Sharon and Jacques’ Excellent Blog

It seems that I hit a bit of a nerve with the last posting about optical media and its tendency to fail. I thought I would write a few lines on how to prepare an external hard drive for backups to ensure that your data has a good chance of keeping it whole. One friend pointed out that its a dirty secret in the industry that optical media has a typical shelf life of 5-7 years unless it states that its designed for long term archival storage. That set of 50 CD-Rs that contain your best of the 70s and 80s likely isn’t archival quality.

Don’t forget that an external hard drive is also a  single point of failure. If that drive fails or you have a fire, all of data is going bye bye. One of the posters mentioned a system called a Drobo which is an external drive systems with lots of drives in it and it manages the failures. Expensive but worth it for the non-technical types. A cheaper solution is to get an external hard drive that can take 2 hard drives and set up the drive with something called RAID 1 This page lists at least a dozen or more from Canada Computers. All the data that you write to the drive is mirrored on the other drive so failure is less likely.

The place to buy computer equipment in Toronto (and elsewhere for that matter) is Canada Computers (http://www.canadacomputers.com). Hard to beat their prices or selection. Certainly cheaper than Tiger Direct.

Get yourself an hard drive or RAID box that will comfortably fit your collection plus room for growth. I use backup software, Retrospect, that lets me add volumes to the backup. You should consider something like this as well as opposed to simply copying them.

I would suggest a bare bones drive dock such as the Themaltake ST0005U. Ugly, but you just drop a drive into it without having to buy another case. Its about $46 at Canada Computers. This dock features an eSata and USB interface. If you are moving lots of data, I would recommend eSATA. Drop me a line if you want more information.

Plug your disk into your computer. A dialog will appear asking you to format the drive. Make sure that you DO NOT select Quick Format. You want to verify every single byte of data on that drive. Depending on the size of the drive or RAID configuration this will take a few minutes to many hours. Let this complete and then use it for backup.

If you do a quick format, its possible that you will write data on to a bad portion of the disk. The disk may recover but I’ve learnt the hard way this is not a good idea having had more than a few pictures show up with strange lines in the middle of them. I traced it back to bad blocks on a disk and had to restore from backup.

Make a point of doing backups on a regular basis if the data is valuable and you might want to consider also making a backup and storing it in a safe deposit box.

Good backing up!

I have a large photo collection which I make a point of backing up whenever I add new photos to the collection. I use Retrospect, an excellent backup program that I have used for many years, and I was backing up initially to CDs and for the last few years DVD+R. I started doing backups about 10 years ago so I had more than 600 disks in the backup collection. I considered it a worthwhile safeguard as I have lost photos in the past for various reasons.

I was doing a backup a few days ago and got tired of of the speed of DVDs which is slow at best to write. I decided to move the backup and associated archives onto a large external hard drive (1.5TB) which I purchased for about $120 CAD.  I started by making a backup of the current collection which took about 24 hours including verification. It’s a large collection, did I mention that?

I then started copying the backup archives using Retrospect which basically involved reading all the DVDs I had burned and copying the data to the new drive. It has been a fun weekend of shuffling disks in and out of readers.

I was shocked to find out about 40% of the disks had 1 or more errors on them and some where just plain unreadable. I made a point of verifying all the disks as I wrote them since I’ve been burned in the past.

I had made a point of buying quality disks, using a marker that didn’t contain any acid and storing them in sealed disk binders and believing the general consensus that optical media had a shelf life of 100 or more years.

 There were some patterns to the failures:

1. For a while, I was labelling the disks with stick on labels. Almost without fail, these disks were totally unreadable. Throw out your labelling systems if you have any desire to save your disks for the long term.
2. Printable disks that I had printed on were the next most frequent to exhibit failures.
3. Disks that were written more than 5 years ago also seem to failed on a regular basis.

