Computer Pie

I have a fairly significant desktop system, it’s an Intel Core i5 2500K Sandy Bridge running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1 on a Supermicro C7P67 motherboard with 8GB of DDR3 Mushkin memory and two Fujitsu hard drives in a Raid-0 config with 1.5 terabytes of storage.

I recently archived all of my videos and all of my photos in their original large format, to my secondary external drive. This left my C: drive trimmed down a lot and I’ve now backed it up to my new primary Four Terabyte external drive. Looks like I have a ways to go before worrying about space…

I’ve installed the Macrium backup software and now every morning at 0615 it runs an incremental backup, saving everything I’ve done in the last 24 hours. It operates in the background for about 3 minutes and the only way I know it’s running is by looking at my drive activity gadget. This is truly a set it and forget it system, until I need it!

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Kitchen View

Standing at our kitchen window, enjoying the amazing view…

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Simple Meal

Ahhh, nothing like a home-cooked simple breakfast to start off a football playoff weekend. Two major snow storms are bearing down on us and I have no plans to put regular clothes on until Monday morning. As to this yummy looking dish, I bought the goodies and Steph crafted these Crab Cake Benedicts to perfection.

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Visibility

The xmas music has finally stopped, but what’s the magic date when people finally stop saying Happy New Year! Just asking…

This was a bad-ass snow day here in the valley and my sweet little Chevy with the great snow tires almost got stuck twice. If it had been one of our old Fords, well…

Visibility sucked in Victor so I grabbed these window shots to remember the moment.

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These photos are un-retouched, this is what it looked like!

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Setting Up

This is the very first step in this years third annual Great Snow Fest. The guys arrived early this morning with the frames and plywood and by this afternoon the boxes were assembled and waiting for snow to be dumped in them.

I’ve covered the first two and I’ll be posting updates here until the winner is chosen.

Update: Oops, I was wrong. Those frames were not part of the boxes! I pulled in today to drop my kids and they were still there along with a big pile of concrete. They’re finally breaking ground on the new Teton Geotourism Center that’s been in the works for years!

This should be interesting, major construction right next to the ice sculptures :-) Anyway, I’ll grab box shots tomorrow morning…

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Four Terabytes

Steph just asked me if I was doing a blog post tonight and I told her my computer was busy. Man is it, I love my computer! My new four terabyte WD external drive arrived today and I’m setting it up as my system backup. I’m compressing backup videos from my old external drive in the background while running a complete drive test on the new drive. New software is also being installed while I write this post. I guess there are not many limits to busy.

It’s a good time to recount and old tech story. Back at the turn of the eighties I was the primary computer consultant for Interocean Steamship Company in San Francisco. We were running a state of the art IBM System 38 and the company shelled out fifty grand for a gorgeous one gigabyte hard drive. This thing was amazing, standing four feet square and on wheels, it was a marvel of technology. That gigabyte of storage was the envy of other companies running IBM hardware, up and down the coast. I was programming that system in RPG-3 and I couldn’t even dent that much space.

Obviously I’ve been at this a long time and I’ve watched the storage expand while the price dropped, with amazement. So, lets refresh the math here: One gigabyte is a thousand megabytes (1,000,000,000 bytes) and a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). The drive sitting on my desk, that I bought for $160.00, is four terabytes.

Tonight I’m running a data backup to the new drive, tomorrow a Windows 7 system backup during the day while I’m at work and then I’ll clone my entire drive. I’ve also just finished backing up my PC computer past dating back to the early 90’s in Kent, WA.

I cleared off a lot of desk space to make room for this huge drive :-)

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Shiht

Perhaps it’s time to explain my new website naming conventions. There’s a reason for these somewhat edgy names: they’re short, and a pronounceable five letter .com domain name is a valuable property these days. Eyebrows probably rise a notch when people see them and maybe a smile escapes, but they make an impact.

It turns out that my two latest programs, Shiht and Suhck, represent some of my finest work. They’re state of the art Html5 sites that actually provide a very sweet service, and they now compliment each other.

Shiht grabs popular Tags from Flickr and presents them in the form of a Word Cloud where the most popular tags rise to the top. When you click on a tag, Suhck is launched with that tag as it’s search parameter. It’s just a great way to explore photos on Flickr!

A funny thing happened today as I was finalizing this code. I kept noticing some punk kid’s photos popping up in various tags. I researched him with my own tools and discovered he lives in Brazil. He was attaching every popular tag to each of his meager 114 shots, probably via code. Stupid hacker punk! Anyway, I just hacked him back, no photos of that boy showing up here :-)

One more thought. I know a few of my regular followers use their tablets to drop by here and I’m working on these apps to make them more android/apple friendly…

The photo below is Shiht in Most Popular tag mode. You can toggle across Daily and Weekly tag modes from within the program. Click Here to try it out!

Flickr really needs to lower it’s tag limit per photo and add some intelligent comparisons against their popular tags. The current limit is 75 tags per photo. Really? Can you imagine typing in that many tags each time you upload a photo to Flickr?

The hackers use this limit to their advantage, so, I’ve set a tag limit in my code. If the number is exceeded, I skip the photo. Along with some other criteria you might select 50 photos, and only get back 20. But, the ones you get are great!

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Mr Sloppy

Our Mr Coffee (咖啡先生) carafe was a piece of crap. The plastic top thing didn’t fit around the glass and it leaked when we poured the coffee. Today I got out two of my black Sugru packs, rolled them into a thin strip, and fixed the problem.

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Almost as good as FaceDownTuesday or FenceFriday or Bench Monday.

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Salt and Pepper

One of the toughest things about living in this house is choosing a salt and pepper set at mealtime. We have a few and you never know which one has the freshest stuff.

I keep telling Steph she needs to get a handle on this obsession. I’m just about at the point where I ain’t going to put salt or pepper on my food at all anymore!

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Workday Blues

I started out this Thursday morning and it felt like a Monday. When I got home it felt like a Friday. These holidays have got me really screwed up, let me explain.

As of this morning I hadn’t worked for 5 days: that’s a weekend, Monday and Tuesday that Karen worked because there wasn’t enough for the two of us, and then New Years day. As my workday progressed today I learned that my schedule for tomorrow was falling apart and sure enough, by the end of the day there were no Friday rides, so I have a three day weekend. In other words, by the time next Monday rolls around I’ll have worked one day out of nine.

And you wonder why I’m so down on the holidays?

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Rose Tails

Steph’s and my anniversary is today, New Years Day. That’s a real easy day to remember and a good day to celebrate because all that holiday nonsense is over and it’s a brand new year. She says it’s 12 years now, and I’ll take her word for it.

We have this little tradition going where we have lobster tails for dinner on this day and I’ve added the roses into the mix since she really liked those last ones on her birthday. These are really fresh, I watched the girl remove them from the dry pack box that arrived this morning at Broulims.

I remember the New Years Day 12 years ago when Steph left work at noon and physically abused me, but that’s another story, and this story continues on. My one resolution this year is to stay alive one more year.

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