Diary of a Network Geek

More photography links this month.

I started this blog, and this entire website, to highlight things I enjoy, things that give me life.
I meant that to be writing and photography, and maybe a little spirituality lightly sprinkled through all that.  But, I have to admit, lately, there hasn’t been a lot of time or energy in my life for those things.  Oh, spirituality is something I pursue constantly, regardless of my day-to-day circumstances, but the writing and photography have sort of…
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“Two is one and one is none”.

I’ve quoted that a lot over the years.  I’ve reminded people over and over again that just moving your data to an external drive is NOT a backup.  If you can’t afford to destroy it, then it’s not backed up.  I’ve said all those things.
And, yet, on Tuesday, I lost data because it wasn’t backed up.

As many long-time readers know, I’m an amateur photographer.  In the past five years, I have taken over 18,000 photographs.
On Tuesday evening, the network attached storage device, an IOMega two terabyte personal cloud edition NAS, to be exact, died.  Or, more specifically, the drive inside it died.  The sad thing was that I was preparing to copy it all to another device when it bit the dust.  Oh, sure, I still have a little over 4,000 of the best shots uploaded to my Flickr photostream, but, it’s not the same.  (I talked a little bit more about the backup portion and the loss over at my other site, JKHoffman.com)
So, here’s what I’ll be doing; First, I’m investigating the data recovery services of DataRetrieval.com and Second, I’ll be ordering two more large drives for my Pogoplug to store and backup my photos from here forward.

Let’s take these in reverse order.
I plan on adding a new feature to this blog called “Tools for Tuesday” which irregularly reviews various tools, software and hardware and even non-computer, that I’ve used and enjoyed over the years.  One of those early reviews will be of the fantastic Pogoplug.  In a nutshell, for those who aren’t familiar, this little beauty lets me attach up to four USB-based drives at a time to my network.  They can be any kind of USB drives I happen to have available.  Right now, I have two one-terabyte drives in generic enclosures hooked up to it.  They are set up as a master and a mirror drive.  In other words, one drive is where I put all my “stuff” and the Pogoplug automagically mirrors it to the second drive.
It’s really, really nice and when I have the right software installed on my various machines, I can map a drive to that device via the internet and upload to my own personal cloud in my server closet at home.  It’s very nice, albeit a little slow sometimes when I’m away from home.  Still, it’s private and reasonably secure and automatically backing itself up.  I’ve confirmed that two of these devices in separate locations can be used the same way, make a truly redundant mirror, if you really want to do that.  (I do, but I haven’t gotten around to getting the second Pogoplug and setting it up on another network somewhere.)
I really cannot convey how happy I have been with this setup.  I’m super, super impressed with this as a low-rent solution for the small or home business person, or, like me, the hardcore hobbyist.
So, by the time you all are reading this post, I’ll have ordered two three-terabyte USB drives of some kind.  And, clearly, I’ll be setting them up in a similar configuration as the ones I already have, so that one backs up the other.

I’m also sending my drive off to DataRetrieval.com to get an estimate on restoring the data.
I chose them because they had an office in Houston, and I like using local businesses.  Also, they sent me a free shipping label to send the drive to them to get an estimate, which I like.  And, yes, I did try several things to get the data back myself, including the ultimate hard drive “Hail Mary”; the “frozen drive” trick.  I only got as far as seeing the drive, but not being able to access any of the partitions.  And, based on the horrible clicking noise it was making, I’m pretty sure it’s going to take getting the platters out and mounted in their special recovery equipment to get the data off.
I’m choosing slow over expensive, so it may be a couple weeks before I hear back from them with an estimate.  And, depending on how pricey it gets, I may not even decide to follow through and have them recover it.  But, I have to admit, it really hurt to lose five years worth of my photography, even if I don’t really go back to the old stuff all that often.  Now, if I were a professional photographer, or a business owner, I’d pay through the nose to get that data back, but for me, it’s really not hugely important.  Still, I’ll be interested to see, and share, what the quote is and how it’s handled by the service techs at DataRetrieval.com

So, stay tuned!  I don’t know how long it will take, but I promise to do a Part 2 when I get the data recovery quote!

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects."
   --Arnold Glasgow

No, not Santa.

Well, I suppose Santa is coming to town, soon enough, but I’m talking about something else entirely.
No, I’m talking about your favorite bands.  This past weekend, my girl and I went to see one of her favorite musical acts, who were playing at a real, Texas dance all over in Winnie, about an hour outside of Houston.  But, we only knew about it because one of her friends had been lucky enough to catch an announcement about them coming.  What if he hadn’t?  These guys are pretty old now and, frankly, there’s no telling when, or if , they’d ever come to our area again.  If we hadn’t gotten lucky like that, we might never have seen them!

