Quicksilver Messenger Service, Happy Trails I have gone blank slate a half-dozen times, and that is always my first acquisition. At this point, it is a tradition. If I move to a new permanent location, it is what I play in transit, and the first thing I play on arrival. It focuses me when disoriented.
After that, abandoning italics, Astral Weeks, Revolver, Soft Machine Third, Let It Bleed, For the Roses, Ummagumma, the usual nostalgic suspects.
Posts like this make it clear to me that I am a freakish outlier when it comes to listening to music.
THAT isn't the interesting question it raises!
Obligatory: "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson.
Obligatory: "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson.
I have apologized for the double post over at Standpipe's blog.
3, 5: Yep. (Although my iPod just went all weird, and I'm annoyed because now I can't listen to NPR podcasts on my commute. But that's not music.)
I don't know how I would respond if I lost my music collection (and, short of a house fire, I'm unlikely to lose the entire collection at once, and in that scenario there would be other things to replace than music).
I might go out and replace favorites quickly, or I might pick up some new music, embrace the idea of having a tiny collection for a while, and use it as a chance to learn some new music.
The possibility of the same tragic fate befalling me as befell Armsmasher is why I have two drives, one of which exists only as a repository for daily automated backups of the other.
Of course they're both in the same place because I can't afford the kind of storage/bandwidth necessary for colocation shit.
(My schoolwork is even more securely backed up! ASK ME HOW!)
With the download blogs (if you are cool with that), this is a much less perilous situation than it used to be. Either way, though, you obviously want the first things you re-acquire to be albums that bear repeated listens, given that they're the only things in your library. So, in the initial stages, your library may not actually reflect your music taste, if you are wont, as I am, to listen to a diversity of stuff, rather than certain things repeatedly.
With that said, LastFM is telling me that my first fifteen albums would be something like:
The Fall, A-Sides
Amon Duul II, Yeti
Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Acid Mothers Temple and The Melting Paraiso U.F.O, Does the Cosmic Shepherd Dream of Electric Tapirs?
My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
Joy Division, Substance
The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico
John Fahey, Blind Joe Death
Bardo Pond, Lapsed
Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilian
Pixies, Doolittle
Pink Floyd, Saucerful of Secrets
The Byrds, Fifth Dimension
Rolling Stones, Hot Rocks
Brian Eno, On Land
Come to think of it, this is a good thread to ask -- my iPod's (it's a nano from a year or two ago) controls have stopped working. I can move through the menus (although I sometimes have to hit a button repeatedly to make it work), but nothing will actually play. I also can't do that reset-thing where you hold down the middle button and the top of the wheel -- nothing happens.
It did this once before (sort of. The previous time I couldn't play anything on purpose, but "Shuffle Songs" worked. This time, no shuffle.), and then spontaneously fixed itself. Is this familiar to anyone and is there a miracle cure?
1.---Gymnopedies, Satie.
2.---Goldberg Variations, Bach.
Everything else could wait.
I would probably just buy new things.
Libreath, a way around the problem might be to get those earbuds that come with a "remote", i.e. a couple of buttons which serve the functions of pause/play, skip to next song, or rewind to previous song, as well as volume control.
Fuck songs, which can be replaced. I'm terrified this is going to happy to all my family pictures one day. (Which are largely backed up even less well than Smasher's ipod, unfortunately.)
I wish the link in 11 were written in English, because I'd really like to have some low-hassle way to store them more securely. What I do now is both a pain in the ass and not really all that effective.
18: If you're really wrecked about this, what about having someone make prints for you of all the ones you really care about, and shoving them in an acid free (or whatever the standard is) box under a bed somewhere. If you never open it, they should stay in decent shape, and there's no risk of hard-drive failure.
I learned over the weekend that a friend is in the process of burning every album in his music library (he's made it to "D" so far) to these blank CD things, which he keeps in a large book in his vehicle and which he plays on the vehicle's CD player. It's really rather adorable and quaint.
19: Oh, it doesn't keep me up at night, so much as I sometimes worry that it should.
I'm not sure your solution is practical, though. There's a lot of pictures, and it's something we'd have to do every time we took photos--twice a week, at least? (Or the alternative: one a month or so, with a risk of loss of the un-printed ones in the meantime, and also the giant pain the ass of sorting through a month's worth of photos to pick out the "good ones".)
Maybe it means I'm being unrealistic about the whole thing, but I'd definitely classify that as not low-hassle.
Oddly, I think my first two acquisitions would be Until The World Is Beautiful by The Prids, and How We Quit The Forest by Rasputina, neither of which is very close to the center of mass of my musical preferences, but both of which I can listen to over and over again.
I really like The Prids live. They are like a bar bandy joy division.
23: Of course, Joy Division was a bar band. But their albums provide little evidence of that, it's true.
They're like Joy Division with a yummy happy curvygirl instead of a suicidal epileptic skinnyboy.
songs, which can be replaced. I'm terrified this is going to happy to all my family pictures one day.
