Ryan Martinsen

I opened a support ticket with the Jungle Disk folks and they helped me do some “consistency checks” in the software and everything reappeared. Whoo! My previous post no longer applies to Jungle Disk, though I still think it’s a good thing for software not to do (ie. mess things up).

I can once again recommend Jungle Disk as a good solution for backups.

Edit: I got everything worked out. The people over at Jungle Disk helped me out.

I lost my laptop a few weeks ago. Okay, I actually left it on a train on accident. I had hope because it was the JFK AirTrain and the people on the AirTrain generally seem more trustworthy than those on the subway in NYC*.

I also wasn’t too worried because I’m a nerd. My hard drive was completely encrypted with an insane password. There was no way anyone would ever get anything off of it.

Lost data wasn’t a worry, either, as I’ve been backing up my hard drive for years. I used to backup manually on an external hard drive and then I installed Jungle Disk which lets you store files on Amazon’s S3 service. Infinity storage! You only pay for what you use, and it’s cheap! I configured Jungle Disk to automatically backup all the stuff I cared about.

So with an encrypted hard drive and backups on the intertubes, I wasn’t too worried. All it really was was a big inconvenience. I’d eventually get a new computer and get my stuff back.

Well today my new computer arrived: a brand new 24″ iMac. I’ve been a Windows user forever and people usually assume–because I’ve argued against Apple fanboys and defended Windows–that I am anti-mac. I’m not. I just preferred Windows. I still do, actually. But I figured on a Mac I can run Windows in a VM. Now I have access to both operating systems and can do what I please on either.

Anyway, so I was all excited to get my stuff back today! I installed Jungle Disk and was very happy! I knew my stuff was safe! But! I was a bit stupid. I should have immediately initiated a manual restore of all my data. Instead, I kept installing software I needed so I could get back to work (since it is the middle of a work day).

Do you see where this is going? I should have. I noticed that Jungle Disk was doing some sort of “archive clean up”, but I couldn’t tell what that meant. I let myself get distracted away, probably installing some software or something. 30 minutes later I look again and notice IT’S DELETING STUFF. I immediately cancel it, but it’s too late. The “archive cleanup” meant “all your backups were old and so we deleted them.”

Yeah. All my stuff. Gone.

The default Jungle Disk settings were to “Remove previous versions [of files] after 30 days” and “Keep at most 10 previous versions of each file”. Actually, I’m not sure if those were default settings or just my settings. I don’t know if Jungle Disk syncs settings with its servers. Either way, I don’t see why it would have deleted my stuff. My backups were NOT 30 days old. But it did delete stuff. Almost all of it (it would have had I not stopped it, but everything I wanted is gone). All my photos. Journal entries. Everything that actually mattered. Gone.

How not to write software: don’t delete my freaking stuff.

* I was wrong. Or it’s just that the people at the AirTrain lost and found are useless. I know a ton of stuff gets lost, but all I ever got on the phone was incredibly rude people who told me entertaining things like this: “we, like everyone else, use technology. call back and leave a message.”

I decided to experiment with the excerpt thing in Wordpress on my last post and, apparently, when you do that it becomes the only thing that shows up in feed readers. So if you saw my last post in a feed reader and wondered what on earth I was talking about, you might be interested to learn that there was actually a really long post about it.

I’ve never been much for dieting. Truth is, I’ve never really needed it.

Until now.

Forget all the thoughts that just ran through your head. Well, assuming you’re human, you probably shouldn’t really forget all the thoughts that just ran through your head because it’s plausible that your mind wandered and you pondered on all sorts of things unrelated to diets, such as polar bears or rotary telephones.

It’s also plausible that you started reading this post on a laptop while on an airplane, which then crashed and you ended up on a remote and magical island for years and years. When you finally get back home the government mails you your old laptop, which was magically preserved in the airplane wreckage. So you powered up the laptop and found, once again, this post. So please don’t forget all the thoughts that ran through your head from the time you read the first sentence until now. Unless, of course, you want to.

So now that I’ve successfully made you forget what this post is all about, I will proceed.

On March 28th, 2009 I began cultivating selective ignorance. I stopped following Twitter. I even nearly stopped posting to Twitter. I stopped reading blogs. I stopped wasting time on Facebook. I didn’t check my email nearly as much as before. I kind of wish I was into mainstream news so I could have stopped following it as well.

As you can see from my twitter stats, my average tweets per month for November-March was 133. During the month of April, however, I only tweeted 42 times, which I admit still seems like too much, but that number doesn’t show the biggest change, which was in the time I was spending on Twitter. Time spent on Twitter in April was negligible in comparison to previous months.

