’t been tagged yet. What am I not cool or something ? Anybody want to blogtag me so that I don’t feel left out?

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I received this error message when I tried to access WinterCampers.com from Panera Bread’s free Wi-Fi service. Apparently Panera has SonicWall configured so that it denies any site with the word “Weapons” in it. I thought it was kind of funny :).