Pulse check

Let's see here... yep, I've still got one. It's been quite a while since I've posted here and much has transpired.

We had our twenty first anniversary last Friday (we had a great dinner at a restaurant we'd never tried before — more on that later). I setup and then threw away a weblog for family discussions and I ended up staying up late on Saturday to install PHP to try out some of the message boards. I flew off to Atlanta early on Sunday morning (but did catch most of the second half of the Packer game in my hotel room; unfortunately an 'oops' muffed the recording at home so I don't have much to say there).

On Monday I gave a presentation for Garry Betty and then a bunch of us went off to the woods of Georgia where there was very little cell phone coverage (interestingly, newer phones functioned in some fashion while my four year old cell was completely useless) and 26.4k dialup (I just put a phone cord in my bag, I somehow thought I didn't need it in 2004 and was plainly wrong). Although fall is mostly over, the area just north of Helen (GA) was beautiful to see and I wish I'd brought my camera. On Wednesday afternoon when we returned I had a couple meetings to attend to and after dinner with a friend, I had nearly a thousand emails to chew through.

The flight back yesterday wasn't bad, although the LA traffic is what it is and Albert wound up having a significant fender bender. I feel a little guilty (still) but as Albert put it, shit happens.

I'm just about caught up on the most important items that came up while we were off in Deliverance country (as someone put it), although I'll end up doing some document reading this weekend to catch up on the rest.

One other thing, I'm looking for backup suggestions. I have been using SilverKeeper for a while now (backing up local directories to an external FireWire drive) and I really like it. But it took 2.5 hours to backup my 4G cvs directory last weekend (I noticed because I ended up staying up late). That's ridiculous, as there were only 37M worth of changed files. By comparison, a backup of my work directory just a little while ago took 4 minutes (82 files updated out of 23,033 in a 1.6G directory). I'm guessing that the large number of directories with hundreds of tiny files causes the problem (the updated changed 49,633 of 344,152 files). I may just be stuck, but if you have ideas please pass them along.