You’ll also notice on that stats page that Twitter usage has gone up since April. I’ve regressed a bit, which is actually why I’m posting this now. I started writing this back in April, but decided to wait to see how it went. I wrote this paragraph back in April:

How long will I stay on this new low information diet? I don’t really know. It’s hasn’t been long enough for it to be a good experiment. What I really aim to accomplish is to put the constant stream of information in its proper place. I don’t want twitter to be as big a part of my life has it has been in the past. The same goes for email and blog reading.

I certainly accomplished what I set out to do. I put the constant stream of information in its place. And I enjoyed it. The problem is that as I have added things back into my life they haven’t stayed in their proper places, rather they tend to try to move back in, consuming everything they used to.

So I’ve experimented and learned. I’m now readjusting and moving forward.

BUT WHAT IF THE WORLD BLOWS UP?!

Then we’ll all be dead.

We’ll all be dead and I’ll be the one who has spent more time having fun. Have fun with your news.

Seriously though, I hear about important news. I haven’t missed anything. People talk. Nothing went wrong as a result of my information diet. On the contrary, things have been better. I’ve actually had more time for reading books. I feel better. I’m happier.

Would anything go wrong if I kept this up for the next 5 years? Perhaps, if you consider not knowing things like that the Obama family is spending their vacation at some lush resort as something going wrong, then yes, a lot of things will go wrong for me. I won’t know a lot of things that don’t matter. And for that I am quite happy because, as a result, I will know more of the things I wish to know of.

In the pursuit of knowledge, something is added every day. In the pursuit of enlightenment, something is dropped every day.
– Lao Tzu, found on twitter the day I decided to start this whole selective ignorance thing.

Oh, I do intend to keep reading the blogs of family and friends, but will cut back on everything else. Also, I’d like to apologize in advance for not reading and starring your funny tweets (you know who you are).

It’s been a long time since I’ve partaken of a pink lollipop, but I have had the opportunity to know, at least in part, what it feels like to be one.

In actuality, my experience is far less like being a lollipop than it is like being roasted in an oven.

Last week I was in Utah and Idaho. I partook of a delicious raspberry lime shake. I drove an ATV down dirt roads at what seemed like perfectly reasonable speeds. I tried wake boarding for the first time. I drove a jet ski around in circles on a lake. I also spent time with family and ate a ton of food. Thankfully, I managed to sleep on the red-eye flight back to New York.

I have been at work for 24 hours straight. I am not particularly thrilled about that.

I’m pretty sure that being roasted in an oven would be much less pleasant than my time on the beach at Bear Lake, but I do feel that I was lightly toasted and then painted a bright pink, I assume, in order to hide pink lollipops on my person. I hope to find them soon.

P.S. I’m a bit out of it and will probably regret posting this. I think I should go get some breakfast.

Though it’s a late anniversary.

I first registered ryanware.com 10 years ago: June 1999!

Before that I think I was hosting my software on a user account (eg. example.com/~ryan/) on an old ISP. Before that I was on geocities. Before that I was on Netcom back when it was an ISP. I’m probably missing a few in there somewhere. I had a bunch of awesome websites. And by awesome I mean awesome for the 90’s. At least I thought so.

To celebrate 10 years of ryanware.com I decided to move my blog to a new domain which, you’ll notice, has not happened yet. Today is not the day for the switch, but I did make a step in the right direction this morning: I moved ryanware.com from the server it lived on since the beginning to a newer, shinier one*.

I don’t want to publicly announce what I’m planning because, hey, I tend to take a long time to do anything with my website. Besides, it’s not that exciting. All you really need to know is that, someday, my blog won’t live here anymore (and you probably don’t even need to know that). I’m only posting this at all because I wanted to post something about the 10 year thing before it became 11 or 12 years.

* I went with a VPS at Linode. I set up the hosting account months ago. Seriously. Like 4 or 5 months ago. Thankfully, it’s amazingly inexpensive for what you get, though that comes with what will be a downside to many: you setup everything on your own. You pick a linux distro (or install your own from scratch) and install everything you need, all by yourself. No plesk, no cpanel (you could pay for, and install them if you wanted, but why would you want to?). It’s rather fun, I think.

If you were sitting next to me, or anywhere else in my apartment, you would hear an awful lot of Latin American music. There’s an outdoor concert practically outside my window.

Last week I said I was going to post more, and perhaps even walk a whole bunch or something today.

If I were able to calculate the total number of feet I’ve rolled around in my office chair today I bet it would be more than the total number of feet I have walked today.

Yeah, I’m working today.

So, that’s more of something.

Just not what I had intended.

However, I did choose this. I traded a day. Work today for no work another day.

Perhaps on that day, whenever it may be, I will walk somewhere.

Hopefully that somewhere includes donuts and/or ice cream.