I will not be pigeonholed

…is Laura Bush’s Birthday. It’s also Will Rogers’ birthday. And Walter Cronkite’s. And that of a bunch of others. So let’s not forget their special days. Light a candle in their honor. Pick up a cupcake. Or at least a free coffee.

On my return this morning from a nice weekend autumn ride, I had a strange incident. Less than 3 miles from my home, riding north on Broadway, I caught up to a cyclist. Without sprinting, I passed by him. After about 10 seconds he zoomed right past me and yelled something.

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Sunday morning a male stranger came up to me and gave me a butt pat. My natural reaction might have been to punch him in the face. But instead, I, an unambiguously heterosexual male, accepted it. No, I appreciated it.

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I came up with a new title for my rarely-updated blog. I decided to rename it for two reasons. The first is that the previous title, Gingi, Interrupted, inspired by the memoir, Girl, Interrupted, was misleading. Unlike some of the characters in the story, I am not suicidal and I don’t have borderline personality disorder I don’t think. So to all my loyal readers, particularly those that recommended that I seek psychiatric consultations, I apologize if I gave the wrong impression and thank you for your unexpressed concern.

The second primary reason for renaming the blog is primarily motivated by the ongoing presidential primaries. I will make a small political disclosure. I am registered here in New York as Independent, and therefore cannot vote in the primaries. It’s okay because votes tend to count less in polarized states like New York. Still, I get criticized regularly for being a spineless moderate. I’m not a moderate, and I have a spine (yup, I just checked).

I tend to have fairly strong opinions, and I am not ashamed of them. But I cannot align myself with a singular political party or belief system. My Venn diagram just cannot be contained within another Venn diagram. But my Venn diagram does intersect somewhat with other Venn diagrams. There are many ideas in various ideologies that I embrace, but there are often some that I reject. Excuse the cliché, but I will not be defined by any one ideology.

To put it in lexical terms, some of these ideologies apply to me as uncapitalized adjectives (get it?), but not as capitalized nouns. I am libertarian, but I’m not a Libertarian. I am independent, but I’m not an Independent. And so on. (I am almost tempted to use an OOP metaphor that illustrates the benefit of interfaces over class inheritance — the GoF would be proud.) After much contemplation, I think the new title captures my superficial defiance of institutionalized over-categorization.

One last note. I am not generally opposed to the pigeonhole principle.

I’ve already had two hard disk failures on my work Mac. The first time was on a PowerBook, but my home directory was recovered after about 2 weeks. The second time was on a new MacBook Pro that replaced the PowerBook as a result of the first failure. It contained much of the data from the first failure, and took about 6 weeks to recover most of my home directory as well as some applications. I think I learned my lesson!

Yesterday, I finally got a nice, 500 GB, FireWire external hard disk so that I can begin to back up both of my Macs. Lovely. But now what? I am researching the best engineering solution to meet my requirements, listed below:

1. Back up of both hard disks

   I have a personal PowerBook and a work MacBook Pro. I’d like to back up both hard disks on a regular basis.

2. Consolidate data libraries

   I have an iPhoto and iTunes libraries on both machines. Both started from the same copy but have since diverged significantly. I would like to use the external hard disk to keep the libraries synchronized.

3. Granular File Restoration

   I would like to have the ability to synchronize, if I wish, a unique set of files to my local machine. For example, I’d rather keep my entire music library on the hard disk and only download a set of playlists that I want to listen to.

4. Sharing Data Between Macs

   I want to easily access data that originated from the other Mac. Say I have a license for an application on my PowerBook that I’d like to copy over to the MacBook. I know that I can do it over the network or BlueTooth, but is it possible to use the external HD as an intermediary?

I think that these four requirements pretty much sum it up concisely. Here are various solutions that I am contemplating:

• WD Backup
  The software that comes packaged with the hard disk. It seems pretty feature-laden, and I think it will meet Requirement 1, but I’m not entirely sure about the other requirements.
• SuperDuper!
  A widely-acclaimed disk recovery program. Uses sparse disk images to maintain active backups. It might be able to meet Requirement 2 by the creation of a separate disk image for specific libraries.
• unison
  An open-source tool for synchronizing multiple file systems. Combines functionality of rsync with SCM features. It seems that with some effort I’ll be able to meet all of the requirements.
• In-House Solution with SCM
  Write my own backup system that leverages a revision control system to meet all the requirements. I would probably start out with a golden disk that will contain a merge from both hard disks. I would then use some versioning features, such as branching and local checkouts, for granular control (Requirement 3). I would probably use Subversion or Perforce. But then I’d have to deal with scheduling. Besides the fact that this will probably be a pretty involved undertaking.

Some other considerations involve handling of the raw 500 GB of storage. I need to figure out whether I should go with a single partition or multiple partitions. I am considering reserving part of the disk to save movies from my DVR. Also, I’m thinking of setting up a RAID scheme, but that may be overkill.

So does anyone out there have any other suggestions or feedback about how I should go about doing this? I hope that I’ll be able to implement a solution before my hard disk crashes yet a third time!

Technorati Tags: mac, external hard disk, unison, perforce, subversion, backup

The Cross-Bronx never looked this AJAXy. I’ve been waiting for this a long time. Now I’ll be able to tell what a nightmare I’m about to drive into.

Headline from the NYTimes: “Tuesday’s Wall St. Slide Adds to Concerns About Economies.” Shouldn’t a headline read, “Concerns About Economies Add to Wall St. Slide?” Ah, the psychology of crowds. Geoff Gannon, as always, has an insightful comment on yesterday’s tumble.

On the cusp of my 4th terrestrial decade, there’s just one thing I have to say:

Thought it up myself. Really. Just wait for the keynote.

Will it blend?

Appears that Steve Carell (Michael Scott in The Office) is married to SNL alumna Nancy Walls (Carol, Michael’s ex). Who knew.