Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

Taking Control of Your Online Identity

Recently on Lifehacker and a couple of other sites that I read regularly they have been talking about your online identity.  Who you are when someone types your name in to a search engine.  I’m sure you’ve tried it, most people have done what has been referred to as “vanity Googling”.  While vanity, or some level of curiosity may be the motivating factor behind people searching their own name online, it actually is something everyone should try.  Why?  Simple, so that you can be aware of how you are being presented should someone search your name.  That someone could be a potential employer, client, date, or any number of other people you’ve come in contact with.  If you don’t know what the search engines reveal about you, you could be in for a nasty surprise.

To be prepared for writing this I went ahead and Googled myself.  It had been awhile and I was curious as to what I might find.  Under “Alex Schwartz” it took until page 22 to reach a reference that was actually to me and that was a link to Dan’s florn.net podcast.  Under Alexander Schwartz the first reference I hit was after a few pages, and that was a link to my Amazon profile and wish lists.  Nothing terribly damning there other than learning which X-Box games I long to play, and what books I want to get next.  Trust me, it’s not that interesting, take a look if you don’t believe me.  Googling me doesn’t reveal much of anything about me(yahoo and Bing both turn up next to nothing while searching my name). In some ways it’s a good thing because I don’t have to worry about people finding out things about me that could be damaging.  I’ve been pretty good about avoiding putting anything online that could be taken the wrong way.  By the same token sometimes not finding anything speaks volumes.  Are people going to wonder if I’m secretive?  Not very interesting?  Haven’t done anything with my life?  A luddite (well, okay, checking my Amazon wish list, or the fact that I run my own domain, disprove that theory in a hurry)?  Not even real?  It leaves a lot of room for people to speculate and just plain wonder.  Paranoid?  Maybe a touch, but let’s face it, online life has been, in many ways, merging with our real world lives.  People have lost a shot at a dream job simply due to a dumb comment, or inopportune picture posted to the web.  Just like at a face to face meeting, you want the first impression of your online identity to be a positive one. Continue reading…

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Home backup strategy

Sure, I’d love to have a nice tape backup system where I could rotate tapes on a regular basis, keeping a set safely offsite somewhere – but for my home life it’s unrealistic in terms of both time and money.  Still, that doesn’t mean I can’t take some reasonable precautions to make sure that my data will be safe.  I use a multi-tiered home strategy that took just a little bit of time and effort to get up and running, but after that mostly attends to itself.

Continue reading…

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Asus 1005ha-pu17 Netbook Review

I’ve been looking at Netbook’s for awhile now, since before they became one of the must buy holiday items.  In fact I’ve been keeping up with them since they were more of a novelty item with only one or two choice out in the marketplace.  Since then the little sub-powered laptops have exploded with dozens of competing models at any given moment, and more coming out all the time.  When asked which of the current models I’d like my choice was the Asus 1005ha-pu17 (in blue).  It’s the newer edition that comes with the 250GB hard drive and Windows 7 Starter edition.

Continue reading…

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Pigeons, the New Broadband

I thought my internet connection gets slow at time, but who knew the people in South Africa had it so bad.  Apparently it is quicker to transmit your data via a homing pigeon rather than over your internet connection.  I had moments back when I was dealing with Verizon DSL when I thought my broadband connection couldn’t possibly be any slower without being disconnected.  Apparently if I lived in Johannesburg I’d be better off sending my data files via a homing pigeon than I would using my computer and broadband connection.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.  Though I still don’t think it will keep me from complaining about the lackluster internet in the US – especially when I compare it to many other countries who once upon a time we were on par (or ahead of) technologically speaking.  We’ve been back sliding for awhile now and I’m not sure what it will take to catch up.  However I will remain thankful I don’t have to resort to pigeons.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

OS X 10.5.8 Update Fouled Up my Time Machine

Last month my laptops hard drive died.  It went from a little wonkiness, to a loud clicking, and then straight to sudden death.  Mostly I was annoyed.  I’m good about backups.  I have a cloned image of my drive.  All my important and irreplaceable documents and pictures also get their own private onsite and offsite backups.  I have also been using Apple’s Time Machine.  While I was annoyed that I would have to replace the MacBook’s hard drive (which, fortunately, is far easier than it was to have to replace the drive in my old iBook), I was eager to see how well Time Machine worked at recovering from backups.  So after I got the new drive installed I booted up from the OS X disc and selected to recover from Time Machine.  It went smoothly, and in about an hour all my data was on the new drive and it booted up and looked and felt like nothing had ever happened.  I was impressed.

Two days later I installed the 10.5.8 update via Software Update.  It appeared that everything went smoothly.  It wasn’t until the next day I realized the little indicator for Time Machine was constantly spinning.  When I checked on its status it seemed to be stuck on “Preparing…”.  Hmmm.  This wasn’t happy behavior.  I fiddled with the settings a bit.  Stopped the backup and started a new one and again it hung on the same thing.  I decided since I had created a new cloned drive image after getting the new drive up to speed I would reformat the drive I used for Time Machine.  I don’t really deal much with incremental file versions so I wasn’t worried about losing months of access to those. (for the record I have an Airport Extreme (pre-dual band versions)with a 500GB USB drive plugged in to it that I back up to via the wireless network).  After reformatting the thing I began starting it up as a new Time Machine drive and once again it stuck on “Preparing…”.  Checking out Console.app showed it was having problems accessing Spotlight related files on the new drive image.  This of course was odd as it was a brand new sparse.image file, but all the same it could neither read/create/nor find whatever it was looking for and was throwing up several errors a minute.  Searching around the web revealed a few other people with similar problems, but no solutions at first.  After awhile some people began posting that they had that issue but let it keep going for a few hours and suddenly the backup kicked in.  The theory being that Spotlight needed time to reindex everything after the 10.5.8 update.   Okay, I could buy this.  So I started up Time Machine and let it go overnight.

Fast forward over 12 hours and the machine was still preparing.  There’s only 40GB’s in use on this drive so I find it hard to believe it was still attempting indexing.  Next I invoked  mdutil -E to the laptops hard drive to force it to index.  Spotlight showed it was indexing, and I clicked on it so I could watch its progress bar.  20 minutes later the drive was reindexed.  Awesome I thought.  Fired up Time Machine… and again it stuck on “Preparing…”  I let that go for hours before finally giving up.

Hopefully this is a widespread enough problem that Apple introduces a patch, or some instructions on fixing the problem as I would like to be able to use Time Machine again, especially after seeing how while it recovered my machine after a drive failure.  In the time being I will continue updating drive clone images with Carbon Copy Cloner, as well as continuing all my other back up practices.

Edit 1 (13:13 EST): This is the error message that I receive over and over: “8/8/09 1:13:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B)(Error) IndexCI in CIMetaInfoCreate:Tried to create index when index already existed /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B”

I’ve also gotten:  ”8/8/09 1:14:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA/0.; needs recovery “

Edit 2(August 14, 4:11 EST): Well it seems that the problem actually has to do with 10.5.8 and the most recent build of Mozy for the Mac (1.4 I seem to recall).  While Mozy was working fine it was doing some weird cosmic thing to certain sets of permissions that caused Time Machine to throw up all sorts of errors.  I uninstalled Mozy (saved the prefs) and Time Machine immediately started working like nothing had ever happened.

Be Sociable, Share!

•