In case you were wondering, I tried reading the disks on 3 different DVD drives. An old Plextor model was the best at reading most of the disks. NEC drives worked about 70% of the time and an old Panasonic drive was just terrible.

What’s the moral of this story? If you have important data that you want to keep for long periods of time, better check your optical media. I would suggest making a copy of it to a hard drive and putting the drive in a safe place. At least the drives have the ability to do some type of error correction.

I hate to think of what has happened to all those disks that I made of movies and song compilations that I so lovingly labelled.

Hope your experience is better than mine!

We travelled from Mississauga through to Bradenton Florida to visit the folks for Christmas, and drove a straight 23 hours to get there.  With the help of satellite radio and the comedy channels, the trip stopped two people from killing each other in the car.  Being couped up with someone 23 hours straight is one thing, but driving 23 hours with your life partner in tow (or at least sometimes you wish you could tow them on the back of the car) is quite another.

We probably saw every cop in Georgia, as they just sat on every overpass trying to find yet another sucker to make their year end quota.  Onward we drove, quite thankful that at least we missed the snowy weather that was hitting other parts of the country quite hard.  We were riding in the hippo, and this was the first long distance journey we undertook in it.  It fared quite well and was comfortable, though I have to say that if you are my height (keebler size) there is really no good place to put your arms.  We also discovered that despite technology boy’s best efforts at bleeding edge – the darn hippo does not seem to want to give us the miles per hour on the digital speedometer.  Most of the time we were guessing at the speed, and my spellbinding math skills have still not improved since 10th grade.

I have to say one of the saddest things is the lack of Tim Horton’s along the way.  The last one is in Ohio – then there are Waffle House’s as far as the eye can see.  While I love saying the name – there is not much else that redeems it.  Part of our challenge was also the load of stuff we were carrying for friends and family.  My biggest fear was the 20KG of flour in the back of the car.  I was afraid the border police would think it was the other white stuff.

Upon our arrival we stumbled into bed for a nap, then woke to our family celebrations.  Christmas morning saw us with an 8:30 am tee off time and for once, Jacques joined in the fun.  Though he seemed to quit on hole 7 as he pulled out his binoculars and camera and started birdwatching on the golf course.  Seriously.  Maybe it was because he managed to nail someone’s house with a golf ball so hard it sounded like a gunshot.  True to form my game was excellent on the front 9, but after a few beverages and far too much laughing with friends – disintegrated.  A h well, not like I was keeping score!

We arrived home for another nap – then the luxury of too much food and lots of friends.  We have also been exploring the surrounding area, finding out of the way places to eat and walking on beaches.  It is a bit too cold to swim.  Today we heard a Brit complaining about the cold to which his wife replied – stop complaining, at least it is much warmer than England.  Ah, a woman who always sees the glass half full!

There will certainly be a few pics to come – so keep an eye out.  Happy New Year to all our wonderful friends and family!

Sharon and I traveled to Hong Kong and the Phillipines in November 2009. We spent 3 days in the Phillipines doing a bit of shopping and saw a few sites. We then flew to Manila where we stayed with some friends, doing lots of shopping drinking and touring. Thanks for Neil and Avon for having us and being such great hosts.

We arrived in Hong Kong at 5:00 AM after a 12 hour direct flight from Toronto. We flew Cathay Pacific. After hearing so many good things about Cathay, I was expecting it to be amazing. It was very average, especially compared to Emirates. We took a cab to our hotel, the Bishop Lei. It was on the Hong Kong side at Mid Levels. We had a small suite with a great view of the city. It was also affordable, around $125 USD per night. H1N1 was a big concern and they had plastic over all the commonly used surfaces which they said they changed every hour.

Walking in the bathroom, there was a big sign that said “Tap water must be boiled prior to drinking”. Welcome to Asia, this is a common problem and so we made sure to buy bottled water. We slept for a few hours and then Sharon insisted we begin shopping and sightseeing.