Now, though, there’s another option; Songkick.  This app, for either iOS or Android, will scan your music collection on that device, or check your Last.FM song list, and tell you when those artists are coming to your area.  It will also tell you who else will be playing with them and serve you up a map of where the venue is.  And, on top of all that, the app will let you add the concert to your calendar to remind you to buy tickets.
Frankly, I think this is a genius idea and I wish there was an app like it that would do the same for your favorite authors!

So, what the heck, it’s Friday and if you’re reading this, you’re not working any more so you might as well go download the app for your phone and see who’s playing near you or coming soon.
And, have a great weekend!

So, today marks another lap around the Sun for me.

Honestly, I don’t hang a lot on birthdays, especially my own.  I mean, for the most part, they’re just another day.  Another marker of many in my life and, frankly, a rather arbitrary one at that.  I’m more impressed with the fact that I’ve paid a third of my mortgage than that I’m turning 44 today.  Of course, the fact that I’ve made it this far is actually sort of an…
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It should be no surprise to the few, brave souls who still come and read this blog that I’m just a little obsessed with photography.

As I’m sure people have guessed, I’m not from here.  Here, of course, being Houston, Texas.  I moved here back in ’98 and, well, just stayed.  In fact, I like to say that I’m nothing but a damn Yankee carpet-bagger who’s only here for your money and your women!  But, all that aside, I’ve learned to love this town and all its quirks.  I’ve even learned a little bit of the history here, though, I have to admit, I’m surprised at how much Houston history is still around.  In Chicago, where my family is from, we have a long-standing tradition of preserving our historic buildings and there are quite a few.  But, I was quite surprised to find that Houston has a lot of historic buildings still standing, too!
So, you can imagine that when a friend sent me a link to a site that combined photography and Houston history, I was pretty impressed.  And, that’s what the HoustoricProject is all about; photography and Houston’s architectural history.  The idea is simple, they take old photos and photograph them out in the world, in front of the historic building that is in the original photo.  It does an amazing job of placing the old photo in both time and space, relating it to how things are now.  It’s quite an interesting project, in a number of ways.
For me, I just love the photography and the history combined in a creative way.

But, hey, don’t take my word for it, go check it out yourself!  Seriously!  I mean, it is Friday after all, and you deserve a creative break, don’t you?  Of course, you do!  So, hit the link and be inspired.

Time to get out into the server room with the big, blue ceiling!

Spring is springing in my part of the world.  Flowers are in bloom and the weather is quite mellow and pleasant.  And, of course, I spend most of my week trapped in a server room. But, I don’t want to take a lot of time off to go do things, so that means I’m stuck doing things on the weekend.  That doesn’t give me a ton of options, but there are always day trips.  I live in Houston, so there are all kinds of things to do, but, frankly, I’m not all that into most mainstream venues.  I mean, sports bars are okay, but I’m not really into sports.  And, well, once you’ve seen most regular museums, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  So, what’s a professional geek to do on his time off?

That’s where I’m hoping Nerdy Day Trips will help.
So far, there aren’t a lot of trips described for the Houston area yet, but there are more and more getting added all the time.  Oh, they hit the biggies, like NASA and the Battleship Texas, but they also have the National Museum of Funeral History and the Alkek Velodrome, among others.  And, yes, I’ll admit, since most of my “extra” income goes to camera gear these days, I’m mostly thinking of photo opportunities, so the stranger the better, as far as I’m concerned.
So, while the weather is nice, go and take advantage of these strange opportunities.  And, if there are any that you know of which aren’t on the map, especially in the Houston area, please, add them in!

And,hey, try to get out into the world this weekend and away from the computer for a bit, okay?
You’ll thank me later!

No, not a flu that your synthetic humanoid might catch.

Virus writers target operating systems with a large installed user base.  There’s nothing controversial or even particularly interesting about that statement.  It’s a generally accepted concept based on observation, if not actual hard facts.  For a long time, that’s why there were so many viral attacks on Windows.  Windows enjoyed the greatest market penetration, so Windows users had to put up with the most frequent attempts to penetrate their machines.
But, that’s changing as the distribution of operating systems changes.  Android, in various forms and flavors, is now the most installed operating system.  Yeah, that’s right, someone has been writing viruses (virii ?) that attack your Android phone.

I’ve seen two new stories about this today.  One from a Houston local tech celebrity, Dwight Silverman over at the Houston Chronicle, and elsewhere, both talking about a new Android Trojan that can actually record your voice conversations.
One of the things that people like about Android is that it can load software from places other than a restricted, safe, controlled marketplace, but, that’s also one of the liabilities.  Apparently, the malware takes advantage of that ability to load itself onto your phone’s SIM chip and force the phone to record conversations to the chip then, optionally, upload those recordings to a server, presumably controlled by an attacker.  It’s somewhat unclear how that process would be initiated, but the simple fact that it can do it at all is chilling to me.  Also unclear from the articles was whether or not this has been spotted in the wild.
Hopefully, not yet.