Eh, kids can be replaced.
I'm never without my music as long as I can hum.
I'm never without my music as long as OH GOD GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH
They're like Joy Division with a yummy happy curvygirl instead of a suicidal epileptic skinnyboy.
I cannot imagine.
Probably a good thread (or a very bad one) to ask the following:
My daughter wants to move a bunch of our old vinyl to digital (who knows why). It looks like there are standard offerings of USB-enabled turntables from folks like Numark and Audio-Technica in the several hundred dollar range and I assume there are a lot more choices if I want to leave it to my old turntable (and which I assume would be cheaper). Anyone have any relevant experience? The quality of the records is not such that anything very hi-fidelity is appropriate (and I fear the whole exercise may be doomed to disappointment for that reason). Thanks for any advice.
In the pre-MP3 era, we had our whole giant envelope of CDs stolen during a move. Our homeowners' insurance wouldn't give us any cash for it, but offered to replace "only those items that were stolen." So we had to make a list of titles, only those that were actually stolen. They were very clear about this, but obviously there's no way for anyone to know what we used to own. So that meant goodbye to the Pink Floyd and jambands, hello to Japanese-only jazz imports and all the latestcoolest indie things we'd been overhearing but never buying. Instantly cooler. Then iTunes happened and it all became moot.
29: neb, their site autoplays one of their catchier numbers, if you'd like a taste.
31: How did that work out? Did the insurance company wind up sending you a bunch of obscure CDs?
their site autoplays one some of their catchier numbers
18
I don't really understand the problem with pictures assuming you have a digital camera. Once you download them to your computer they are in two places and you can burn them to a dvd if you want another backup.
in two places
You mean the camera and the computer? Doesn't the camera fill up pretty fast? (At least for us it does.)
Btock Lamerf, if you're a mac user, this is both mindless and apropos to the other thread.
Most of the music I listen to is on CDs or vinyl, so it would take a catastrophe to leave me without any and I'd probably have more important worries than replacing my music collection if it came to that. It might also be liberating. But if I did decide to replace my music collection The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Velvet Underground, Journey into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story, Duende by A Man Called Adam, Saint Etienne's Foxbase Alpha and Seigen Ono's So Peaceful, Simple & Strong would probably be among the first records I would try to replace.
Journey into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story
Niiice. This is also key.
Regarding 37, the Time Capsule is a very nice (if expensive) backup solution, but it's not quite as smooth as advertised over wireless.
This makes me want to propose a "you kids today" experiment wherein for a week people listen to no music other than what's playing on the radio and watch no TV other than what comes on at scheduled times. Turning off cell phones is probably a bridge too far, but maybe turning off caller id. Not because life is necessarily better or worse without instant access to electronic information, but it's different, pacing- and serendipity-wise.
||
The girl sitting next to me at this cafe, having a conversation on her cell phone with an absent friend, remonstrates: you're not supposed to do anything but tease him until he asks you out!
|>
No music other than what's playing on the radio?
In my day, if you wanted to listen to music, you played it yourself, or found a public concert!
Ah, the hubris of the mp3ple.
I gotten rid of most of the things in my collection that I can't imagine wanting to listen to again, despite the fact that doing so no longer has any monetary value. (Remember when you could spend all afternoon flip-clicking through used cds?) This still leaves a fairly large chunk of things that I may in fact not ever listen too again.
What I'd replace first would depend on whether I was in a new music or known music listening phase. These days I'd probably reacquire Dengue Fever and TV on the Radio, before going back to get established favorites.
44: When Grorgh want music, Grorgh bash rocks together. Grorgh make more music in winter; music not great, but sometimes sparks make fire.
26: I'm not worried about losing the kids, I'm worried about losing our pictures.
36 is essentially my response to 35.
40 is basically what I've heard about 37, although usually using phrases far more inflammatory than "not quite as smooth as advertised."
44: I was trying to ease the youngsters in. Next step: sewing your own clothes!
47.1: I think Standpipe's blog is paging your kids.
36
You mean the camera and the computer? Doesn't the camera fill up pretty fast? (At least for us it does.)
I guess it depends on how many pictures you take. I got a digital camera (with a 2 GB card) about 18 months ago. It currently has over 600 pictures on it and isn't full yet.
When the chip does fill up I expect I can copy it to DVD, erase it and start over.
22: Rasputina FTW!
As a matter of principle, I'd likely get Sgt Pepper, if not every Beatles album. But, truth be told, I'd probably be OK going awhile without hearing them.
I actually have a half dozen albums that I've purposely not ripped, so that I can intentionally listen to them as albums.
This is also key.
I really want the two Loft volumes on vinyl.
Remember when you could spend all afternoon flip-clicking through used cds
Remember? That's how I spent Saturday afternoon. (Yield: Glenn Campbell's cover of "Hava Nagila")
There's about half a dozen Miles Davis albums that'd be first on the list, then (as per jackmormon), Bach's Goldberg variations (in any one of a number of versions), then a LOT of other stuff.