2009 11 Hong Kong Misc

The gallery is of a mix of pictures of Hong Kong that I couldn’t really categorize. The pictures that look like paintings are high dynamic range photos. Its a technique where you take 3 pictures of the same object with different exposures and it produces an image with all the detail from each picture.

It was very hazy in Hong Kong and about 22-25C which was a perfect temperature. One thing that surprised me about Hong Kong was how built up into the side of the hills and mountains everything is so the roads and sidewalks are really steep. There is an outdoor escalator that goes from the Mid Levels down to sea level (or Central) and it goes down in the morning and up at night. Getting around in Hong Kong was very efficient and generally cheap. We purchase an Octopus card which gave us unlimited use of the subway and bus routes. Cabs, which were readily available, were $5-10 CAD and always used a meter, something that wasn’t common in other Asian cities we visited.

We spent the day shopping and visited the main markets in Kowloon as well as going up the Peaks to get a great view of the city. Food was good and available in all prices ranges.

The next day Sharon had planned to go see the Sitting Buddha and followed by a night cruise and the seafood market. The Sitting Buddha is located outside the new airport. You take the subway to the end of the line and then can take a cable car or bus to get the site. We opted for a cable car with a clear bottom. I recommend the experience as the views are great. If you’re afraid of heights, you might want to opt for a car with a regular floor.

2009 1109 Hong Kong Sitting Buddha

The cable car takes about 30 minutes to get to the site. You have to walk about another km and then climb up a long set of stairs to the Buddha itself. You walk through a Disney like village with little stores and they also have an excellent massage store which does divine foot rubs. After climbing up and down the Buddha, my feet needed it. Price was reasonable, about $50 USD for an hour massage.

Overall the whole site was well done. It was clean, well laid out. In comparison to the Buddha in Phuket, it was much more modern and better done. The Buddha in Phuket may be taller but it wasn’t complete when we visited in 2007 and the drive up to get to it was a bit horrific. This was quite genteel by comparison.

We went back into town, did more shopping and then wait to the main tourist pier to await our boat for the night time harbour cruise. We had pre-booked but had forgot to confirm. I gave Sharon a bit of shit for that but it worked out in the end. Once again, I must accept that Sharon is always right.

The boat was nothing to look at but it did include as much booze as you can drink. Hong Kong at night is simply amazing. The buildings are all lit up and I have never seen anything quite like it. We sailed towards the end of the harbour and then stopped and walked through the seafood market. Pretty much anything that lived or crawled along the bottom of the seas appeared to be for sale. I didn’t check prices but I suspect it would have been good value. Our cruise included a meal which unfortunately wasn’t that great and certainly didn’t contain many of the goodies that we saw on the walk through the market. Overall, the cruise was good value but did make for a late night. We were shagged by the time we got back to the hotel around 10PM. The thumbnail for the gallery is actually the escalor down from Mid Levels.

2009 1109 Hong Kong Harbour Tour

We spent another day in Hong Kong and then went over the Phillipines were we spent the bulk of our time. We had a great time in the Phillipines including the nicest hotel experience of our lives.

Here’s a taste of what it was like:

2009 1116-18 Phillipines Hotel Azure

More to come so please check back over the next few weeks.

Sharon is of the firm opinion that this has been the worst summer ever. I was curious to find out if that was true so I started to do a little digging on the Environment Canada web site where you can all kinds of interesting stats.

I’m a firm believer that most people can’t remember what the weather was in previous years on average. Everybody can remember the major storms or high temperatures and they remember some of the weather on weekends especially when it rained.

So is Sharon right? Is this the wettest summer on record so far?

Lets look at the average data for the Toronto airport, one of the two main weather stations for Toronto. Data for July is as of July 23 which is the latest data posted on the EC web site.

So far we are not even close to 2008 and are actually slightly below the average. What about temperature? BTW – the yearly average temperature in Toronto is 7.5C.

We do seem to be having a colder summer than compared to last year so there might be something to Sharon’s memories.