Google has a funny view of time

Monty Python fans will particularly appreciate the last one, but I have to say that the skidoo one is pretty darn good, too.

Of course, my first reaction was that this is some kind of scam or spam. But I checked the e-mail headers, and the email originated from a navy.mil server. Then I checked the originating IP address, and it’s registered to the Department of the Navy. And a quick Google search revealed that the Seabees do have a facilities center in the California city that was in the sender’s sig line.

I gave the permission, after checking with Tom to make sure he had no objection. The intended use seems to be for a printed handbook, but I’m kind of hoping that they re-publish it online somewhere. Tom initially said “no online use” — his concern was that if the Navy published it, people would think we stole the article from the Navy. But I made it a condition of our permission that any online use would not only include the credit line, but that the credit line would include a link to Tropical Boating.

Whether they’ll ever use it online or not, I have no idea. But if they do, we’ll get a .mil inbound link to Tropical Boating. And Tom can truthfully say that the Navy is using him as a resource for training its sailors.

It looked like a nice set of knives, and I was thinking about buying them. But the seller, mr.fareira1980, totally lost me with his rant about all the lazy sellers who steal his photos. This was a listing with a starting bid of $550! Not surprisingly, there weren’t any bids placed.

A note to mr.fareira1980, if you happen to read this, polish up your listings a little bit, please. I don’t care how unjust you think it is that other sellers steal your photos; what I’m interested in is buying some nice Wusthof knives. I’m most definitely not interested in sitting through a rant about how upset you are about what some other sellers are doing.

This conversation occurred during a 2-hour drive on the interstate, so rather than let the question lie, I pulled out my iPhone and Googled the question. It turns out that Craigslist does indeed charge for some postings — they charge for job listings in a handful of cities, and for apartment listings in New York. That’s it.They pay their expenses, and I’m sure they make a nice profit, but surely they could make a lot more than that.

Even if all they did was place a single unobtrusive Google AdSense ad on each page, they would reap a heckuva lot of money. They could make even more with some private paid advertising, affiliate marketing, and charging for more classifieds postings. Craigslist is one of the highest-traffic sites on the entire Internet; they could be raking in the dough.

So why don’t they?

“Users haven’t expressed an interest in seeing ads,” said Jim Buckmaster, according to an article in a NY Times blog post.

When an analyst wanted to know how Craigslist planned to maximize revenues, Buckmaster replied, “That definitely is not part of the equation.”

That’s just weird. Why would you not want to make money?

This particular keyboard has one particular feature that I really like: The alternate characters (such as ®, ©, ‡, ¶, and others that aren’t accessed via regular keys) are printed right on the face of the keys, so it’s easy to find the particular one I’m looking for, and I can type them by simply hitting option-key or option-shift-key.

There were two keys that were problematic on this keyboard, though. The caps-lock key has been moved from its normal home on the far left of the keyboard, above the shift key, over to the right side of the bottom row, between the option and control keys. I found that I was frequently hitting caps-lock instead of option. The Mac’s System Preferences -> keyboard modification allowed me to change that mapping, and now my caps-lock key acts liks the option key. I virtually never use caps-lock, so this is a perfectly acceptable solution.

The other problem was, the help and delete keys are lower than I’m used to, and so I was frequently hitting help when I was reaching for delete. Which opens the help viewer, which I then have to close, and then I can delete whatever I trying to delete. The built-in keymapping options didn’t allow me to change that, but a little freeware program called Ukulele solved that problem handily. Now my help key acts like a second delete key, and it doesn’t matter which of those two keys I hit. I rarely use the help files, and when I do I usually access them from the menu using the mouse, so that also is a perfectly fine solution.

The Matias USB 2.0 Keyboard for Mac

Now that I’ve found a keyboard I like, I’m thinking I should order a lifetime supply. I’m quite sure they’ll stop making it.

For many years, I’ve been very good about backing up my computer. I learned that lesson back when I worked in a real office for a real company. Our graphic artist had been working on a very important Photoshop file for over a year. She wasn’t working on that file every day, but whenever she had some time in between other routine projects. The day was almost at hand when she would need to send that file to the printer, so she was stepping up the amount of time she was spending working on this file. The project this file was for was extremely important, and there was no wriggle room in the schedule or the production deadline. At the time, the best backup system available to us was a tape backup system, and she rotated her backups through 5 different tapes, one for each business day of the week. She religiously ran her backup every day to the appropriate tape.

