Reciprocity » Life

Happy 2009!

Keith — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:09:14 +0000

To all those who read the words I put here, here’s thanks for a great 2008 and warm wishes for a happy and prosperous 2009.

Keith

Layout Change

Keith — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:41:45 +0000

Nothing major, but you might notice a new block below on the home page. I added a section (powered by FeedWordpress) to pull in my ride logs from VeLog via RSS. This way, I only have to remember to post them in one place, and they automagically get posted to the blog too. Isn’t Web 2.0 grand?

Off-site Backups and Amazon S3

Keith — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:52:42 +0000

After losing two hard drives in rapid succession, I figured it was time to start giving some serious thought to my backup plan. I have been rsyncing my documents, pictures, and active projects folders to my local Debian server for a while now so neither drive loss was that critical, but it drove home the fact that while I like to think my systems are bulletproof, there’s no such thing. At that point, I decided I needed a robust off-site backup plan.

I started looking at the various free services that were available. I tried a few of them, but the biggest drawback was most locked you into a proprietary application for performing backups. The notable exception here was Omnidrive, which I used for a while and liked, until they upgraded their software and it stopped working on OS X. The other major drawback to the free services was the available space. Most providers only give you a gigabyte or two for free, and then charge you beyond that.

Since I was going to have to pay to get the amount of space I needed, I started looking at real offsite backup providers. I found several that offered what I was looking for, but none were within my price range. While researching the various options, I came across Rob Rohan’s article about how he used Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3 for short) as a back-end for a server backup plan.

After looking at how much (roughly) it was going to cost per month, I started using S3 last month as my primary off-site backup destination. I couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome at this point. I followed Rob’s technique for the most part, but skipping the database backup stuff since I don’t need it (but I might start doing it, you know, just in case). The first backup took forever of course (we’re talking almost 5 gigs being pushed up my cable connection), but the subsequent sync operations fly.

And the price? Well, my first monthly bill was $1.42, broken down thusly:

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used – 2.478 GB-Mo – $0.37
$0.10 per GB-all data transfer in – 4.632 GB – $0.46
$0.18 per GB-first 10 TB/month data transfer out – 0.097 GB – $0.02
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests – 55653 Requests – $0.56
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests – 46 Requests – $0.01

As you can see, it makes for a very cost-effective backup solution.

Some apps I found useful for working with S3 (Note: OS platforms listed after each app):
Jungle Disk – Windows, OS X, Linux
S3 Browser – OS X
Cockpit – Windows, OS X, Linux (requires Java)
S3Sync – Windows, OS X, Linux (requires Ruby)

Black and White Shrub

Keith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:45:53 +0000

I’ve been on a black and white photography kick lately. I don’t know what triggered it, but I can’t get enough of well-done monochrome photos. I did this one tonight based on a photo I took of a Lilac shrub in my front yard.

I did quite a bit of manipulation in Photoshop to the original shot to get this output, but I think the results are worth it.

Early Morning Sky

Keith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:41:23 +0000

Every so often, you just have to pick up the camera to take a picture of something. This morning, it was the sky directly outside my front door. I’ll let the picture speak for itself…

Wedding Pictures Are Online!

Keith — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:55:02 +0000

94 of them to be precise…

They are all in the Wedding Pics set, so it’ll be easy to browse just the wedding photos.

EDIT: (09.10.07) – Added another 100+ pictures, made individual albums for each person who gave us pictures, and added each individual set to the Wedding Photos collection. The original link was changed to point at the new collection also.

Introducing

Keith — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 23:14:26 +0000

Mr. & Mrs. Keith Solomon!

I’ll write more later, but I wanted to get a picture up so people could see it…

Weight loss check-in

Keith — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:31:45 +0000

So it’s been a while since I posted anything about my goal to drop 30 pounds before my wedding. Well, at this point, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. It seems I’ve hit a plateau at 263 pounds (I’ve been here for the better part of a month at this point). I don’t know what else I can do at this point, but I’m happy with the results thus far. It’s not as much as I wanted to lose, but it’s better than nothing (or gaining ). I’m going to keep up with the exercise, though…I’m determined to get down to 250. More news as it develops.

I swore I wouldn’t do this…

Keith — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:09:48 +0000

But I just couldn’t help myself…my contribution to the lolcats meme…

This is Smudge…he likes to think he owns the water dish…

You can view the full-size version here.

As of today…

Keith — Sat, 26 May 2007 13:51:45 +0000

Akismet has caught 5,072 spam comments since I first installed it.

And in that entire time, I’ve only had to moderate 5 messages (which all turned out to be spam… )

So yeah, I’m pretty pleased.