I have a huge clearout of music a couple of years back, so most of what I own, I like enough to probably want to replace. However, I own CD or vinyl copies of all of my music (except for a few things from emusic that can be re-downloaded) so it'd take a house-fire to trash my collection.
re: 30
Assuming your old turntable is decent all you need is a way of connecting it to your PC. If your PC can be connected to an amp with a phono stage then your total expenditure is going to be a couple of quid for a cable. If not, you'll need a phono preamp, but those can be had super-cheap these days. Either way, it's easy.
I lost all my iTunes stuff in a strange hard drive partition failure a few years ago, and since it had been a week of non-stop ripping on three machines it was worth the money and effort (to me, anyway) to run partition recovery tools on it. Everything is now synced to a second HD, but I also still have all the CDs and if worse came to worst I could rip them all again.
I need a better strategy for images, though, since I think they've now outpaced the CDs and are increasing at a greater rate. I've got backups on two different HDs, but I'm running out of space trying to keep up with that.
51 - I'm looking forward to the remastered Beatles release on 09/09/09, but I'm afraid it won't live up to its promise. The DVD-A version of "LOVE" sounds incredible once you can get past the mind-bending mashup aspect of it.
Bach's Goldberg variations (in any one of a number of versions)
I have a harpsichord recording I'm really fond of. Fewer pyrotechnics than in Gould's version.
55: Do you mean "purchased from iTunes" stuff? Because last year whilst upgrading a server, I lost everything I had ever bought from iTunes (TV shows included). I called up Apple -- whose name is on basically every piece of equipment in my house -- and they put everything I ever bought back in my download queue. They will make things right if you lean on them.
40, 47.3: I dunno, works great for me. Sometimes I have to stop it because it's making other internet things annoying, but I generally have it run in the middle of the night, and if I don't get daily backups, they're pretty much close enough.
What are the problems people have with it?
As for what I wouldn't replace, I think the works of Dead Voices On Air wouldn't make the cut - they were a three-degrees-of-Skinny-Puppy purchase and I haven't listened to them in over a decade.
60: Ha. Recently CA was making similar decisions in his "upload to FLAC, play everything on Squeezebox" quest. All sorts of 90s CD purchases were questioned: The Angels of Epistemology? Gashuffer? Steel Pole Bathtub? Some made the cut; not all.
Angels of Epistemology
Keep! Keep! Jeb is a totally swell guy (or was back when he lived here, anyhow).
I ripped a whole lot of CDs when I didn't have any intention of using Itunes, Ipod, or any other sort of thing, and I had something like 800MB of memory. So for each CD, I tried carefully to decide which songs to rip and which ones I didn't particularly want on my computer. Now more recently, I just have every song on every album, even ones I don't like very much, but then I go back to one of my favorites like "Scream Dracula Scream", and get annoyed by the fact that only the best 8 songs out of 14 are there.
62: Ha! I thought there might be Chapel Hill kickback on that one. Superchunk is safe, just to reassure you. As is Corrosion of Conformity.
fedward raises the point about reissues. My tastes run toward the older stuff, and there is just a dizzying array of reissues, remasters, etc. for a lot of it. Some with bonus tracks, some with different bonus tracks. Losing everything could be an opportunity to upgrade.
But if all the HDs and CDs go up in flames, I guess I'd start with the Beatles. Having only 1 or 2 Beatles albums is like having only 1 or 2 volumes of an encyclopedia. What else? Robyn Hitchcock, Neil Young, Siouxsie. Which albums? Whatever the used CD section provides.
43: you're not supposed to do anything but tease him until he asks you out!
nosflow, just ask out the "girl" sitting next to you and her devious plot will have succeeded.
Smasher is probably one of those torrent-y folks, but another way to reestablish your copy rights would be the public library. We've "borrowed" most of our new music in the past couple years from them.
I wonder if I would ever get around to replacing music that carries mainly sentimental value for me, but I don't really listen to anymore. I haven't listened to any Midnight Oil for at least six years, but they meant a lot to me back in the day.
"dizzying array of reissues, remasters..."
69: Black Sails In The Sunset is still a great album...or at least an album with so much sentimental value to me that I have it on cassette.
I cannot _imagine_ what I would do if I lost the music I have so carefully accumulated. Weep tears of blood, probably, especially since most of my really really precious things are either on vinyl or obscure enough that even in this age of reissues they'd be a bit tricky to replace.
But seriously, I just can't get all worked up about downloading music. It doesn't have the emotional resonance of looking at the CD, never mind the liner notes. I recognize that this is a silly attitude to have, but I like my CDs. They're dusty and clunky and they scratch easily and I still have the first one I ever bought. (Mekons, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strenen, import, hideously expensive, from the record shop that later closed down due to cocaine dealing in the parking lot.)
Right now--should musical catastrophe occur--I'd race right out and mug someone for the $80 I'd need to replace my Rip Rig & Panic CD.
