Very, very cool.

and the making of.

I need to preface this by saying that I’ve been an Apple user for nearly 25 years. I have worked almost exclusively within the Apple ecosystem for that period and things have been good. For my chosen profession of video editing, this relationship, for the most part has been a good one. So when the iPhone was released it seemed like a natural progression. The early iPhone’s were a huge leap forward in terms of technology and interface and life was good. Fast forward a few years and things aren’t quite so ground breaking. iOS hasn’t really changed that much, and whilst the hardware has gotten smaller and faster, it really hasn’t broken the mould lately. The doubt set in when I spent a lot of money upgrading from the iPhone 4 to the 4S. It wasn’t a bad upgrade but I couldn’t quite see the full value for dollars spent. When it came time to upgrade from the 4S to the iPhone 5 I really couldn’t see the value. A bundle of cash for an extra row of icons and a slightly thinner phone. I wasn’t excited. I had been watching developments in the Samsung camp, but never really played with one. Based on being out of a phone contract and still having a functional iPhone 4S I decided to have a proper play with a Samsung phone. In particular, a Samsung Note II. Over the coming weeks I am going to attempt to document some of my adventure into the ‘dark side’, including the pitfalls and the pleasant surprises. To give away where this is headed, a Mac guy bought a Samsung and the workd didn’t end…

One of the things I truly love about running are the sunrises.

My run last Wednesday was a personal achievement at 13km’s as the longest run I have done. (*Tough Mudder didn’t count) That was until Sunday when our ‘little training run’ raged out of control and ended up at 20.82km. Just 190m short of my goal half marathon distance for October. With 10 weeks till the Melbourne Marathon, now the question has been raised. Do I just keep training to get faster and more comfortable at the half marathon distance, or do I put my head down and see if I can turn 21km into 42km in 10 weeks.  (evil grin)

After Tough Mudder, and a little worse for wear.

*Tough Mudder didn’t count as a proper run. Sure it was 19km long, but there was so much standing around waiting for people on obstacles that it really didn’t classify as a proper run. At the time, I was struggling to run more than 2km without falling in a heap, yet managed to get through Tough Mudder without too much issue.

This is the kind of ‘take to people with a stick’ attitude that is needed to get regular folks to perform regular backups.  With people embracing the ‘digital hub’ lifestyle, the amount of data people are accumulating is increasing exponentially, and in turn, the risk of epic data loss also increases.

These days, our photos are digital, our video is digital, our letters are digital and our music is digital – and they are all stored on that tiny little spinning hard drive that could literally fail at any moment.
Gone are the physical copies of the precious memories that people gather.  Previously, we would have had printed photos, video tapes, CD’s, cassette tapes, vinyl and hand written letters.  These were all physical items that could be stored easily for years, and barring a house fire that destroyed everything, you could be pretty certain that you could successfully keep most of your precious memories long enough to hand on to the next generation

Now, we store all of these digital memories on a hard drive (usually just one) and rarely with a regular backup routine.

Instead of you needing a catastrophic house fire in order to destroy all of your memories, now all you need is a hard drive failure; and those seem to be happening all to often.

ok – end of rant.  Now that I have hopefully got you fired up, now to do something constructive with this.  Let’s have a quick look at the options out there and see what is available.
First things first – storage is cheap.  Very cheap.  Too cheap for the cost of storage to be an excuse for not having your shit backed up.  Buy at least one or preferably two external hard drives to use as backup drives.  Next step is to look at software for backing up.

Software Options
At the absolute base level, you don’t actually need backup software.  If you have some idea about what you are doing, you can just manually copy all of your important data across on to your backup drive and be done with it.  However… Backup software has a few tricks that can make big differences to successfully maintaining your precious data.

Carbon Copy Cloner – http://www.bombich.com/
This app is free and awesome.  It gives you a bunch of really cool and simple options for backing up your shit.  You can even set it to automatically back up at specified intervals.  How cool is that? You can also set it to create bootable versions of your hard drives, which means you can create backup of your main hard drive, and if your main hard drive fails, you can plug in the backup and keep going.

Time Machine – this is built into the Apple OS.
It’s that thing that annoys you whenever you plug in a hard drive saying ‘hey, do you want to backup your shit onto this drive’?  I really wish people would pay more attention to that question and occasionally say yes…  it is truly plug and play (almost to a fault).  Whenever you plug in a drive, you are prompted to use it for a Time Machine backup.  It provides incremental backups so that you can go back to a version of a file at a particular point in time (hence the name Time Machine and you can set Time Machine to poll your machine several times a day to ensure that you have the most up-to-date backup possible.

Crash Plan – http://www.crashplan.com/
Ok, I haven’t used this one personally, but I have had enough people who I respect suggest it that it certainly is worth checking out.  Even better, it is multi-platform so it’s not just for the Mac folk.

End note – I have written and published a version of this article a few times before.  Each time it has been triggered by some recent and very scary incidents.  Over the years I have seen university thesis (years of work) disappear in a drive failure.  In my early days of working with Premiere, I lost all of a documentary TWICE in 2 weeks.  Thank goodness for tapes back then…   I’ve had clients lose photos from the birth of their children, the last photo’s of their parents alive, and more than a few ‘only copies’ of wedding photos have vanished into the ether.  As a final point, here is someone else talking about backups in a much more entertaining (and scary) way…

The plan is to switch off social media for 30 days.  Delete the twitter & facebook apps from my iPhone and iPad, log out of facebook on my laptop & desktop and maybe even get my partner to change the password.  The plan is to remove myself from the daily flotsam and jetsam of micro-blogging contributors.  Reduce the noise and hopefully allow myself to get a bit of clarity.  Remove the chatter and allow thoughts to develop fully.

It doesn’t mean I wont contribute on these platforms, but if I do it will be via syndication; ie. I post a blog on one of my WordPresses and it auto posts to twitter and facebook – and hopefully this will be in some more meaningful way than my usual idle banter.

Now I may falter, weaken and succumb to the temptation that is the constant 24hr instant gratification that is social media, and I am hoping that my friends will stand by me and tell me to get off social media and stay the course of the project.

If you need to get in touch with me, or feel like you are missing my input on something important, there will still be ways to get in touch.  You could always email me, call me or do something crazy like arrange to catch up for a coffee or lunch.  If you don’t have those details, you should be able to get in touch with my via this site.

This should be interesting.  Giddy up!

I have seen others post about this over the last few weeks and hadn’t really paid attention until this morning.  I logged into my MobileMe iDisk to see if there was actually anything there, and found a whole bunch of images and other flotsam from 2003 and 2004 that I had thought was gone forever.  Now I am madly downloading it before it properly goes for good.

My suggestion is that if you have a MobileMe, it might be worth a quick look to make sure you haven’t left anything up there before it is gone for good.

So far I have spent a few days getting over jetlag up at Big Bear, snowboarding & mountain biking at Snow Summit, and more recently have spent a few days catching up with people in LA.  Next stop is Portland for some more snowboarding then back to Las Vegas on the weekend for NAB.  Giddy up.

I have added some random pics from the last few days below.

One of my New Years goals (note. not resolution) is to write. Not write more or write heaps. Just write. I am one of those people who is constantly thinking of ideas, then gets frustrated when I cant get that idea out. It doesn’t necessarily matter if anyone is listening or reading for that matter. I just need to get the ideas out and recorded so that I might be able to refer to them at a later date.

To further this process, I have set the goal of writing. writing something.. The idea is that if I can write often enough I can, through practise, reduce the barrier to getting an idea or thought out there. So to wrap this back into the title, I am rendering…. a perfect opportunity to give this writing thing a crack.