The 1st year I raced the Florida Coast to Coast with Will, our support crew wrote a song over the course of the 2 days while we were out in the sun and sand of FL. At the end of the race, they sang it to us “live,” but later made a “produced” version which I include here.
There’s a link from the race report, but I want to put it here as a test of this new audio wordpress plugin that will let me put audio directly in a post.
iTunes has an XML file that it uses to track all sorts of neat things, like ratings, play counts, date added, last played, etc. Some of these stats are useful within iTunes, to sort by date added, or play count, or ratings. Or to make smart playlists, etc.
For example, I have a smart playlist called NeverPlayed, which lets me see all the music that I’ve never played since importing it to itunes. Since I spent a fair amount of time a couple years ago re-ripping all of my CD’s, I have quite a few songs that I’ve never played. In fact, it is over 3000, but I’ve been letting the NeverPlayed playlist play a couple hours every day, so I’ll get that down eventually. Though I have to admit there are some songs that I probably don’t ever want to play! 😉
(BTW, I re-ripped to standardize. I started ripping CD’s sometime in 2000, and over time ended up with various formats, like mp3, ogg-vorbis, aac, etc., and different encoding rates. I really wanted to standardize to 192K variable mp3, so that is what I did.)
But iTunes doens’t provide much more insight into all the stats then what I’ve just listed. I do use the last.fm plug in, so I’ve got stats from when I added that a few months ago, but even that is limited (and I wanted stats for all-time, not just when I added the last.fm plugin), so I searched around. I found one called SuperAnalyzer that runs on Mac and Windows. (It’s a java applet.) It provided a little information, but not much. Mainly that I have too many tracks that don’t have all the information filled out. 
I also found iTunes Registry, which let’s you upload your XML file and then does an analysis on it. One thing that is neat about this site is that it combines all users’ data that is uploaded to it, so you can see some “global trends.”
I uploaded my XML file, and here’s a link to that page. I did find some interesting info — like I’ve listened to Dar Williams the most. And it gives some insight into how you rate artists, etc.
Anyway, there are probably a lot more cool things that could be done. I’d really like to know percentages like how much a given song, artist, or album, comprise my total listening, or total listening in the last year, or a given month, by song/artist/album/genre, or what percentage of songs are responsible for X percent play time (i.e. how long is my song tail?) Now not all of that would be availble, as the XML file doesn’t keep everything. But some of it would be possible and would be interesting.
It has been one year since surgery. Things are better than 6 months ago, or 9 months ago, but I’m not sure if I’m better post surgery or worse. I guess the best term would be different. I am no longer getting sore on the lateral side of the knee, but instead under the patella, and mostly from impact, such as running. Cycling, elliptical, and even hiking all seem ok, though I really have not pushed those to long distances/durations like I’d need to to get back into racing seriously.
At any rate, I figured I go see a Dr. of Osteopathy who also does prolotherapy. I’ve heard some really good things about both on the Yahoo group for chondromalacia.
Well, I was somewhat disappointed with the Dr. of Osteopathy. I had heard they spend a lot more time with you than a typical orthopedic surgeon, looking at the entire body to determine what might be causing the problem. But she did a fairly quick and typical knee exam, and that was it. She does think that prolotherapy is worth a shot — as she put it “you have nothing to lose.” It is a pretty non-invasive procedure. While there will be some short term pain and discomfort, because it is intended to be like a minor injury so that the body will heal itself, long term, there should be no issues. (It is very targeted, unlike a normal injury.)
Basically the doctor would inject a mixture of dextrose and water under the patella, in an attempt to get the cartiladge under there to heal up more, so that impact from running does not bother me. It would be a series of at least 4 injections, about two weeks a part. I would be able to ice and take tylenol for pain, but no NSAIDS, as the inflamation is needed as part of the healing process. I’d have to really limit activity during the cycle and for up to 4 weeks after, so we’d be looking at 12 weeks. 😦
At this point, I have a race scheduled in a few weeks, so I will definitely wait until that is over before I decide.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a few computer problems that I thought I’d document here. A couple of them were the kind that normally would have sent my heart dropping, as the PC would not start at all! But since I now have a good back up system, I wasn’t too worried. In fact, my 1st thought was, “Oh, it’s about time to rebuild this windows box anyway.” Of course rebuilding is a pain, but it’s a chance to start fresh and get rid of a lot of things I don’t use.
Anyway, here’s a run down of the problems I’ve seen:
So i installed the “Instant Media” client which promises to download Internet HD videos. Well, apparently my video driver was too old, so I downloaded the latest and greatest from Intel, installed it, and could see Instant Media clips in HD. Great! Well, the next time I tried to watch TV via my WinTV card, it was all garbage. So I downloaded the latest and greatest hauppage drivers and installed them. It failed for some unknown reason, so I tried their “erase all” program. Upon reboot, I got the big blue screen saying the pci.sys file was missing or corrupt. Uh-oh. Trying to boot from CD to do a recover gave “setupdd.sys could not be laoded, error code 4. Uh-oh again.
