Backup is a hard work

I spent all day thinking of a way to make a decent backup of my data on computer.

It may seem like something a bit paranoid, but only those who have lost a hard drive with no backup or had stolen a micro know what I'm talking about.

The problem is with Windows Vista Start Edition, which does not come with a decent backup program. Incidentally, does not come with any backup program.

All right if Baixaki and SuperDownloads sites have hundreds of backup programs, but I think I have to think of something more secure than a simple backup to DVD.

 

Every good backup site states the obvious: a backup on DVD only makes sense if it is done in at least two copies, one to be kept in a safe and another to stay somewhere else on the planet, in case of any missile fall in the building where the main computer.

One option seemingly secure is online backup, but seems to be a risky business, because it usually is paid and have a size limit. And then, a company that provides this type of service must be a safe company. Tomorrow she closes the door and put our data in risk.

The size issue is much more serious.

Before making a backup, I thought, how many files I have on my HD?

The answer is somewhere around 90,000 files.

It seems little, but it is not.

I wanted a software to show me my files today, then save the entire listing in a text file. Within a month I would run it again and record a second record of the files on my HD and so on. The idea is to monitor what emerges and what disappears from my files over time. Only a history.

 

The problem is that a list containing the names of 90,000 files is simply too great. Even for a simple text file type.

It's almost One megabite only with lines of names, which equals, if it were printed, a good book of some three hundred pages.

It's too much.

Of course, almost everything is bullshit. Thousands of files belong to Windows, other thousands belong to other programs that we can easily install. That leaves a few thousand who are our e-mails, photos, spreadsheets, school works, and presentations from the company where we work. But we do not want to miss anything. After all, it represent many hours of sweat and anger in form of stored files.

In the end, few programs have worked satisfactorily. I ended up with a simple little program that you can not list everything, but at least the list more used folders without stay much.

Now, I have to think a way to select between good files that worth something and bad files that worth nothing.

Then, do the backup.

Then, hope you never have to use it to restore a detonated HD, or replace data from a stolen PC .

This digital life is not easy.

The look of success

Appearance is not everything, but it helps in the achievement of success. At least this is true when  we talk about internet.

I've been taking a look at award-winning blogs around the world, and it became clear that a blog do not necessarily need good content, but without a good visual, he is nothing.

So, I spent a few hours giving improved in the look of my blog.

I know it was not very pretty, but it is much better than the old look, old-fashioned and serious. To give a nice visual takes time and ends up making us pay more attention to appearances than to content. There are blogs that belong to 12 years old boys wich seems to be made by a master of design. Of course the content is pure nonsense, but the look rocks.

Moral: The first hen that cackles...

The price of success

Of course the success is a cool thing, I guess, because I do not know if we can say that we are successful in all aspects. Must be nice to have an Orkut community with over 5 million participants. A community like that makes people respect you.

How can someone be so competent as well?

I do not know, but from a certain amount of success, some people pose as stars, and then start to be harassed. The harassment must do a darn well for the ego, I guess.

But at what cost?

A community owner should have some control over the content of what is posted on it, but when I glanced at the history of a great forum in a community on Orkut, I was impressed.

I would not wish people want the death of their families in my community. I would not want children hate their parents and put it in writing for the world to see. Not in my community. I would not be successful using the drama and suffering of teens to draw media attention, satisfy my ego and make some money on advertising of mobile phones and pen drives.

 

If you have problems, everybody has. Now, if the way you want to solve their problems is not the right way, do not count with me to support you or to disseminate your distorted ideas.

Success is not success without responsibility: is failure.

too many things

I spent the day surfing the internet, researching too much.

I have the impression that everything is already done in the net.

Think in something new.

This is original only in your mind. Not on the Internet.

Use Who.is. Try to create a domain with a creative name and you see that someone create this same name before you a long time ago, in several versions and variations and forms.

Use Alexa and look at the world ranking of sites.

It's disheartening.

Go to Google and type anything. Anything at all! He will find.