70: well sure, some of them. But you could pick up Japanese black triangle remasters on eBay, say, and subvert that whole business.
This is basically a variation of the desert island discs question, no?
It doesn't have the emotional resonance of looking at the CD, never mind the liner notes.
See, you need to find the really nerdy torrent sites where they include scans of all the pages of the booklet with the download, and then you need an mp3 player with integrated cover viewing (iTunes with cover flow works great, but there's plenty of others). Technology has the solution!
I shouldn't really talk, obviously, being in the process of figuring out how to get 4 different formats of collected music across the country.
How to get a music collection stored in four different formats across the country, under the watchful eyes of pedants.
Pedantry is definitely not spatiotemporal.
71: "Red Sails in the Sunset" and, I agree,, their best (Kosciusko!).
When my wife and I finally merged our music, there were a few redundencies we held on to (ie, February's "Tomorrow is Today") because, odds are, they're never going to be reissued and what would we do if the only copy got stepped on?!
I have a harpsichord recording I'm really fond of. Fewer pyrotechnics than in Gould's version.
Murray Perahia's rules, which is to say I recommend it highly.
Also, Jack, and anyone else who cares: there's this 20-year-old Japanese guy who played a kick-ass Hammerklavier yesterday at the Cliburn. He's the first blind player in the competition, which heightens the kick-ass factor. You can hear it your own self: go here, open up the streaming dealie, click on the semifinal archives and find Nobuyuki Tsujii's recital. Totally blew me away. (I've been blogging the webcasts over there, incidentally, and believe you me, piano geeks can be as annoying as anybody who's ever turned up here.)
Speaking of piano geeks, hey Jesus, check out the crazy video of a Chopin prelude traversing a four dimensional torus mapping chords.
Oh, Jesus, it's lovely. Listening to the stream now.
This thread should feature a lot more sympathy for Armsmasher.
I guess it depends on how many pictures you take. I got a digital camera (with a 2 GB card) about 18 months ago. It currently has over 600 pictures on it and isn't full yet.
When the chip does fill up I expect I can copy it to DVD, erase it and start over.
Time for my semi-weekly flyby:
For what it's worth James, these cards aren't very stable storage, so your plan isn't a great one if you'd lose anything you really care about.
I often shoot 1-4Gb in a session (raw format only, so that's only a couple hundred or so), so I'm always swapping out cards anyway. But I have had them go wonky, and I have had data loss on them.
Both the file systems and the typical firmware aren't as stable as you'd might like either, so current 'best advice' is to never delete from the card itself, and reformat it every time you dump the card. At least that's what the pros tell me they do to avoid costly losses. Also, avoid cheap cards, not worth it. The error rate isn't that high, so a typical point and shoot user might not even have one in the few years their camera is current. But it sure would suck to have a catastrophic error if they aren't backed up.
I've probably have a dozen read errors on my camera this past year (but I take orders of magnitude more photos than you do, and a hell of a lot more data)
Oh and 82: That really sucks. We've still got a thousand or 1500 CD's I guess, so I'm not so worried about my digital stuff (which is also backed up). We'd lose some sure, but not all.
Going all digital on things like this (or worse, your thesis say) really does suggest a solid backup strategy but it's not the most straightforward thing to manage for many.
My typical approach is rsync the really important stuff to two geographically remote campuses where they're also automagically backed up. This doesn't work if you don't have access, and also isn't much good for media like music or photos. I've got an auto-mirror set up at home, but should probably set up something incremental too, especially since hard drives are cheap as dirt now.
of the desert island discs question,
Deserted island.
85: Jared Diamond investigates what caused the inhabitants of Rapa Nui to so rapidly deplete their music collections?
Brock, if you are worried primarily about data security (but not to the extent of wanting an off-site backup) and don't mind an approach that's a bit spendy, you could buy a drobo and stick a Tb or two in it.
If you have a top 25 list of photos you'd really hate to lose, you can print them as LB suggested, and/or burn them to a few DVD's and send to friends or relatives to stick in a file somewhere. Hard to beat geographically separate redundant storage.
I'm looking at a variation on this. I'm thinking about having Internet-based secure encrypted storage of all my business files. Anyone know what's out there?
Man. Are you in the process of packing up decades of files? That's got to be a huge project.
How much data are you thinking of Charley?
Honestly, I don't know that I'd trust the crypo side to anyone, but that's easy enough to do locally. At least for backup purposes.
Is it a desert island or a deserted island? This question has nagged at me for some time now. It would seem that "desert island" is inapt in many circumstances in which the term is used, since a lot of the time, for example on Gilligan's Isle, it's actually like a jungle situation, and not a desert at all. On the other hand, "deserted island" also often seems inapt, for example when the island is so remote as to have never been inhabited at all, let alone to have been inhabited and subsequently deserted by its inhabitants. And on other occasions (this is also the case in Gilligan's Isle, that show being my primary point of reference for the term and the concept, and, as was previously discussed, Hamlet and Bizet), the island isn't deserted at all, but is the current home of indigenous Polynesians or Micronesians etc., who might not always be present, for example because they have a migratory lifestyle that takes them from island to island, or atoll to atoll, but who fully expect to return, and so it wouldn't be strictly correct to call the island deserted.
