This weekend I looked into Jungledisk as part of my interest in Amazon’s S3 and related products. I’m fascinated by the potential to go serverless: to essentially rent out a box and storage as you need it, without having to pay hosting fees, and home use implications.

So anyway. Right now, S3’s prices are:
$0.15 per gig per month of storage
$0.10 per gig of data uploaded
$0.18 per gig of data downloaded

So I thought about this: what would it cost for me to backup a DVD’s worth of data?

For normal 4.7GB disks, it turns out to be $1.18 to upload and store it for a month and then $.71 for every month I leave it up there.

With the price of blank media, I’m better off burning it to media and storing it. Or use a hard drive.

But here’s where this gets interesting. I’m entirely paranoid about backups, but I’m really bad about actually doing them. I try to do a whole rotation, keeping incremental/full backups on a rotation and what not, but I don’t in practice do a good job. So what I do in addition is run two drives in RAID-1.

The only think I’m really paranoid about, though, is the writing. My whole backup paranoia comes from college, when I got lazy and lost about four months of stuff, and restores failed. And that’s only a fraction of my stuff.

And there’s where this potentially shines: incremental backups.

1) Sign up for the storage
2) Map it to a drive
3) Pick your favorite backup utility and set it to go at the one directory I care about on a schedule

Then each day or so, it goes through, sees what documents have changed, and updates them. I get charged some tiny amount for the bandwith burned that day, and at the end of the month, I have to cough up a couple of pennies, because the actual amount of data that changes day to day is tiny.

No having to stash some DVDs at work in case the house burns down. No rotation schedule.

That’s ridiculously cool and convenient.

Linus Torvalds once said “Real men don’t use backups. They just submit their work to a public FTP.”

That’s almost exactly what we’re talking about.

The really interesting thing, I think, is extrapolating out — what happens as encrypted, secure online data storage is nearly free and you can set up your own virtual server to do things with it?

It’s 4:25 and when I looked outside a couple minutes ago, it was dark.

Sunrise: 7:18 AM
Sunset: 4:12 PM

That’s a 8h 54m day. At its highest, the sun got 20′ off the horizon (making walking south really hard).

A few weeks from now you’ll be able to work an eight hour shift and not see the sun unless you go outside for lunch. For all my complaints about Seattle, that’s a full half hour worse than we get.

Of course, we get overcast skies and rain, and it’s been cold, clear, and sunny here.

I happened across the Lord Mayor parade today, where a ton of (to my American eyes) random groups drove/marched/etc through the streets of London: scouts, unions, trade groups, charities, and so on, and so forth… and a lot of the UK military. Marching around in camo with assault rifles behind the British equivalents of the Girl Scouts. Some of the UK military groups were, say, the fueling group, or the medics, but there were a lot of them like the arctic commandos who went through the parade in a Zodiac, guns pointing out…

And here’s the thing: I saw Children of Men not that long ago. It made it being in that close proximity quite unnerving. When I mentioned this, the lovely and talented Mrs. Zumsteg said “Maybe you shouldn’t watch movies like Children of Men…”

She might have a point. But I don’t think I can.

You have chosen — or been chosen… — Breen

Following up on yesterday’s gaming post — I don’t want to live in a country where you can’t take pictures of things on trains.

And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to City 17. It’s safer here.

Some of this is going to be US-centric.

Relative powerlessness to do anything about all other items on this list
Global warming (expandable!)
Iraq War
I’m a citizen of a country that tortures people and makes them disappear
We’re all “good Germans” (see above two, several from below)
Erosion of civil rights (see: war on drugs, war on terror)
Non-global warming environmental issues
We’re not going to get onto clean energy sources before we can’t use dirty ones/there aren’t dirty ones left so the last two humans face off with clubs over a preserved bottle of Penzoil in a couple decades.
Media consolidation and lack of discussion of topics on this list
Corruption
Politicization/Evangelism of military
Politicization of other government services (TSA)
Quality of educational system (particularly race/class discrimination)
Societal inability to find reasonable compromises (see: war on drugs, erosion of civil rights, also: health care/copyright laws)
Wealth concentration
… and so on

I don’t know, looking that over, none of it seems particularly unreasonable to be anxious about.

I made my first presidential campaign contribution of the cycle, and I never would have expected it when this thing started up. As any reader of HLWT knows, I’m greatly upset about the erosion of constitutional rights, and lately, particularly by the failure of Obama or Clinton, who are in the Senate, to do anything, or take a leadership position on any of that, or Iraq, or anything… so obviously, Dodd’s “restore the Constitution” platform’s appealing, but I didn’t care enough.

Anyway, I watched this latest bill with dismay, unable to understand why you’d want to give blanket immunity to people who violated (at least) the privacy of their customers, and almost certainly their civil rights. That no one did anything to stop it made me wonder why I even cared about this stuff.

And today, Dodd threw a big wrench into the process, and at the very least, he’s prepared to pay a price for his opposition to this horrible legislation… and I realized that I need to support that. So I did.

Dodd 08.