Behind Infinity

This post is all about the complex set of thingies that you plug in together and collectively call “the computer”. After spending some time today working on my family’s computer, I thought it might be useful to share my family computing knowledge, so that those of you who don’t have a resident genius in the house can still figure out what kind of gadgets and gizmos you REALLY need to get that hunkajunk workin’ right. Because it really can be a scary topic. So I hope maybe I can be enlightening. I plan to talk about two things: some basic components and the importance of backups.

This all came about because last night, my family’s computer had a crisis. Somebody had a project that needed to get done RIGHT NOW, but it couldn’t. Thousands of photos, hours of video clips, and a huge music library had made it so that our iMac–normally a workhorse machine–was running more and more slowly over the course of the past few weeks, and now it was refusing to function, because its hard disk was absolutely full.

I had meant to take a look at the computer for awhile now, but I’ve been pretty busy lately and I have two laptops of my own, so it didn’t really score high on my list of priorities–until this project needed to be taken care of. And truly, with a bunch of peopel sharing a computer, and a bunch of those being underage, there are any number of things that can get mucked up. I wasn’t actually expecting the hard disk to be totally full. But at 11pm last night, that’s exactly what happened. So I deleted some files, and moved some to an external hard disk, in order to free up enough space for some breathing room. But that was just a stopgap measure.

This week we had Acton University at work, so I did a lot of IT work and frantic running around today. However, I was able to find some quiet space in my brain to work up a more ideal solution to my family’s space problem.

My family loves photos. We take a lot of them…on our 3-week trip to the Grand Canyon a few years ago, I seem to recall we shot something like 46 rolls of film. That gets expensive. So about a year ago, my Mom bought a digital SLR camera and we’ve been an all-digital family ever since. We have 3 digital cameras: the Olympus SLR, and 2 smaller Fuji FinePix cameras (one is mine, one is Mom’s) that you can slip in your pocket, purse, or diaper bag and go anywhere with.

Well, after a year of being a digital-only family, it’s no wonder our poor computer was filled up. For more space, I decided to stop at Best Buy and pick up another external hard drive, one that we could use exclusively for photos and videos. I spent the evening cleaning and organizing the computer desk and copying over files from one drive to another.

So here’s the final setup–a 21″ Intel iMac. The iMac is a “dual-boot” machine, meaning I have configured it to run both Windows and Mac OS X. The kids use Windows for games like “Star Wars Clone Troopers II” and my Dad uses Windows to run ProE engineering software. We use OS X for everything else: Photos, videos and video editing, music, internet, other games, Microsoft Word, etc. etc. etc.

OK, now here’s a detail photo of all the important little gadgets that make our computer system work. We’re going to talk about them top-down.

The green and silver, UFO-like thingie is our DSL modem. It connects to the internets for us. It sits on top of the white Airport Extreme and these two little boxes are connected by an ethernet cable. The Airport Extreme is our network router–it takes the internet signal from the DSL modem and divides it up so that all the computers in the house can have some. All of our computers have wireless cards, so they connect to it (and our guests with wireless devices can connect to it as well).

The second shelf has not one, but two external hard drives, which are both connected to the computer via USB cables. The black one on the left, with the glowing yellow stripe, has 500 Gigabytes (GB) of space and it is now our designated media (photos + video) drive. The silver one on the right is an entire Terabyte (TB — a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes.)

The silver terabyte hard disk is the all-important backup drive. Every night, Time Machine (a feature of Mac OS X) makes backup copies of both the computer’s internal hard drive and the 500 GB external drive, and puts those copies on the silver external drive. So, when either of those drives fails, we will have copies of their files. If somebody accidentally deletes a file, we can simply grab a copy of it from the backup. Or in a theoretical house fire, somebody could just disconnect that silver drive and take it with them, and thereby save all of the files and family photos and videos from our computer.

In a perfect world, my backup system would have a 3rd hard drive in it–another one of those sliver 1 TB disks–and every week I would swap them out. One of them would be hooked up to the computer, the other would be kept in a fire safe or brought to my office at Acton for safekeeping. But I didn’t have the money to get one today. So this will do for now.