'Desert', in the island context, is I think always an archaic form of 'deserted', rather than meaning 'sandy with dunes'. The problem of how can an island with an aboriginal population be 'deserted' is left as an exercise for the Eurocentrism of the reader.
the crazy video of a Chopin prelude traversing a four dimensional torus mapping chords
Ha. Awesome.
Crap. Now I'm like all paranoid about my shit.
54.last: Either way, it's easy.
Thanks, ttaM, as I was typing the comment up it occurred to me that I had not really thought it through and it should be rather easy. Will try something with the old turntable (probably get a new stylus if I can, the one on there now is ancient).
89, 90 -- I'm thinking mostly about the future. I am starting with nearly nothing -- a couple of legal pads, some pens, some disks with my Outlook stuff and some Word files. I need to buy computers and all the rest. (Also a desk, some chairs, etc). And I think I'd like to have the back-up off site.
'Desert', in the island context, is I think always an archaic form of 'deserted', rather than meaning 'sandy with dunes'.
Correct, and this is also the origin of the "sandy with dunes" meaning.
On the other hand, losing my mere 1.5 GB of music pales in comparison to the dozens of gigs many of you others have, and I'm sure smasher had. The thought of purchasing new music fills me with confusion, terror, and rage. Much like the prospect of dating.
92: Yes. Similar to the "Great American Desert" of the 1st half of the 19th century. Although in that case I think it carried the connotation of lacking trees as well.
Great American Desert.--This was the term used by the people east of the Mississippi river to express their idea of the country west of that river when it was an unknown land. Carey and Lee's Atlas of 1827 located the Great American Desert as an indefinite territory in what is now Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Indian Territory and Texas. Bradford's Atlas of 1838 indicates the great desert as extending from the Arkansas through into Colorado and Wyoming, including South Dakota, part of Nebraska and Kansas.
Actually, I wonder if it makes sense to have my primary hosting on the web as well. Pretty much everything is going to be either Word or pdf. It's awfully handy to be able to access and edit docs on the road.
100: I would consider going with one of the cheap sharing hosting packages, which often give rather ample space for very little money. Then you can access files with FTP. They often have good backup facilities, too. But for more than 100 GB, you might be better off with something specifically oriented towards storage.
Carey and Lee's Atlas of 1827 located the Great American Desert as an indefinite territory in what is now Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Indian Territory and Texas.
Um...
100: There is an outfit called Mozy (I believe EMC now owns them and the name recently changed, but you can find them as Mozy) that seems to have a pretty good track record, but it really is a backup of data you have on your system, not an archive per se—which will usually be cheaper. I think Mozy is on the order of 50 cents/GB/month, someone told me of one they found that I forget that was 15 cents/GB. I think a combo might be best. Archive most of it (which you can get very cheap to free) and run one of the backup services for the active stuff.
102: Good catch. I took the description from a web page transcribed from Kansas: a cyclopedia of state history, embracing events, institutions, industries, counties, cities, towns, prominent persons, etc. ... / with a supplementary volume devoted to selected personal history and reminiscence. Standard Pub. Co. Chicago : 1912.
But still off by a few years from when it was a state, so that presumably might have been a holdover from an earlier edition or another source.
59: Sometimes I have to stop it because it's making other internet things annoying,
Well, yeah, that's my biggest problem with TimeMachine+TimeCapsule+WiFi. Watching Hulu sputter to a halt is no fun. And of course, watching that damn backwards clock icon spin for hours and hours and hours after I multi-GB batch of pictures is irritating.
How do you get yours to only run at night?
But still off by a few years from when it was a state
1907, TYVM. Late in November 2007 we found out that the Presidential Proclamation (780) making Oklahoma's statehood official was on display at the National Archives in commemoration of the centennial, so we managed to get there and have a look at it. It was underwhelming. Two pages, typed, double-spaced (IIRC). There was, however, no line. We were in and out in the time it took the line for the "Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom" to move by about ten people.
How do you get yours to only run at night?
Sifu feeds his gizmos after midnight, and they become crazy apeshit gremlin gizmos with an archiving mind of their own, only to return, mysteriously, to their calm and docile demeanor the next morning at sunrise.
Surely there's a config option for when to run the backups?
There are several approaches to changing the schedule for a Time Machine backup. I've never had to resort to any of them, as my network is apparently so overbuilt that the backups of my MBP don't seem to interfere with anything else at all.
96: You're hanging out a shingle and going solo? Excellent. I'd envy you, except that the thought of getting clients terrifies me.
Surely there's a config option
In almost my very first philosophy lecture, Prof Clarke warned us all to beware of Shirley, and his warning applies in this case too.
