Belt & Braces

It’s probably because I work in IT but I’m a bit cautious when it comes to backups. Up until now, I’ve been using Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine to take care of backups on my Macs. Following a recommendation from a fellow Twitterer (Twit?) I have signed up with SugarSync which will back up any files I specify to their secure servers in the cloud. I’ve gone for their free 2GB offering for now.

SugarSync looks like it will solve my other problem too, i.e. how to keep files synchronised between my MacBook Pro and my iMac. Up until know I’ve had to rely on having a share on the iMac and saving important files there (which of course needs a network connection between the two Macs) or remembering to copy the changed version back to the “other” Mac whenever I’ve changed it. SugarSync solves that problem by keeping files stores on either Mac in sync via the cloud.

Anyway, that’s the theory. I will let you know how I get on. Meanwhile, if you are intrigued by the above, click on the following link for more information. By the way, it works with Windoze as well!

http://tinyurl.com/ybkj7y9

It’s only f*cking Green Day, Dude!

I’ve been waiting to see Green Day for years now (missed out on tickets in 2005) and yesterday I finally got to see them! Part of their world tour, we saw them on their second night at the O2 and it was worth the wait – they were awesome. They played for nearly 3 hours, a mix of new (21st Century Breakdown) and old (Idiot, Dookie, etc.).

Green Day, still the best f*cking band in the world!

Today I has been mainly…

Today I has been mainly working from home.

There are some aspects of working from home I like, however there are some things which I like less.

I like the fact that my home phone doesn’t ring with the same people as my office phone yet I can still maintain contact with my team via mobile and email; plus being logged onto the works servers means I’m in touch realtime. What I like less is the ease with which I can go get another cup of real coffee, raid the biscuit tin and be more distracted by Twitter. On the plus side (again) it’s great to be able to sit somewhere comfortable at lunchtime. Oh, and not having to do that commute!

R.I.P. www.wizzardprang.co.uk

www.wizzardprang.co.uk is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life it rests in peace!

You get the idea. I have not used the site at all for ages and I cannot remember when I last updated it so I decided to pull the plug before the hosting company billed me for its renewal next week.

I have several other places to use for image hosting so I’ll be updating various links etc. over the next few days. Meanwhile this blog, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr will suffice to serve my presence on the interweb.

It’s been how long?!

I have just realised that my last post was at the end of August!

Since then I have mainly been:
Tweeting
Facebook-ing
XBoxLive-ing

It has got me thinking about whether I really need my official website. It’s up for renewal in a week or so…

10.6.0.

Got my Snow Leopard disk today.

Being a bit of  a geek where IT is concerned, and bearing in mind all the risks accociated with being an early adopter of a new OS version, I went for the update on my MacBook Pro. After all, my MBP is only a couple of months old and has no edgy software on it making it a safe target.

So I followed the usual steps, i.e. repaired permissions, cloned the HDD using CCC and ran a backup on Time Machine. Then I went for the upgrade. I can report that it went smoothly, taking about 40 minutes (against the 45 it estimated).

Early signs are that everything is cool. It’s shaved about 7GB off used disk space, app startups are faster and everything works, even Photoshop Elements using Rosetta. There is also a Beta of Cyberduck which I found works with SL.

So, that’s my experience of Snow Leopard to date. If I do find any problems with it I’ll update this post.

Know Your Enemy

I know mine. Procrastination. Well, actually it’s enemies: procrastination and being distracted down the easy path.

I have really let my guitar playing slide (no pun intended) over the last few months. There’s been so much important stuff to deal with that setting time aside to practice playing the guitar was not easy, so it just wasn’t happening. It needs more dedication than, for example, surfing the net or going on the XBox for half an hour.

Anyway I was browsing the magazine racks at the weekend and spotted the latest Total Guitar, which I do buy every now and again. Their riff of the month was Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy”, so I bought it. That Green Day track is so good (as is the whole 21st Century Breakdown album. So my next goal is to learn the Know Your Enemy riff and this will galvanise me into spending more time on the guitar.

It’s time to ROCK!

MacBook Pro!

The day after my MacBook arrived, Apple announced the revised MacBook Pro line up at WWDC. Speed bump and other features plus a price drop. I was a bit pissed by this, however a phone call to Apple Customer Support resolved the matter – I could return it and they’d ship the newer model. It took a while to turn around but my new MacBook Pro arrived yesterday. It’s lovely! Thank you Apple!

New MacBook – Nice!

OK so I finally made up my mind to buy a new Mac and it arrived today. It’s a lovely aluminum MacBook and it looks really cool! I’ve used Migration Assistant to set it up using my iBook, which got me up & running pretty quickly. As I write this it’s busy copying over all my music into iTunes. I will enjoy spending the next few evenings installing all the apps I need

This week I are mainly…

• Listening to Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown
• Playing Wanted Weapons of Fate on XBox360
• Playing Call of Duty World at War on XBox Live
• Thinking about doing some chores