Using another PC to search around on the Internet, I found that the suggestion was to remove all PCI devices and reboot, and then put them back in one at a time. My shuttle has only one PCI slot, and that is where the wintv card is. So I removed it, rebooted, all was well, powered down, put the wintv card back in, powered up, and all was ok. The next time I installed the wintv software, it all worked. Problem solved.
I needed some more space on my music partition, so I ran partition magic to do that. When PM tried to do the steps required, the pc failed on reboot. Uh-oh! After some searching, I found that my master boot record was probably toast. I booted up with a windows CD and ran fixmbr. I was then able to reboot, but just to windows, as it basically got rid of the grub info. I hadn’t booted to debian in 6 months, so I decided to just get rid of it, though if I had booted with my debian CD, I would have been able to fix it from there. When I finally did re-run partion magic, I got error 1201, warning 1211 messages, about bad blocks and block counts. I just had to again boot with my windows CD and run chkdsk /f on each partition, and then re-run partition magic. Problem solved.
At some point in all this booting from CD, the DVD/CD combo drive stopped working completely. I had to use a paper click to get the CD out, and then ordered a new one from newegg for about $30. That came 2 days later so I swapped it out, and all was well again.
I pulled the iMac out of the basement to set it up for Riley. It’s probably been down there for 2 years unused. On boot up, I get a little finder face alternating with a question mark in a folder in the middle of the screen. Called up my neighbor who does Mac support, and he said it can’t find the start up disk. Hmm, the spindles on the HD are probably suffering stiction. I tried shaking the whole imac, but that was difficult since it’s a bit bulky and heavy. I then removed the hard drive using the instructions in the link. I tried to start the imac up with just the power to the drive connected, and then twist the drive hard and fast as it was getting power, but it would not come free. Since it’s just a 13GB, I ordered an 80GB one from NewEgg for about $40, should be here today.
I think that wraps it up, though the last day or so I’ve heard a strange clicking coming from beneath the desk. I haven’t been able to place it yet. It sounds kind of like what the old ISDN link sounded like when it was coming in and out, but I seem to see it when the shuttle’s HD is coming on.
All of these issues have me thinking about what I would replace the shuttle with. I love the big imac’s, but I’m also happy with my 2 20″ dell monitors, so perhaps a mac mini. I’d run parallels and windows on it to get the best of both worlds. But a loaded mini, plus parallels, is getting close to $1k. So building another small form factor PC for under $500 would also be an option. At any rate, I need to wait a couple weeks to see if any of the current mac rumors about new mini’s are true. (And figure out what hte clicking is!)
Carbonite is the last online storage/backup site I’ve tried, and so far I’m sticking with it on my PC. It is $5/mo for any amount of storage! As my last post stated, with most home broadband, anything over 40 or 50 GB is probably not worth it, though if you have a few PCs, you could quickly get over that amount and recovery on just one would be reasonable.
One review I read thought Carbonite had a simplistic interface, but I actually like it. You can use windows explorer and right click on a drive, folder, or file, and tell Carbonite to back it up, or not back it up, or back up this file type, or not back up this file type. It seems to use less bandwidth while I’m doing other things per my mrtg graphs. It is still going, but I realized that when I clicked on my “data” drive, that there were lots of things in there that did not need to be backed up. For instance, I back up my internet server to my data drive, and while I may back up some of that in more than one place, my users Maildir’s don’t need to be backed up againa and again!
Carbonite has a 15 day free trial, which is what I’m in now, but I imagine I will keep using them past that. The do not let you use your own encryption key yet, but say they will in the future.
There is no Mac support for Carbonite, though they say the will have it sometime this year. I saw that for Mozy as well, BTW.
Mozy is the 2nd storage/backup site I tried. It offers 2 GB free, or 30GB for $4.95 per month, or 60GB for $9.95 per month. For home use, where you are probably stuck with upload speeds of 380k – 1 Mbps tops, going much past 40 or 50 GB for backup is probably not worth it. It will take days to upload, and days to download during a recovery. Once you have uploaded everything and are just synching, it doesn’t much matter. But the recovery would not be fun if you had too much data! (Then again, your download speed is probably more like 1.5 – 3 Mbps, or even 6 Mbps in some cases, and then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.)