You can just read 108 as expressing incredulity if you like.
You can read 111 as expressing resigned solidarity with your incredulity.
88,96,110:Wow.
This seem like a big deal.
the thought of getting clients terrifies me
Surely* not as much as the thought of not getting clients.
* Yes, yes, I know.
Surely a bunch of us would step up and commit crimes to keep LB's solo practice in business.
Given her areas of expertise, we should probably be suing each other instead.
Similar to the "Great American Desert" of the 1st half of the 19th century.
Similarly, maps of Oz always show it lined by desert on all sides.
Possibly my drive changes less than yours, so it bothers me less. I'm not taking gigs worth of photos every day, for instance.
118: Similarly, maps of Oz always show it lined by desert on all sides.
Impassable Desert, Shifting Sands, Deadly Desert and Sandy Waste. In turn surrounded by more lands and then my favorite, The Nonestic Ocean.
83
For what it's worth James, these cards aren't very stable storage, so your plan isn't a great one if you'd lose anything you really care about.
I would have thought the odds of both the card and hard drive failing at the same time would be pretty small. Or can the card have lost lots of my old photos without my noticing it because it is still working for new photos?
I would have thought the odds of both the card and hard drive failing at the same time would be pretty small.
Probably true. But I think that the card doesn't really count as a long-term storage solution. The card is where photos/image files are held until you transfer them to something more stable. It's the (longer-term) stability of that "something" that worries people.
116 -- Since Elbie won't do it, you'll have to commit crimes to keep me in business.
114 -- Well, it's a big enough deal to me, that's for sure. Right now, though, it's a series of small problems, each of which has been faced and resolved by countless others before: insurance, technology, marketing strategy. Then we can get to the good stuff: winning cases.
Real lawyers take Wednesday afternoons off?
I'll give it two weeks before you hear the phrase "I aint looking to do no jail time."
Yes! You will like it bc real lawyers dont get mocked for not wearing suits when they dont have court.
Also, remember the phrase "when the money hits the wood, the case go good."
I never wear a suit when I don't have to go to court, will.
I thought the Virginia phrase was 'Excuse me, your honor, but the defendant will need a continuance. The case is not financially mature.' (It sounds better with a UVA accent).
That is what you say to court.
My saying is what you say to the client.
And on other occasions (this is also the case in Gilligan's Isle, that show being my primary point of reference for the term and the concept, and, as was previously discussed, Hamlet and Bizet), the island isn't deserted at all, but is the current home of indigenous Polynesians or Micronesians etc
Marine biologists, actually.
My main problem with Gilligan's Island has to do with the field of expertise of The Professor. Professor of just what, exactly? Not to insist too much upon the value of (over)-specialization, but he seemed to profess expert knowledge of just about everything, which of course raises the possibility of expert knowledge of just about nothing.
Also, he used to leer at Ginger in just such a manner as revealed his true lack of taste, when anyone (with or without the book learning) could have told him that Mary Ann was the real prize.
Or can the card have lost lots of my old photos without my noticing it because it is still working for new photos?
Probably too late, but: It's possible to lose sectors (or other issues) of the file system on the card, yes. You wouldn't notice until you tried to access older files. Depending how you handle syncing etc this may or may not be an issue. It wasn't entirely clear to me what your strategy was, but anything that relies on long term storage on the cards is iffy. So's relying on one drive, of course, but they're at lest more stable that the cards.
For that matter, I know people who will never leave a shoot without having dumped to a portable disk on site, and verified the files are in both places. But their business relies on it -- different story for most folks, most of the time. On the other hand, I do seem to hear about people losing irreplaceable photos far to often to think that being paranoid about this stuff is completely nutty.
CCarp do you already have contact info for my stepdaddy? He's been through the same sort of thing in that area of the world and presumably has helpful or at least entertaining advice. email me.
134
... It wasn't entirely clear to me what your strategy was, but anything that relies on long term storage on the cards is iffy ...
The idea was that I didn't have to back up the drive as long as the pictures were still on the card also. When the card got full I could then burn all the pictures to a DVD and clear the card (while keeping the pictures on the hard drive). So I would always have two copies of every picture and would only have to do backups when I filled up a card which at the rate I take pictures is not very often.
Of course I really should have some routine way of backing up my hard drive anywhere.
Don't trust cheap recordable DVDs necessarily, either. Bit rot kills (photos)!
I would be quite distressed if my music all disappeared into the void. Even though I have most of the cds, the last time I had to load them onto digital media it took about three weeks. And considering I have went on something of a collection frenzy since then, how long it would take now doesn't bear thinking about.
I think the first thing I would upload again would be Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, because I'd need something soothing.
Is it Pinnock's harpsichord Variations?
re: 134
Ironically, given that my day job involves working with the long-term archiving of digital images, my home strategy is pretty inadequate. I have one copy of most of the RAW files on a hard-drive and a partial backup on an external. About 10-20% of the images are also backed up elsewhere. There's still about 50% of my digital stuff only in one location.*
But I still shoot film a lot of the time, so I have the film in proper archival sleeving in acid-free card boxes, so that's immune to everthing except a house-fire.