In this new era, most families have probably switched over to digital cameras, just like us. They’re so fun, and easy, and cheap–no film processing fees and only print the photos that turned out well! But there is a danger in digital photography as well–the danger of losing all your precious photos when your hard drive dies. Notice that I didn’t say if, but when. Your retro photos fade and get yellow with age. A lot of 60’s and 70’s photos acquired a warmish distorted glowy look that I love. If stored well, printed photos and negatives last a while and you can generally catch their natural breakdown and make copies before they’re totally dead. In contrast, your computer hard drive has maybe a decade in it (if you’re VERY lucky) before it goes kaput. Sometimes they make grinding noises that warn you of their impending doom and you can quickly move your files to safety, but usually they just die–one moment they’re fine, the next they’re not at all fine. I’ve had it happen to me twice. One time, the drive was a mere 2 years old, and it took with it several hundred photos for which I didn’t have any backup copies. Those are gone forever.

So I can’t stress enough the importance of having regular backups of your computer. If you’re on a Mac, use Time Machine. If not, I’m sad for you. But you can buy a program like SyncBack which does kind of the same thing. The important thing to remember is this: the weakest link in any backup system is not the technology, but the human. I have yet to meet somebody who was diligent enough to make the manual effort daily (or even weekly) to do a backup. Before the advent of Time Machine, I haphazardly backed up my system onto DVDs on a “whenever I thought of it and had a free moment” basis (so, every couple of months–aka not nearly often enough.) Get yourself an external hard drive and install a program that will do it for you every night. Then you can forget about it and have fun with your computer.

Once I had the two hard drives set up, I added one more gadget, called a USB hub. Nowadays pretty much every computer thingie you could add on (printers, cameras, hard drives, joysticks, keyboards, mice, phones, coffee cup warmers, etc) use USB for power and to communicate with the computer. This is great, until you run out of USB ports and then you have to start swapping out devices and cords go everywhere and it’s just kind of a mess. In my opinion the only great flaw in the iMac design is too few ports: You look at a modern Dell desktop and it usually has about 10, while our iMac has 4. So I plugged in this USB hub, which takes one USB port and splits it 4 ways, so that the family will be able to play their games and charge their phones without swapping out cords (thereby theoretically mitigating the chance for somebody to unplug one of the hard drives and screw up the backup system.) For now the hub is taped to the bottom of the iMac but I want to get some sticky-back velcro to hold it on there. This way it’s convenient and nobody has any excuse not to use it.

And that, in a nutshell, is how I roll.
(With respect to a desktop computer setup, I mean.)

To review:

• Computers get slow and crabby when their hard disks are too full. This is partly because then it takes them forever to search the disk, but more because they use “empty” space all the time for “swap” memory. That basically means that when the RAM memory (RAM memory is what the computer processor writes to when it’s performing its thousands of calculations per second) gets filled up, it turns to the hard disk. Writing to the hard disk is slower but better than nothing. If you’re out of hard disk, your computer doesn’t know what to do. Opinions vary but in my experience, keeping a good 10-20 GB of your computer’s internal drive free will definitely boost performance.
• External drives make great storage for all of those digital photos and videos that you’re making.
• You should have at least one really big external drive (bigger than your computer and your external drive put together) to back up your files to. Having two is even better. If you don’t have two you might want to consider making periodic DVD backups of your photos for extra safety points.
• If you want to experience an annoying and potentially tragic and catastrophic loss of data, then don’t do anything I’ve said here. It might take a year or two but sooner or later your hard drive will write its last zero and chuck a wobbly, and your data will be toasted. Cool huh?

Any questions?

New design for Summer 2009.

This design was somehow the most labor-intensive this blog has ever seen (but also probably one of the best), taking a good 24 hours of work over several weeks.

It does not include support for IE 6 so it probably looks pretty lame if you’re using that browser. Sorry, but I don’t actually care anymore. Upgrade your computer to IE 7, you’ll be a lot happier. (If you don’t know how let me know and I’ll tell you.)

More horse showing yesterday.

Highlight of the day for me: Jezebelle won the Half Arab Sport Horse in Hand class. Yes! Getting a good score in SHIH means she is considered to be well-built and athletic with good movement, suitable for the dressage ring or work over fences. The judge and her assistant had some very positive comments, telling me we had improved a lot since last month.

Brenna got the whole thing on video. Here’s what happens: in the beginning the judge is walking around Jezebelle (who is not standing as still as I would have liked), checking out her legs and body conformation. Then, we walk in a small triangle, and then trot a larger triangle, so that the judge can see how Jezzie moves.