I set up Mozy on a friends computer that I was working on. (Friends and family often ask me to look at their PC’s due to performance problems. The most common problems are lack of memory, disk fragmentation, spyware/adware, and tons of temporary files… ) Anyway, this PC just had 1.3 GB of data on it so I set up mozy to upload it. Mozy did it in just about 8 hours. My mandwidth use at that time was my max of 520Kbps upload, but I should note I was also running a different service on a different computer at the time, so it’s hard to say if Mozy would always max it out…
One of the nicest features of Mozy is that you can keep your own encryption key. Some services, such as streamload, don’t even encrypt your data. Other services encrypt it, but they keep the private key. Mozy will either keep the key for you, or let you keep your own. This is probably not an issue for lots of folks, and can be very dangerous. If you lose your key, there is nothing anyone can do to recover your encrypted data!
Mozy had a little app that you download, where you can tell it file types, or just give it the files/folders you want to save. Overall, I think Mozy is a nice little service. I plan on using the free service with some docs for now as I try both Carbonite and this out.
If you want to try Mozy, click here to signup so I get a little more free space:
Thanks!
Sean
Streamload is one of the 1st online backup and storage sites I tried. With up to 25GB free, it was the site that offered the most free storage that I could find. Granted there were limits on the downloads per month, but since I only wanted it for backup, that was fine.
They offer a few ways to upload content. First you can use your browser and standard buttons/forms. But that is far too tedious for any number of files. Second, you can use a java applet. That is better, but if you are backing up a lot of stuff, that still seems cumbersome. Finally, they offer a downloadable application that lets you tag files/folders, to keep up to date. That would be the best method, but the app kept locking up on me.
I finally gave up and moved on to a couple of other services…
(One other note in case Streamload fixes the app… They do not encrypt your data, so you’d have to do that yourself if you want it secure. Granted they do offer “sharing” of data, so it wouldn’t make sense to encrypt that. But I’m not looking to share, just looking for stroage/backup.)
I’ve been working a lot on storage and backup recently. Maybe I’ve gone a bit overkill, but I thought I’d document some of it here.
First, I had written of the Linksys NSLU2 (aka “”Slug”) before, here. That has been up and running really well. I have all the PC’s and MACs in the house rsync to it nightly, and then the Slug has a 2nd drive that synch’s nightly as well. And then I have a 3rd drive off site that I bring in once a month or so to keep up to date.
One issue with this solution is that my drives are all 160 GB and I’m now 70% full. The slug will handle any size drive(s) so that is not an issue, but it would be a bit of a pain and hard work to set up again. But at some point I will do that. I may just buy a new slug and 3 new drives… I haven’t decided yet!
Another issue is that the Mac’s HD was full. I set up an “archive” section on the slug so that we could off-load files manually to the archive and remove them from the mac. That’s fine, but see the point above about my slug drives being too small.
We also archived a bunch of stuff off to CD’s and DVD’s, and keep two copies, one on-site and one off-site. But with many of the recent reviews saying expect 2 – 3 years out of these, that’s a bit scary. Granted, that is with the lower end products, but even if you buy the higher end, name brand CDs/DVDs, how much longer can you really expect? It may be better to just have two large HD’s, one on-site and one off-site, than keep all the CDs/DVDs…
In addition to all that, I’ve been looking at some of the on-line storage and backup solutions. I would never keep my only copy of valuable data at these places, so it’s only one piece of the puzzle. I’ve played with 3 such services and will write mini-reviews in my next few posts.
I haven’t written a knee update in quite some time, but I ran 30 minutes on the treadmill today. That is the longest I’ve run so far since surgery. We’ll see how it feels later today and/or tomorrow. Right now, I can tell that I used it, but it doesn’t hurt or feel tender. I’ve not taken any NSAID or iced it yet either.
Running is still the thing that bothers me the most. I can hike, bike, do elliptical, etc., all with no problems. Hopefully I’m on the way back to 100%, but I’ve decided that if I can never run another marathon, as long as I can keep on hiking, I’ll be ok.
Now that the basement is 98% done (I think the last 2% is the hardest!), I can really start working out at home again. I need to get back to the PT routine of strengthening and stretching, and I really plan on doing yoga at least once or twice a week. When I was doing lots of yoga a few years ago, that is pretty much the only time I’ve been injury free.
“3 Bean” Salad
Combine anything of choice: green beans (steamed gently), black beans, kidney (kidney is the bean of choice because it’s firmer but I use pinto), yellow squash, zucchini (mine were grilled), corn, onion, and some green pepper. The original calls for garbanzo beans, any type of firm bean would do well.
You can vary the oil/vinegar according to your taste. Calls for vegetable oil (3:1 vinegar/oil) but I used a small amount of olive oil in mine because of the grilled vegetables and their juices. Add black pepper and celery seed. Fresh celery can be used as well as Italian parsley and/or dill. Sugar to taste; start off with about ½ cup and a cup of vinegar for a large bowl of veggies. Let chill well before taste testing.
2sparrows 