I came home the other night and found out that I had a dead hard drive on my main file server. D’oh! That machine carries every one of our photos since we got a digital camera and a ton of the print photos from early in our childhood. It’s irreplaceable!
But, of course, I have multiple levels of backup so I knew my data was safe. It’s just a matter of getting it back to a healthy condition.
I decided to just let the drive sit there and wait for a replacement to arrive from Amazon. (4TB for $142!) Each file is stored on two physical drives so once I put the new drive in, it would automatically copy the files back onto the drive and I’d be all set.
Well, while I was waiting, the machine reported that a second drive had failed. It was the other one that I had purchased as the same time as the first drive so it’s not completely unreasonable that they failed together, but it still seemed unlikely. Looking through the SMART data on the drive, it looks like it got pretty hot in the case at one point so maybe that led to early demise (3 months after the 2 year warranty expired.) Now I had a mess on my hands and would be forced to pull out some backups.
I didn’t want to wait around so I drove to Best Buy and paid $40 extra for the same drive. Thankfully I was able to get the second failed drive to boot up again so the server was able to heal itself. When the new drive arrived from Amazon, I replaced that second drive because I just don’t trust it anymore. The machine now has four 4TB drives in it and all our files are safe.
I don’t know how you could read this site and not have heard me say it before, but BACK UP YOUR DATA! Hard drives only carry a one or two year warranty for a reason. Here’s the test for whether you are doing enough backups: if I walk into your house, take your computer and smash it with a sledgehammer, did you just lose photos, videos, documents, etc? If so, you’re not doing your backups correctly. Here’s the very quick and very economical solution: http://crashplan.com Less than $200 will get you four years of worry free backups. Set it up once and forget about it until you need it.
I’m proud to say that I was part of the first fan-funded television show in history! Many of you know Zane Lamprey from previous shows like Three Sheets and Drinking Made Easy. He travels around the world, learns local drinking customs and has a good time doing it. I previously wrote about his Kickstarter to fund a new TV show. His plan was to put in a bunch of his own money, raise money from fans, and then produce a TV show that he would market to networks. It was an easier sales pitch because their cost to produce the content was $0.
This was the first year of the new NASCAR playoff scheduling system. Every car still races in every race, but towards the end of the season, they start knocking people out of contention for the championship. In the last race, points are reset for the top four drivers and whoever finishes the best, wins.
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I picked this up from MattB’s recent Facebook post. It’s a Forbes article entitled “Why Don’t More People Work As Programmers?” It does an excellent job of describing what it takes to be a great programmer. Programming is not something that you can learn by taking a class or two or ten. Give it a read if you’ve got a code monkey in your life. Our profession is a mystery to a lot of people. The article won’t explain the mystery, but it might help you appreciate the complexity of the trade.
I ordered a 
I don’t have room (or money) for full size woodworking equipment in my garage, so instead I buy the smaller versions. But there are lots of different things out there to spend your money on. Which tools do you really need? 
I mentioned 
We had a big crowd at the house to watch the Seahawks take on the Giants. The Seahawks fought hard for the whole game and were finally able to coast at the end of a game. Beating the Giants isn’t a huge accomplishment, but it felt like a pretty solid win. That’s good because the upcoming schedule for the Seahawks is brutal. They play the Cardinals and the 49ers twice with the Chiefs, Eagles and Rams thrown in.
More Power!
I have some very generous friends. For the front yard project, Tim and Brent loaned me their tractor, Don loaned me his Chevy 2500 diesel truck, and my neighbor Randy loaned me his dual axle dump trailer. We ran all that equipment very hard on the first Saturday of the front yard project. We moved 50-60 yards of sod and dirt in 14 loads. Each load was at least an hour round trip to a spot where Tim’s friend let us dump it for free (saving us $1500-2000!) The only catch was that getting up to the dump spot required powering straight up an extremely straight driveway towing 5-6 tons. We had to put the truck in 4 low just to make it up the hill, and man, you should have heard that diesel screaming up the hill! It was nothing that the truck couldn’t handle, but it was pretty impressive.
On the final run, Tim stuck his phone out the window to record it. Of course the video doesn’t even come close to doing it justice. The hill looks way steeper in person. Before you watch it, picture that you’re driving $50-60K worth of somebody else’s equipment on somebody else’s property and if you slide back down the hill you’re going straight through somebody else’s house into the river. No pressure.