* with my thesis I had super-paranoid backup strategies with version control, and multiple off-site backups. But that was the product of learning from mistakes earlier on in the process.
I would feel liberated if all of my music disappeared into the void. It would be fun to start from scratch. I might take my time.
I've had trouble getting into new stuff for a long time -- I download stuff at a whim, infrequently paying for it. I have far too much new music that I'll hear but never listen too.
On Sunday I went to Amoeba for the first time this year and picked up "In Our Bedroom After The War" and played it once in the living room.
I've had trouble getting into new stuff for a long time -- I download stuff at a whim, infrequently paying for it. I have far too much new music that I'll hear but never listen too.
I stopped downloading all music that I hadn't paid for, partly for that reason.* I had to too much new stuff to appreciate it. These days all new music comes as a paid download, or on CD/vinyl and I get to spend time listening to and enjoying it.
* with the exception of things like the Unfogged mixes, which get listened to and then after a wee while, deleted.
That's smart. It would probably be worthwhile to delete those songs from the Unfogged mixes that I don't remember from the title.
And Apo keeps his up, so if I ever have another party I know what to do.
I think one of the pleasures of the blank slate would be realizing what songs I was really jonesing to hear again and which I was satisfied to remember or hum for a few bars.
Woo hoo! I just unsubscribed from a Song of the Day blog. I'll check back in for the end-of-year lists, it will be a blast.
140: I'm not sure if I'll ever get through my entire music library. I have a fairly involved system of playlists, but even still, I probably have thousands of mp3s -- and maybe a couple hundred records -- that I've either never listened to, or never listened to all the way through.
re: 144
Yeah, I was there for a while, too, until I decided it was beginning to spoil music for me. So, I had a year zero a few years back.
Deleted everything [and I mean _everything_] and then re-ripped everything from CD as lossless files. Since then I've stuck to it. I am quite happy to listen to people's mixes, or download the odd file for a quick listen if I'm not quite sure I want to buy something,* but the only music that lives long-term on my media drive is music that's bought and paid for.
* and with the advent of Spotify I can't even remember the last time I did that, even...
11: Since nobody asked, how, neb, how?
103/others: Amazon S3 is 15c/GB (for the volumes you're looking at). Probably so are other higher-level systems that use S3 under the hood, but they'll have some fixed cost or other component where they make their money. It's easy enough to synchronise with yourself though using any of the several tools available, and it's one fewer step that can fail. Amazon gives back a checksum immediately you store it so you can guard against transmission errors, which you will run into across dozens of GB of data otherwise (this point gets underrated, but a backup that's corrupted from the beginning is worse than no backup at all and anything that helps avoid that is good).
Encryption you should always do locally or it's pointless, so that all holds true for encrypted systems too. I use that and S3 to keep my most vital data updated off-site once daily, and a backup local drive keeping all my data updated with rsync more often for the run-of-the-mill disk failure case, rather than the house burning down. Sometimes I consider shifting more of it off-site, and I probably should, it's not expensive, just a hassle to upload or find somewhere to keep a drive.
12 tells me that criminally bulgur is *exactly* the same age as me, although I don't think I'd buy any of his list now.
I don't think I'd set out deliberately to replace anything. I'd just buy stuff I liked in the happy assurance that I haven't already got it somewhere I'd forgotten about.
re: 146
Yes, I should look into off-site backups of everything. I've held off in the past because ADSL speeds for uploading data are so woefully slow but it is probably worth it.
re: 57
I've never heard a harpsichord version I really really liked. Everyone always says, "oh Landowska/Pinnock/other-harpsichordist is the definitive version" but none of them work for me like the best piano versions.
I never listen to Gould's original recording, but I do like the 'Zenph' version of Gould.* I go through phases with different piano recordings but the one I listen to most is probably Tatiana Nikolayeva, which she recorded live for the BBC not long before she died.
* which, I'd imagine, makes purists shudder
148. Right. The primary meaning of "desert" as an adjective is uninhabited - by transference to large tracts of land unsuitable for pasture or cultivation.
130: A small firm partner once explained the two basic rules of solo/small firm practice to me.
(1) Always get paid
(2) If anyone's going to end up in jail, make sure it's the client.
I did almost no version control for my thesis. Most chapters had something like three versions, and the thing together had two at submission. I did keep a running backup at a physically separate location and a local one on a separate drive (same comp).
Should have set up version control, but may be too fast and loose as a writer. Revise like a Viking pillages, baby!
re: 153
My first submission of thesis suffered from messed up version control. I had corrected some typos and things in one chapter, and found later that the typos survived in the initial printed submission. No major mix-ups but I'd obviously submitted the last but one draft [which differed only in tiny corrections of that type]. So when it came to revisions and corrections, I installed subversion and used that.
Thanks EMess. Email sent.