One day, she went to work on the file and it wouldn’t open. Photoshop reported it was corrupted. She tried everything. She called our tech support. Nothing would open that file. Well, okay, she’s got five backups. Pop in the most recent backup tape. The file was corrupted. No problem, there are 4 more backups. She’ll lose a day or two of work, but it’s not a big deal. Pop in the second most recent backup. The file was corrupted. Still not a big deal, one of the remaining 3 backups will surely be good. The third most recent backup — the file was corrupted. Now she’s pretty concerned.

The fourth most recent backup — the file was corrupted. She’s on the verge of panic, and is about to slit her wrists or jump out the nearest window.

The fifth — and last — backup. The file was good! Phew! Okay, she lost 5 days worth of work, but a major disaster was averted.

It turned out that the spools on the tape drive were defective and were stretching the tape as it recorded her data. We were very lucky that the one tape contained her file intact.

The Take-Home Lesson

The take-home lesson from that little adventure is, never rely on one single backup method.

I have an almost-perfect backup system.

• I have several extra hard drives attached to my Mac. I use a great donation-ware utility called Carbon Copy Cloner to run scheduled clones daily, weekly, and bi-weekly. Two clones are “exact mirror” duplicates of my hard drive as it exists at the time of the backup, and two are “incremental” clones that copy over everything new and changed from my main hard drive, but leaves on the clone anything that no longer exists on my main hard drive. The mirrored clones are cloned every day on alternating days. In case of catastrophic failure of my main drive, I could boot from one of the mirrored clones and it would be just as if I had booted from my main drive, with absolutely everything intact and in exactly the same state it was in at the time of the clone. The two incremental clones serve as backups to my mirrored clones, and also allow me to easily retrieve older files that I’ve dumped from my main hard drive, by a simple drag-and-drop.
• Additionally, I use Retrospect to back up my user files to DVD. I rotate between two Retrospect schedules. One runs nightly, in the evening after I’m done working for the day. The other one runs weekly, and backs up my files to a different backup set. The first set maintains a daily archive of all my files, and the second set maintains a weekly archive of all my files.
• I also use Time Machine, Apple’s “Easy Button” backup solution. I didn’t think I would like Time Machine, but I do. I purchased an additional external hard drive to use as my Time Machine disk, and Time Machine runs in the background every hour, backing up whatever files I’ve changed in the past hour. The thing I like best about Time Machine is that it’s so easy to grab any recent version of a file. If I’m working on some particularly complex bit of php code, and I’ve completely bollixed it up, I can use Time Machine to go back to the version I had saved an hour ago, or two hours ago, or earlier. Time Machine wouldn’t be my first choice for a complete restore in case of hard drive failure, but it’s an additional option in case all of my other backups fail simultaneously.

I like Time Machine so much that I bought another hard drive for my husband to use, because he doesn’t back up nearly often enough. Just yesterday he commented to me that he plugs in his Time Machine disk to his laptop every couple of days at the office and lets it do its thing. A backup once every couple of days wouldn’t be nearly enough for me, but it’s a lot better than Tom’s previous backup schedule, which was once every month or two, at best.

I use some other backup approaches, as well. Since I use Parallels virtualization software, with 3 different very large virtual disk images of three different Windows operating systems, and since I use Entourage, with its stupendously stupid monolithic database, I exclude those from my Time Machine and Retrospect backups. I work with a lot of MySQL databases, and those don’t live in my user directory, nor are they easily accessible in the Finder. So I have a couple of cron scripts that generate a complete database dump and a copy of my Entourage database every morning. The computer turns itself on at 5am, and the cron scripts run shortly thereafter. The Windows virtual disk images I just don’t worry about — I don’t keep anything critical on those, so I would just re-install Windows if anything happened to those.

The Weakness in my System

The only weakness in my multilayered backup system is that I have no offsite backups, other than files that I’ve uploaded to the web server. If the house burned down with all my backups, I’d be in a bad way. I’ve been considering signing up for Mozy, or simply using the “poor man’s backup system” by having my husband carry one of my external clones back and forth to his office. The likelihood that his office and our house would both burn down at the same time is extremely low, so that should be pretty safe.

My backup strategy may seem like overkill, but it’s a beefed-up version of my previous backup system, which included a Retrospect backup to DVD and a clone to an extra internal hard drive. At the beginning of this year, both my main hard drive and my cloned hard drive failed at the same time. I ended up replacing the whole computer. Since I had my daily Retrospect backups on DVD, I was able to restore all my files — but it took days to reinstall all my programs, restore all my files, restore my databases, and re-configure all the configurations and settings to where my computer was in a usable state. I had to install php and MySQL, get all the customized Apache configurations back the way I wanted them, enter dozens of application license codes, and generally spend a lot of time messing with things before I was able to do a lick of work for any paying clients.

