For the first time in years I finally have a backup solution that I really like.

Some history is in order here: I remember (barely) when backing up your computer meant making another copy of the paper type with your BASIC program on it. That was nasty. It was followed by the floppy disk era, when backup meant copying your data floppy every so often (your system floppy was already a copy). Later, I knew the joy of buying a new program and spending an hour copying all of the program disks as a backup.

All that changed when we got our first hard disk. At 10 MB, it was so much bigger than any floppy disk that backups were nearly impossible. For a while I backed up my hard drive using a program called Fastback that copied the data on to floppies more quickly and safely than the DOS backup program. Later I got a tape drive–that was a joke. It was slow as molasses, and the only way be verify that it had worked was to copy it back on to the hard drive. No thank you.

Eventually I gave up on backing up the whole hard drive; I just started copying whatever I was working on onto a floppy from time to time. As my projects got bigger, I moved up to a Zip drive and used 100MB Zip disks. Then I got into digital photography–it was time for a CD burner. I’ve been through two of those, now, neither of which worked reliably; the third one, which came pre-installed in my PowerBook, seems to be OK.

But all of these solutions have been stopgaps. They preserve my data–but if my hard disk goes south it could be weeks before I’m back up again, depending on how soon I get a replacement machine, and how long it takes to re-install everything.

But now, finally, I have a backup solution that really works. I went out and got an external LaCie firewire hard drive. It’s plug and play with Mac OS X: I plug it in, and there’s another drive. It’s an 80 gigabyte drive; it cost less than a third as much as an 80 megabyte drive once cost me.

Now here’s the cool part. It’s big enough to hold everything on my laptop’s harddrive. I just use a program called Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my laptop’s disk to the external drive.

And here’s the really cool part: I can boot the laptop from either drive. (Thank you, Apple!) So if my laptop’s drive fails, I can boot from the external drive and go on working. When I get the main drive replaced, I just have Carbon Copy Cloner copy everything back over.

Way Cool.

I’m the #1
Duquette on Google!

Granted, the listed page is the old version of this weblog, but that’s still pretty cool.

This is by way of being a sort-of kind-of biography of
P.G. Wodehouse, relying mostly on Wodehouse’ letters and
(woefully few) writings about himself, as well as his attitudes as
expressed in his novels and short stories. Quoting Wodehouse as much as
it does, it is indeed a funny and easily-read book. As a biography, it’s
only so-so, especially as (as the book itself points out) you can’t
necessarily trust what Wodehouse says about himself.

I did learn a few interesting things, though. For most of Wodehouse’
childhood, his mother and father were living in the Far East, while he
himself was shuttled from, significantly, Aunt to Aunt. He had almost no
contact with his mother from the time he was about two years old until
he was in his teens. (They were not close.)

And then, after he left school he spent two years working at the London
branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghae Bank. (The book spells it
“Shanghai”, but this is an error.) (Yes, I know, the City of Shanghai is
usually spelled “Shanghai”. In the name of the bank, it’s “Shanghae”.)
He claims never to have understood what he was supposed to be doing there,
and was finally sacked for writing the beginnings of a story in a brand
new ledger. This was Defacing A Ledger, and was very bad.

After that, he became a full-time writer, and eventually moved
permanently to the United States, where with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern
he helped to invent the modern musical comedy. Before Wodehouse, the
songs in musical comedy frequently had little to do with the story being
told, but were selected for their perceived chance to become a hit.
After Wodehouse, it was expected that the songs served the story. His
efforts as a lyricist are virtually forgotten these days, but among many
other songs he wrote the lyrics for “Bill” from Showboat. He also
wrote a number of plays, which so far as I can tell are entirely
forgotten.

Wodehouse spent a total of eighteen months working in
Hollywood as a writer. His first stint consisted of two consecutive six
month contracts for Warner Brothers. He got paid a ridiculous
amount–$2000 a week in 1929 dollars–for doing virtually nothing. The
studio hired well-known writers, but didn’t ask them to write anything.
Weird. He spent another six months in Hollywood some few years later,
with similar results.

And while all this was going on, he was writing, constantly. For which
I’m heartily grateful.

So I got a new iPod, see? And I’m ripping CDs onto my computer to download to the iPod. And when I rip the CDs, iTunes goes and queries CDDB for the track titles and similar information. One of things CDDB tracks is the so-called “genre”.

A digression: when did “genre” stop referring to the form of the work (short story, novel) and start referring to the content (mystery, science fiction, romance)?

Now, Jane and I have a considerable amount of Irish, Scottish, and English traditional music on CD. And somehow, when I put a Planxty CD or a Silly Wizard CD into the slot, CDDB comes back and tells me that it’s “World” music.

There ain’t no such thing as “world” music, people. It’s simply a term that record stores use so that you can see from across the room where to find the music that’s sorted under its country of origin because they don’t know where else to put it. Beyond that, it’s not a useful designation.

Even if you can’t stand her writing, I would still recommend reading Bell’s
biography of Virginia Woolf. She’s such an eccentric, such an interesting
character that her story is fascinating.

First, there’s the whole madness issue. She committed suicide in 1941 after
years of periodic psychotic episodes. And the treatment then was so
primitive, almost nonexistent, that it almost seemed to make her problems
worse. She probably had some form of bipolar disorder and Bell gives some
time to tracing the mental health issues of her forbear back a few
generations. I’ve often wondered if she were alive now, with all the
therapeutic drugs available, would she have been able to write as
imaginatively as she did?. Or would the drugs have stabilized her mind and
destroyed her creative spark?.

