Category Archives: Personal

I can’t value backups enough. They’re the protection that just sits in the background, and like insurance, you essentially forget about it until that tragic point when you need it. I know many people that have been burned by their lack of backed-up content and I never want to go through that (knock on wood).

My biggest fear is the loss of my MacBook Air as it’s my only computer. Everything lives on it; both my personal and professional data are stored on it. So, instead of spending a lot of time describing exactly what I’ve come up with over the years, I’ve put together a diagram.

Some highlights:

Having two physical drives means I can lose both the computer and one backup drive. The odds of losing the machine are slim, luckily. The odds of losing the machine and two drives is catastrophic and very unlikely.
Having a snapshot (using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner) means if my machine was lost, I could easily plug the bootable device into another machine and be right back up and running in no time. Time Machine, while providing helpful incremental backups (OMG did I really delete that file last week?!) takes a lot of downtime to restore.
Using the cloud (internet storage) is easy. I feel fairly safe putting my timeless items (like years and years of photos) up in the cloud as providers like Rackspace and Amazon allow for tons of cheap, easy data storage which they, too, are backing up (though no guarantees usually).

Do you have any suggestions or thoughts on backing up your personal and work data? Is this overkill? Not enough?

Rethinking food and farms: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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I finished reading an eye-opening book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I feel it's a must-read for every American. Barbara and her family moved to her farm and lived entirely on the local production for a full year.

You may not agree with them, you may not understand them, you may not appreciate them. I put myself in all three buckets before reading this book. But being exposed to the ideas presented is worth everyone's time. I'm a believer.

We've all heard about how farming has changed (moving to big corporations) and how they destroy the environment (gas emissions from farm animals, lack of crop rotation destroying soil). But what is less appreciated is how we can change things by eating and growing food closer to home.

Though awareness is growing, this book has helped make it clear why we should change our habits:

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That’s not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big difference

Also gaining awareness is the fact that we rely so much on just a handful of crops. Corn is in nearly every item we buy at the grocery store. From the sugar in soft drinks, to the feed that fattened up our chickens. History has shown this isn't a good way to live:

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens.

I find it interesting that the more 'affluent' society becomes, the less good food we eat. We shift from water to soft drinks. We go from eating local fruit to munching on kiwi and banana year-round…

Because of this book I'm looking forward to trying new, local, organic fruits and vegetables. I'm excited about a shift in my diet and a new appreciation for food. Again, I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

Some useful resources:

Posted via email from Devin Reams

Cataloging reviews and bookmarks

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In a prior effort to minimize my online activity I removed myself from using a lot of websites. Two of which I’ve come back to: Yelp and Delicious.

I find a lot of interesting sites and articles online and I’ve continually found myself thinking “shoot, what was that site name?” or “where did I read that article about ____?” I’ve come back to Delicious to help catalog these sites.

I’m also interested in sharing my thoughts on restaurants and bars I’ve visited. Yelp has been an invaluable source for finding good places to eat. I love being snarky and sharing my opinion, so, I’m also back on Yelp posting reviews.

An interesting side-note: I’ve stopped actively using Brightkite. In the numerous interactions, I’ve found little-to-no value in cataloging and constantly keeping track of my location. It is fun to engage in conversations at conferences and get togethers.. but certainly nothing that Twitter can’t achieve.

Making naps popular

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Ever since SXSW I’ve rethought a lot of what it is I’m doing, what my priorities are, etc. I’ve also noticed that every night I get home from work and I’m tired. Crazy huh? I also get hungry at lunch time.

But seriously, I hate getting home and not feeling motivated to do anything else. So, I’ve gone back to something I perfected in college: napping.

At the time, biphasic and polyphasic sleep were being (re)discovered online. I stopped taking naps after I started my big-boy job out of college. But now, I realize, it’d be great to take a nap and start a ‘second day’ every night.

So my schedule is as follows:

08:00 AM – Wake up, go to work, etc.
06:00 PM – Leave work, have dinner, etc.
08:00 PM – Sleep
11:00 PM – Wake up, start ‘second day’ (read, watch movies, blog, etc.)
05:00 AM – Go to sleep

My body is, luckily, still used to the 80-90 minute sleep cycles so I can get away with two chunks of 3 hours and feel energized all day.

Two days in and I’ve hit the ground running. I’m pretty stoked. If you have any questions and want to try biphasic sleep / naps just leave a comment.

The Kindle looks amazing

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I had the privledge of touching a Kindle 2 at SXSW when Alex and I bumped into Brian. I learned one thing quickly: Kindle owners quickly turn into Kindle enthusiasts and evangelists.

The display is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The screen doesn’t look digital, its almost like it was ink printed right on the device. Let me reinforce: this thing looks amazing! It’s almost as cool as a Book (comic, Penny Arcade).