I took Starr in the Arabian Sport Horse class, where she placed fifth. The judge was very complimentary towards her too. Being a 16-year-old ex-broodmare, right now Starr is not very toned/muscled and sort of has a belly, because older horses digest their hay differently than younger ones. I’ve been playing with her feed program for awhile, trying to find something which will keep her at the right weight–not too fat, not too skinny–and promote muscle growth. I think finally we’re on our way to the right balance and should see improvement in the area soon.

The night before the show, WMAHA had a riding clinic and barbecue that I attended, and the horses and I spent the night at the fairgrounds. They stayed in the barn, I slept in my truck. Having stalls in the barn turned out to be very handy in the morning, because it rained until about noon.

This little foal is only 3 weeks old. She showed alongside her mother in a showmanship class–talk about adorable.

Brenna and Jezzie did GREAT in their showmanship class, winning 6th out of 12. Yeah! This was only her 2nd ever showmanship class so that’s really good. I was proud.

Starr won FIRST in Walk/Trot trail. She did a darling little trot serpentine for me, backed up in the flowers (pictured above), walked over the bridge without even batting an eyelash, walked over the logs without hitting one, and did an awesome 360 turn to finish. Atta girl, Starr! That 2nd picture is the judge, Doreen Anderson, talking to us. She is a nationals-level trainer out of Allendale and it was great to speak with her. She had so many constructive tips.

Brenna and Jezebelle did their first-ever canter classes yesterday. Here she they are in the 13-under Saddleseat Pleasure class, where they took 2nd of 3.

Jezebelle and I had a pretty disappointing day in our main ring classes. Our ever-present canter leads issue popped up AGAIN, and just when I thought we were over it. She hadn’t thrown a wrong lead in over a month at home so I was hoping we were past it and ready to get on with our summer. So we wasted our first two classes arguing about that, and then she decided that she was done and didn’t want to work anymore and she wasn’t going to listen. So we had to have a “who’s the boss” discussion in the warmup pen. Our 3rd trip was ok but by then the judge had seen enough shenanigans that she wasn’t looking at us seriously anymore. Our 4th trip, the championship class, we were having a really good ride but got caught between two misbehaving horses and nearly ran over the judge. Judges don’t really like being run over. So we were humped there, too. Oh well–we made it through and as long as I can take my riding mistakes and learn from them and work on them, we should do better next time, I hope. There was a pro photographer at the show and he took the two nifty pictures above.

We were all very happy when the day ended. Hot, sweaty Jezebelle got a bath and Starr grazed for awhile, and then we headed home.

My lovely girl with her 1st place medal.

Ever since we spent a weekend in Grand Traverse Bay last August, Tim, Lisa, Nate, and I have been scheming a reprise. This trip, was to be longer and awesomer in every way possible.

This time, instead of staying in a posh hotel, we brought my parents’ posh Starcraft popup trailer. Tim, Lisa and I went up Wednesday night and got everything set up. Here, Tim supervises the process while his capable wife does the heavy lifting.

It was a kind of cold and drizzly night, so we were glad to get inside. We spent the evening reading our books and not really talking to each other.

The next day was still kind of cold and drizzly, so the three of us cooked up some breakfast and then wandered around Traverse City while we waited for Nate to join us in the afternoon.

Once he arrived, we were complete and the fun truly began. We visited 2 wineries in the afternoon. The first one was Longview, which had a Cherry Mead that the boys had been looking forward to tasting for several months now. Mead is wine made with honey. Or something like that. I dunno. It kind of tasted like cough syrup to me. I bought a bottle of their Apple sparkling wine. Yummy.

We took lots of photos of wine vines. I mean, grape vines.

The vineyard was just really pretty, with the soft mist going on and everything. I love everything about vineyards.

These vines were at Bel Lago winery, which just had some of your basic reds, an assortment of whites, and a particularly good cherry wine (which I brought home).

After that we spent more time wandering around downtown, and I took this photo of the old-timey theatre sign.

Then we went back to camp for some dinner, and i took this photo of my foot and Nate’s foot. I just like it. I love those shoes. Both of them.

Then I took this photo of trees. We were glad to see blue sky.

We had taters’n'onions for at least one dinner and two breakfasts. We ate like hobbits.