I was pleased that I didn’t lose any important files (or any files, for that matter), but I was terribly unhappy at the time I had to spend restoring my system. So I instituted additional backups to additional media. Everything runs automatically, so all I have to do is pop in the appropriate DVD regularly. I won’t rest easy until I’m doing regular off-site backups, though.

For years, I’ve used the iMediaKey from Macally. I liked that keyboard. It was almost as comfortable to use as the original Apple extended keyboard. For a long time, whenever I spilled coffee on it or needed a new one for any other reason, I ordered another identical keyboard. I wish now I had bought up a lifetime supply, because Macally has stopped making them.

I’ve tried Apple’s fancy new brushed-metal keyboard. I kept reading reviews by people who said it took them a while to get used to it, but once they did, they wouldn’t want to use anything else. Well, I tried for several months to get used to it, and I just couldn’t. There’s not enough tactile feel to the keys or sufficient tactile feedback on keypress. Too many typos, too slow, not comfortable to use. I’ve decided that any of the new “slim” style keyboards are just not for me. Which makes it difficult to find a good keyboard, because that’s what all the keyboard makers seem to be moving toward.

I also tried the white keyboard that Apple was shipping with its Macs for a while. It’s not a “slim” style, and it has better tactile feedback, but still too many typos and not very comfortable. The biggest problem is that the keyboard has virtually no bezel or frame around the outside. Whenever I rest my elbow on the desk while reading over something, my arm presses against the space bar and I end up entering hundreds of space characters in whatever document I’m working on, until I notice it.

I had been wanting to try the Matias Tactile Pro keyboard. Everyone says it’s the closest thing ever to the original Apple extended keyboard. But they apparently don’t make it anymore. I’ve read up on the keyboards from DiNovo & Logitech — none of them appeal to me. I’ve rejected out of hand any PC keyboards. My husband uses a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard with his laptop, and he loves it. But the labeling of the alt, control and “windows” keys always throws me off — I want to use the Command key, goshdernit, not the control key!

Yesterday I ordered the USB 2.0 keyboard from Matias. It looks promising. I’ll post an update after it arrives and I’ve had a chance to try it out.

A little about me: I develop web sites for a living. My husband sells boats. We also buy boats: We have a Com-Pac Sun Cat, a Boston Whaler, a couple of Hobie Adventure Islands, several kayaks, an ancient aluminum boat, an inflatable dinghy, and a jet ski. We like to sail, fish, go cruising around the harbor, and generally mess about in boats.

We have a dog, Libby. She’s part German Shepherd, part junkyard dog. She’s six months old today, and already over 60 pounds. The vet says there might be a little Mastiff in there. We recently lost our old dog, Tango, to old age, and our middle-aged dog, Misty, to aggressiveness.

We live on several acres east of Punta Gorda. We do in fact live in a swamp — our property is on the inside of a bend of Shell Creek, with 100 yards of swamp between the creek and dry ground, on 3 sides. So we’re surrounded by what is now often called “wetlands.” But really, it’s swampland, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We have a spring-fed pond in our front yard. I just recently used the “area calculation” function on my new handheld Garmin GPS/chartplotter to determine that the pond is just about one-third of an acre in size. The pond is popular with our friends and neighbors. Sometimes, on a week-end or holiday, while we’re getting a boat ready to go out, friends come over to swim in the pond. It seems that everyone has to go somewhere else. Even though we live in a veritable paradise, we leave our paradise even while our friends come over to partake of our paradise. It’s all good, though.

I use a Mac and have an iPhone. In fact, our entire household is pretty Mac-centric: Two Mac Book Pros, a Mac Pro, two iPhones, an Airport Extreme Base Station. I do run Windows on my Mac — I would never use Windows voluntarily; I only use it because the nature of my work requires it. I have Windox XP, Windows Vista, and the RC version of Windows 7 installed on my Mac using virtualization technology.

A couple of days ago, someone searched Google for:
how to sue somebody on trumped up charges

My business blog at tropicalwebworks.org turned up #4 in that search. The person actually clicked through to the page, even though it’s clearly not about suing somebody on trumped-up charges.

Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30″ sign.

We used old-fashioned pieces of paper and had to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines.

The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.

When they asked for my picture ID (yay Florida!), I had a little trouble locating it. I could have used my state-issued CCW, but I didn’t want to scare anyone. It probably wouldn’t have bothered anyone (this is Florida, after all, plenty of people have carry permits), but it just didn’t seem appropriate. There’s the soap box, the ballot box, and the ammo box — and by voting, I guess I’ve admitted that it’s not time for the ammo box just yet. A couple more seconds digging located my driver license, so it wasn’t a problem anyway.