Then, there is the whole Bohemian, Bloomsbury, lesbian thing.
After reading the book, I can’t think of anyone I know who led a more staid,
happily married lifestyle than she did. She was married for years to Leonard
Woolf and, yes, had passionate friendships with lesbians but Bell, who
happens to be her nephew and actually knew her, is highly skeptical that any
physical reaction was reciprocated by Virginia. She did have flamboyant,
creative friends. Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy and Roger Fry were just
a small part of the circle she was involved in. She knew Henry James and
H.G. Wells. And later in life, she befriended Katherine Mansfield and
Elizabeth Bowen. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, was a leader in Post Modernist
painting in Britain and famous in her own right. But Virginia’s major wild
fling seems to be that she shared a house as a cooperative with unmarried
men prior to marriage.

What mostly comes thru is a highly gifted woman plagued with shyness and
insecurity and threatened by permanent madness who writes because she’s
passionate about language and words and thoughts. She isn’t highly educated;
in fact, Bell points out that neither she nor her sister were allowed to
attend school and were educated, badly, at home by their impatient and
overbearing father. She loved London and England. The war with its bombings
and threats of invasion lead indirectly to her final slow slide into another
episode of madness which she forestalls by putting rocks into her pocket and
walking into the river Ouse.

I’ve just posted Chapters 16 and 17 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! Enjoy!

I just ran across a page entitled Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. Excerpt:

There is only one specific type of occasion when Margret feels I should ‘go and speak to’ one of the children, and that’s when they have done something forehead-slappingly idiotic. The implication she is making is that Idiocy is my area. That only I can speak to the children when they’ve done something comprehensively crackbrained because, unlike her, I can speak The Language Of Fools. ‘Maybe you can get through to him,’ she’s saying, ‘Because you know how the asinine mind works.’

Mirabilis has uncovered a site dedicated to a peculiar early instrument called the Serpent. Best of all, the site has instructions for how to build your own serpent sound-alike for about $30 and a weekend.

I think I first read this book when I was 12 or 13. I know I wasn’t in high
school yet because I had to borrow my father’s library card and check it
out. The library where I grew up had a rule that children were not allowed
to take out “adult” books and Dad got a card just to get around that rule.
It was the same summer I read Jane Eyre,
Rebecca by DuMaurier and
Oliver Twist. Oh, and The Robe by
Thomas Costain. The plots of all those
novels stuck in my head until adulthood but, strangely, I could remember
nothing about this one except that it fascinated me and I devoured almost in
one sitting.

The story revolves around a huge yellow diamond, the Moonstone, that was
looted sometime in the past from a Hindu shrine during a British campaign.
The Brahmin protectors of the shrine vow to recover it and thru time have
watched over the owners of the stone waiting for their chance to steal it
back.

That is all background. The stone has now been left as an inheritance to a
young woman, Rachel Verinder, for her 18th birthday by her weird old uncle
and the suggestion is that it is more of a curse than a gift. It’s brought
to her country manor home by Franklin Blake, the young man that she is
falling in love with. “Hindoo” jugglers are in the neighborhood,
coincidentally, and perform for her party. That very night the stone is
stolen from her bedchamber, and Rachel rejects the attentions of Franklin Blake
and leaves in an emotional tizzy for London, refusing to allow the police to
question her or search her possessions. No one can figure out how the stone
is stolen since no one was in her room. The Hindoo jugglers are taken into
custody but no stone is found. Hmmmm…..Oh, yes, the young housemaid, who
also happens to be in love with Franklin Blake, acts suspiciously and then
commits suicide by throwing herself into quicksand.

As a plot goes, it’s ok. There were several times I found myself wishing
that Collins would move it along just a little faster than he does. And from
a modern perspective he’s slightly racist when describing the Indians. But
the way he tells the story is the juiciest part. He fragments the Narrator
into several people by setting the book up as a memoir of the mystery told
by those involved. The first narrator is Betteredge, the house head servant
whose voice is the perfect rendition of what you might expect a butler to
use. He uses a distant cousin, Miss Clack, to tell part of the story. She’s
an ardent lover of religious tracts and her single minded desire to convert
the damned is so humorously portrayed I snickered almost against my will
thru the whole thing. Sergeant Cuff is wonderful as the objective observer
policeman and he comes closest to figuring out the crime. He’s abrupt and to
the point and reminded me a bit of Columbo in a 19th century portrayal.

The end and solution, which I won’t tell because it IS a mystery, is a
little outrageous. He could have done something more creative with it. But
it does introduce the character of Ezra Jennings, the solitary doctor
addicted to laudanum for some unspecified disease who finally figures it all
out and cracks the mystery.

I like 19c novels. I can usually overlook their flaws just because I enjoy
the writing so much. This one was no different. But it also could hold its
own with a modern British detective mystery.

OK, so I’m reading George R. R. Martin’s epic The Game of Thrones. I’m in the early chapters, in which Lord Eddard Stark has just left his seat of Winterfell in the far north to journey south with his King. Eddard’s oldest son has just uncovered some dreadful information which he must share with his father, and proposes to ride south. His mother says, “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.”

Immediately I heard an old, crabbed voice crying, “There will always be Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm!”

Now maybe it’s a coincidence, but I doubt it.