Then try on Wikipedia. It's the same thing.

What is missing to appear?

 

Type the letter A in Google and you will see that it is find several billion sites, somewhere around 9 billion. A little more, maybe.

It's really disheartening.

It seems we have reached a point where we no longer do anything. Simply we consume the billions of things at our disposal, for free, that the world strives to provide us, in exchange for a few clicks.

 

Search engines solve our problem providing billions of pages. Encyclopedias solve our problem providing  infinite knowledge. Social networking solve our problem conecting people.

Finally, blogs solve our problem related with anonymity. Now, we try to be famous, or useful, or whatever we want to be.

What other problems have not yet solved using internet?

This is a question that is worth billions...

I've been thinking of an answer for it, but it is not easy.

Not at all! They are too much things...

The deterioration of the things

As I said, I have thousands of emails archived. The oldest of them was a return message, 1999, sent by ListBot after I joined a newsletter about conspiracies.

Today, the ListBot no longer exists, the site with the newsletter is not updated for almost a decade and his owner is now involved in a project altogether.

It also has a lot of emails from the same time it when I applied on the Stock Exchange, via homebroker in ancient Nettrade' site. I tried to follow the old links of e-mails, but there are no more Nettrade or Patagon.com or anything. You can search the emergence of Nettrade and Patagon in Google, via trade magazines of that years, such as Você S/A and others, but that's it. The site is just an empty page.

All projects of that era have disappeared.

Also ListBot was bought by Microsoft, and online brokerage that time today must belong to a large bank.

This is proof that there is a kind of deterioration, corrosion that is slowly destroying sites and projects in the virtual world the same way we see the physical things around us deteriorate.

Yesterday I spent a few minutes very unpleasant repairing the water outlet of the washing tank in loundry room at home, which was leaking and was dead for months, waiting for my final action.

I had bought new plastic connectors, but the thing, the building, the place where the tank is installed, too close to the wall, it was so poorly done that I could not use the slots the way they should be used. I had to saw, cut, open, in short, I had to do a juggling such that at the end the pipe is fitted, but still the same damn leak that led me to take the old tubing, leaving everything exactly as it was in the beginning.

Yeah, things rot and stink. Stir with drains is not a cool thing.

But we can not let things crumble around us. Even sites, blogs, emails and folders with old documents.

In fact, I spent two hours separating documents that come together over many years. It was a simple separation, which still need another two or three steps to be perfect, but it was a good job.

I also put the scanner on new PC. Now, I can scan things and play out the papers. It is also a good start.

Finally, I scoured the IG site looking for an e-mail account I forgot I had there. I checked it and I had even this account, with 36 e-mails accumulated since mid-2007. I do not even remember it. I used it once to try to create my first blog, but failed. About this blog, no sign. I have no idea what I've been writing in my single post.

To close the day, I found a site that I really needed to know: Alexa.

But let the Alexa later. The fact is that things deteriorate, no matter if these are material or virtual things.

We must keep them. Or not.

Perseverance and blographies

Thinking about blogs, I think if a person wanted to write the story of her life, she could use a blog?

I think not, unless readers begin reading about life in the direction opposite to the clock. I don't know if there are blogs that allow organizing the posts in order of oldest to newest, so that anyone start reading the older things and then come to the newest. But that's the way should be read any biography.

Okay, we can write the other way, but it would be no cool. Then there are always stories to be inserted between one period and another in a time line, because our biographies are formed based on our memories and our memory does not work exactly in chronological order. Then suddenly I remember a cool story that happened back in time, but the blog does not allow me to put a new story in the middle of the old, because he, the blog, is tied to a different concept of time.

Another interesting thing I've been doing has been visiting blogs of people in UOL, using the criteria of categories such as economics, hobbies, family and others. In fact, nobody cares to sort your blogs correctly. And then, as I imagined, few people put more than a dozen messages.

Blogging requires patience, perseverance and content.

I think I'll risk creating my biography as a site. Although it is technically more difficult, one site is more flexible than a blog.