So, here’s another warning for you.  Your devices, of any kind, are not safe.  Not ever.  If you have them powered on and they can connect to a network, even if you think they aren’t, you may still be vulnerable.  The Internet, in all its forms, is a wild and wooly and dangerous place.
Be careful out there, people.

Today is St. Valentine’s Day.

Normally, a day associate with love and romance and a complete imbalance of power in male-female relationships wherein the male of the species is required to present his pair-bonded mate, or potential mate, with a ridiculous display of conspicuous disposable income via dead foliage or high-calorie confectioneries.  And, no, I’m not bitter, thank you for asking.  I participated in this strange mating ritual for many years, spending untold amounts of my hard-earned money on the most gorgeous roses available in Houston, thanks to my ex-wife and the Rose Gallery.  (All kidding aside, they really are quite good and reasonably priced for the truly amazing roses that you’ll get from them on days like this.  For real.)

I, however, prefer to remember this day as the anniversary of when a fellow Chicagoan, Al Capone, rounded up seven of his closest buddies and gunned them down in the back alleys of the South Side of Chicago.  Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre!  It was on this day, in 1929, that the rivalry between Bugs Moran and Al Capone reached its violent and bloody peak, leaving seven, bloody corpses in its wake, along with damaging both Moran’s North Side Gang and, ultimately, bringing so much attention to Capone from the FBI that it effectively ended his criminal career, as well.
Truly, a turning point in the criminal history of Chicago.

So, you all go out and have your romantic dinners and make cow-eyes at your object of desire, but, have yourself an extra bloody steak and remember how they used to celebrate this romantic holiday on the South Side in the old days.

Well, I guess this is what happens when you don’t adequately screen candidates.

Of course, most of what the TSA does is make us feel safer, not anything that really makes us safer.  Still, I think we should draw the line at TSA employees ransacking our luggage for electronics.  And, no, before you ask, I didn’t lose anything this last trip to San Francisco.  In part, because I brought every bit of camera gear on the plane with me in a carry-on bag.  Might have been a good thing, considering the fact that the TSA did go into my checked bag to, uh, check my underwear or something.  After all, my boxer-briefs are quite possibly a threat to national security.  No, really, they must be.

Seriously, this is a huge problem and it has been for ages.  Photographers all know that you should never, ever check your camera gear through Baltimore, among other places.  Frankly, I have too much personal “disposable” income invested in my camera gear to check it through anywhere.  I’ve heard too many stories about things going missing from bags.  In fact, when I got into Houston and collected my bag, I was making small talk with a fellow passenger who was apparently shocked to discover that TSA baggage inspectors had been caught taking things out of people’s luggage.  Though, he had to admit that he had noticed some things had gone missing from his bag while traveling.  He figured, however, that they were just so over-worked that they’d forgotten to put it back in the bag.  Yeah, that’s actually what he told me.  Maybe it’s just me, but, well, I just don’t trust the average government employee.

I used a ThinkTank Airport Ultralight v2.5 to get all my photography gear into an overhead bin.  I ended up not using everything I brought, but I was glad to have it, just because I might have wanted it.  So, it was worth the investment.  I’ll probably get around to a review later.

Anyway, if you’re traveling, watch your bags and what goes into them.
Seriously.

Houston is a strange town.

Now, I don’t mean that in a bad way!  I like strange.  Strange is different, interesting.  The problem is, finding it.  Think of all the chance encounters that have led you to something weird and beautiful.  How often does that happen?  If you’re like me, not often enough.

Back when I started doing “Friday Fun” posts, I used to scour the Internet for unusual bits of flotsam and jetsam. Now, I usually let my feed reader bring them to me.  But, the fun, weird, wonderful things are all around us.  In Harris county, we have plenty of interesting, unusual things to find.  Some of these have been collected at the Harris County page of the Atlas Obscura.  If you haven’t been there, go take a look.  They talk about a couple things of interest, but I encourage you to find and add more.

Incidentally, of the things they mention, I’ve only been by David Adickes’ studio and seen the giant heads outside his workshop.  I have heard of the Museum of Health and Medical Science and the National Museum of Funeral History, but I have to admit, I haven’t been to either yet, not to mention the several places of interest that I hadn’t even known were here before.
You know, now that I think about it, they do seem like great photo adventures that would be easy to do, and I have all that nice, new flash gear….