After our hobbit-meal there was still time to drive up the peninsula and watch the sunset from this scenic overlook. We basically just pulled over off the highway and set up our chairs right there.

This was the view.

And this is when we took our group picture (posted at the beginning of this entry). Nate set the timer and then sprinted up the very steep hill to take his seat. He did this like, 5 times in a row so we could get the perfect shot. It was heroic.

Are you sick of vineyard photos yet? I wasn’t.

My Friends

My Feet

The Sunset.

THUS ENDETH DAY ONE.

Day two was dry, but windy. The boys left early in the morning to go paddle their kayaks around. Lisa and I slept in, enjoyed a breakfast of more taters’n'onions, and then went out for a drive on Leelenau peninsula.

First, I took some flower photos.

Then we climbed trees!

Yes, I went tree climbing in a trench coat. Slightly silly? yes. But that’s how I roll.

After successfully disembarking from the trees, (haha! BARK! get it?) Lisa and I explored the sleepy little town of Northpoint. Northport? I dunno. It was North-something. It had lots of cute little buildings, like this post office. We whiled away an hour drinking coffee and eating cherry turnovers at Barb’s Bakery, and then spent another hour at the best used books store I’ve ever been in. I found a Latin textbook, copyright 1950, back from when kids were actually REQUIRED to take Latin in school. It’s adorable–it has Dick-and-Jane-style illustrations of schoolkids learning Latin, and some great stories and exercises I can use with my students. I also found an Ovid reader and an Allen and Greenough grammar. It was almost, like, Used Books Nirvana for me.

Here’s my feet again. This time, they were enjoying sitting on the pier at Northpoint(or port?) where we met up with the boys and grilled up a lunch of brats.

After lunch, we went to Leelanau Cellars. Basically anybody who has ever bought wine at Meijer probably knows that name. This is their tasting room, which Tim wanted a photo of because it’s basically his dream room. He likes windows and wide open spaces. I bought a bottle of Select Leelanau Red. We also stopped at a hard cider maker. It was tasty, but I didn’t buy any. Lisa bought some Smackintosh, which tastes basically like biting into an apple.

No trip to Traverse City would be complete without a game of Pirate Minigolf.

It’s basically the best minigolf course I’ve ever seen.

In the evening, we enjoyed fudge on paper plates, with a bottle of cherry wine in plastic glasses. We know how to keep it classy, folks.

Yep. Classy. Also, that was the only night we could get our fire to burn at all.
(the fire ring, in case you didn’t notice, had “Lisa is a hottie” written on it.)

Saturday Morning. I love this photo. A lot. It was Tim and Lisa’s anniversary this weekend. Mom Tjapkes said, “You know you’re old when you have other people along on your anniversary.” I’m glad Tim and Lisa didn’t mind sharing their anniversary with Nate and I.

On Saturday, we visited a lighthouse. This is a different lighthouse than the one we visited last year.

I love lighthouses. They’re so Michigany.

After visiting the lighthouse, we drove to Leeland and locked the keys in the trunk of Tim & Lisa’s car. AAA Roadside refused to hire a locksmith for us, because apparently trunks don’t count or something. So we (meaning the boys) ripped out the backseat and retrieved the keys, and there was much rejoicing.

Then the boys went on another paddle.

That day, we visited more wineries. At BlackStar Farms, I picked up a bottle of pear wine, which is very light and fruity, and a bottle of ros&eacute. At 45North, I chose a bottle of Peach Cremant, which will hopefully be consumed at some sort of girls’ night because it is a very girly beverage.

And yes, I realize that is a lot of wine. I have definitely blown through my wine budget for the rest of the summer. That was the intention.

That night, seeing as we had eaten pretty much every stitch of food that we brought, we had dinner in Traverse City. Over dinner, we discussed which Middle Earth race each of us belonged to. It was decided that Lisa is a hobbit because she likes gardening and quiet. Tim is a Took, because he’s slightly larger and more adventurous than your average hobbit. My friends decided I am Rohirrim because of the obvious horse connection, but also because I like being pretty and love good food and wine. And Nate is a Ranger/Dúnedain, because he’s tall, quiet, keeps to himself, but always there when needed.

I love how nerdy we are.

On Sunday, we drove home. I kind of love my truck and its ability to pull things.

And that was our trip. It was great. The end.