By the way, here's a cool product to work in the web. A blog suitable for biographies. Something like Blografies.

Cool!

A productive day

For the first time in a long time I slept early and woke up early at home. Of course we wake up early and sleep more or less early in the service, but at home is another thing.

I took a look in my mail. I have filed about 8,500 e-mails since 1999. Of this total, I read only about 5,000. I stopped reading them in early 2007. There are 3500 to reading yet.

Not only that, I took a look at my financial control. I've been taking notes and managing my finances from early 2002 until late 2004. But I have everything written down on paper since then. Now, is three and a half years of financial notes to be arranged. Why? Do not ask me.

Also I had a mania for control my weight in a spreadsheet in Excel. I've been writing down my weight daily since mid-2002. I was with the data on paper. So I moved it to the worksheet data accumulated since the beginning of 2007.

If to note the weight solves anything? I do not know, but I note it anyway.

Why all this delay?

Because of lack the time.

 

A person who works every day of the week from morning till evening can not afford to control anything. If you try to maintain any financial control, health or even read e-mails and go to the gym with any regularity, will fail to do something important at home, playing with the children and help them in homework. You also will not have time to surf the Internet, nor the time to talk to your wife.

Nor can sleep early.

And, as said an expert on stress very famous: "there is no coffee enough  in the world."

The other day, there is not even coffee enough.

By the way, I went to the gym and read something while riding for forty minutes. In break, in the way to home, I bought and carried a gallon of 20 liters of mineral water, because the house is over.

It is not an easy life.

I've been looking around in the community on personal safety, but found nothing interesting. I wanted to share my blog on them, but as I have not seen anything with the right profile, I decided myself to create a community on the subject. It's called "Living Safely". I hope people will participate.

This is the image of the community:

 

The Day of the Lion

There was no way. I spent the day curled up with the reading old news, with the payment of bills, and finally hit the front with him, the brazilian Lion of Income Tax (lion is the animal-symbol of the greed of the Brazilian government for taxes).

This time, I have not had to shell out anything, but I will have a meager restitution.

It is not easy to stand firm today.

Anyway, I still relatively lively. Just been stubborn, I will open a dozen more blogs about any and every kind of subject that I like a lot, because this is my business.

By the way, I open one about safety: Defend Yourself!

 

Actually, I just put links and safety tips that I myself do not forget that I can handle myself, but anyway, it costs nothing to share with others this type of information.

I also thought about doing another blog about health tips, but I thought better and gave up the idea, because in this case, I'm not in the health area and talk about what you do not know very well is risky and can harm people unwittingly .

So I set myself on issues that I like, such as computer, internet, business, flying saucers and ghosts.

Speaking about computers, I managed a remarkable feat: I  repair my Outlook 2000.

It is curious how a simple computer program that everyone has and uses can disrupt our lives.

The story goes like this ...

 

I bought a new PC with Windows Vista. But I use Office 2000. So, whenever I would do anything in Outlook 2000, how to create a new task, I received an error message that idiot talking about the lack of Wab.dll.

I tried to find a way, but as I always do, I went to Google in search of the same or similar problems.

I typed "wab Outlook 2000 error".

No wonder that Google is swallowing the world. He searched in Portuguese, as commanded, but seems to have understood the problem, so that also showed a response with one or two links in English.

Moral of the story: I do not find anything that resolves the error on sites in Portuguese. But I found a forum in English and a guy, Rollin, gave some hints. It was fast and easy. I copied two files from one folder to another, I copied and pasted two registry commands on the command line of the Start menu and go. The Outlook was round.

Now, two interesting things.

First, that an English prep school I attended for almost two years now is making a difference. Not that I embowel all in English, but what I learned is useful today.

And second, that American kids can have their problems, and everything else, but it seems that in Brazil there is no one really knows computing in depth as required by the market need. Brazilian kids can be good playing video games and hacking counters visits in famous sites, but to solve important things I do not see any progress.

But no matter.

What counts is that the lion is dead this year.

Or not?