But, nay, I mustn’t buy one yet. With over a dozen books on my bookshelf (the real ones, dead-tree books) I shall wait until I finish those before I buy up yet another gadget that may-or-may-not persuade me to do more of something (I’m looking at you Nike Plus).

Update: I bought one! And the dead tree books are still on the shelf. :\

Things I learned at SXSWi 2009

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Just a few of the important lessons I’ve learned here in Austin.

Sleep is precious.
Housekeeping doesn’t know that.
~~Dodgeball~~Foursquare is fun to play.
Companies: Twitter is not the secret to success (nor the end-game); you’re not Zappos.
People really like BBQ in Texas.
Gary Vaynerchuk is still a badass.
But, other cyber celebrities like Scoble becomes less respectable (and relevant) each and every day.
John Gruber talks the same way he writes: smartly (and hasn’t had to buy himself a drink in 7 years, his words).
Companies: Despite the “convenience” of the internet, people still love picking up a phone and talking to a smart, capable human.
Nerd conferences are the only place you’ll see lines for the men’s bathroom but not the women’s.

WordCamp Denver 2009

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There will be a few weeks of little things here and there, but, yes, it’s over. The first WordPress conference in Denver has come and gone and I survived. Thanks to Alex and Rachel for their help running the conference and doing the legwork I couldn’t get to. A big thanks to the volunteers who showed up early to help out: Mike, Mike, and Kristal. Finally, a big thanks to the speakers who came to speak.

So far, the feedback coming in is great. As always, you can’t please everybody all the time. Plus, shit happens; it’s to be expected. I don’t think we would’ve done too much differently, though. There are always trade-offs and I think we did the best we could given the circumstances.

Denver has attracted a ton of talent and interesting individuals and I hope WordCamp was a good event for them. I’ll post some thoughts and experiences over at Mind Averse when I get a few minutes.

Taxes filed, beware TurboTax

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I’m glad to have my taxes done and out of the way. This year (2008) was far simpler than 2006, or 2007. Back in college I had up to seven simultaneous jobs. The paperwork was painful. This year I’m down to two W-2s, my Roth IRA will be maxed out ($5,000 contribution limit, FYI) and life is good. Oh, and since I was such a charitable guy (donations to United Way), Colorado owes me $200. Sweet.

But, I learned one painful lesson: if you have started a return with TurboTax you cannot downgrade to a lesser version of the product. This makes some sense because you’re given “advice” with some of the advanced products. But, TurboTax will not let you start over, reset, or downgrade. You have to create a brand new account which means your prior-year returns are no longer accessible from the same account. So I can go all the way through the process of filing, up to the point of hitting ‘submit’ (and maximize deductions, receive advice, etc.) and then start over for free.

I can’t make this up, from the TurboTax FAQ:

Once you’ve started preparing your tax return with TurboTax Online, you can upgrade your TurboTax Online product to Deluxe, Home & Business or Premier to take advantage of the extra features and tax guidance available in those products. After you’ve upgraded to one of these versions, your tax information will transfer to the upgraded version automatically. However, to switch back to a lower-priced version, you’ll need to start a new return with a different User ID, as there is no option to switchback to the previous version once you have upgraded your product.

Fail.

Back from Africa, I don't have malaria

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We got back from a long vacation to Kenya for a safari. The trip was December 19th – January 9th. I had an awesome time and I now have 1,800+ pictures to go sort through. Plus another 40-50 minutes of HD video to edit, post online, etc.

But the scary part was coming back home and having flu-like symptoms. I figured “well I never get sick, what can this be” so I checked with the doctor. He did a flu test and the results came back negative. What’s left? Some random bug or malaria.

It wasn’t malaria.

But that would’ve been a pretty sweet story, eh?

Check out some of the safari highlights on Flickr and I’ll add the rest as I get some time.

Trip to Boston now online

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Rachel and I took a quick trip to see friends in Boston, MA a few weeks ago. I’ve finally put the photos online. I love the various web applications out there, here’s how I used three to track my trip:

DOPPLR: Used to see the ‘big picture’ when it comes to travel. I’ve had the trip listed on my travel profile for a few weeks here. Magically, dopplr matches up travel dates to my Flickr timeline to show pictures from that trip. Easily one of the cooler features.
Flickr: I uploaded all my photos with the permissions set to ‘me and family only’. So, all my pictures are archived and I can go back and essentially ‘unblock’ the ones I want to share with everyone else. I don’t have a GPS-enabled SD card but I can manually geotag the location of these photos and have them show up on a map.
Brightkite: Throughout the trip I would ‘check in’ at the various spots we were at. Now I can go back and look at a map view of my trip. This helps with tagging photos but is also a really cool way to visualize a trip.

So there you have it. Three nerdy sites for one cool trip.