152: In DC, if you refer to a Rule 1 Violation, you mean that you haven't been paid.
Charley--
Depending on your needs for encryption/security, take a look at Google Apps--it's incredibly cheap, and anything you upload there is stored in Google's servers in the cloud. My agency uses Google Apps as our internal Intranet and MyDropbox.com for secure file sharing. Drop me a line if you'd like pointers, etc.
Little known fact: harpsichords sound like shit. Those wind-up music boxes have richer timbre.
re: 157
That's tended to be my view, too. Years of dipping a toe into harpsichord recordings, and then finding they mostly sound like arse.
The idea was that I didn't have to back up the drive as long as the pictures were still on the card also.
Right, I got that bit but I wasn't clear what your sync strategy was, or how often you dumped to your drive. In your situation I suspect the most likely "gotcha" would be a hard drive failure, followed by finding out you couldn't actually read some of the old stuff from your card even though it shows up in the directory structure. So not a high probability, but it's there.
As Sifu says, recordable CD/DVD's aren't great (far less robust than pressed ones, due to the coating).
These days, an external hard drive isn't a bad or expensive longer term backup solution. For really long term, tape may still be best, I don't know. Really long term storage of digital media is a pain in the ass, as I'm sure ttaM can attest.
Should have set up version control, but may be too fast and loose as a writer. Revise like a Viking pillages, baby!
This gets it exactly backwards. A revision control system makes it much easier to revise like crazy, secure in the knowledge that the chapter you just canned isn't actually gone if you need it. It's wonderfully freeing to realize that. For the more technically inclined (it's not so straightforward yet) a distributed system lets you edit like mad on many machines at once without much grief. Not sure that's worth the setup for many.
Works even better of course if your underlying document is just text, but after all God Knuth/Lamport invented LaTeX for writing a thesis[*]
[*] you can choose to do such a thing in Word. You can also choose to wear a hair shirt. I won't stop you. Some other word processors are less craptacular with large documents.
re: 161
Yeah, it has to be LaTeX. Although I still meet people who ask me to send me copies of stuff in Word -- people who work in formula heavy disciplines, too, which is annoying.
re: 160
Yeah, terabyte/petabyte tape-robots, multiple sites, etc. Although we are moving to a hard-drive based archival system (eventually).
Hard drives are cheap. I keep one 500GB portable at home and one at the office, and swap them every couple of weeks; the laptop with all my data gets backed up to whichever one is home. I figure that losing all three at once is sufficiently unlikely.
Thanks to whoever mentioned The Prids. Until the World is Beautiful has made it into my Top 20 upon first listen.
people who work in formula heavy disciplines, too,
This is utterly bizarre to me, but I run into it also. From the physicians I understand it, but for engg or cs types, not so much.
For that matter, yet to see a more productive document (at least for article/book/tech report) system than emacs + AucTeX & refTeX packages. Plays very nicely with many revision control systems also.
harpsichords sound like shit
Or as Sir Thomas Beecham put it, "like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof."
I would have thought the odds of both the card and hard drive failing at the same time would be pretty small.
I'm guessing 'Smasher felt the same way about his iPod and his home hard drive.
My harpsichord recording is by one Gustav Leonhardt. And if any of you denigrate the harpsichord in my presence, I will cut you.
As Weasel Walter said of Xenakis, "His works for harpsichord are particularly macabre and cacophonously irritating - my girlfriend loves them and says it's just like hearing the best parts of the Rosemary's Baby soundtrack, only longer!"
I would have thought the odds of both the card and hard drive failing at the same time would be pretty small.
To lose one parent data storage device may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Don't make me come after you, nosflow.
166 and 167 aren't actually in opposition, ben.
Right, 167 wasn't a response to 166 but to something much further upthread.
I would like little more than for you to come after me, JM.
Except I wasn't denigrating but praising the 'chord.
That does take a little fun out of it, then.
Piero Milesi's Modi makes excellent non-creepy use of a harpsichord. Present's "Souls for Sale (pt 3)", on the other hand, exploits the copulating-skeletons vibe.
Modi. Specifically the first of the two pieces on that album.
The first of the two pieces. It even has a harpsichord solo! Minimalism for medievalists! Jesus might like it, who knows.
sympathy for Armsmasher.
Totally the first song I'd download.
"Made damn sure that Ogged
Lost his kidney to seal his fate."
180: I do. Thanks. The one in 178 totally rocks.
184.--I will, I will, but I just downloaded a bunch of software crap and am tired of it.
Sadly the album the track in 178 comes from, High Infidelity (real name!), seems to be out of print.
What's a good site that reviews different versions/recordings of canonical classical music pieces? Preferably something user-friendly that is easy to search.
Thanks to whoever mentioned The Prids. Until the World is Beautiful has made it into my Top 20 upon first listen.
I know, right?
I have used this site for Bach recordings, but I am sure that there are others. Gramophone has all their reviews online, but if you register they will send you lots of solicitations for a subscription.
