I woke up this morning in a cold sweat. “Why?,” you ask unnecessarily (because I am going to tell you).

Why? Because I have 37GB of photos from the last 6 years on my computer and when I boot it on a cold day it makes a noise like the hard drive heads are about to fall off the servo postiony thingo.

“But, don’t you have backups Ash?,” you continue, annoying me with your constant questions. The reason I don’t currently have backups of our photos is because I don’t have enough space, even on the ~750GB of HD space in my current machine to mirror the photos *and* all my current projects. Of course I could buy another HD but even with mirroring that seems lame to me (I currently mirror all of my projects between drives). I am a futurist and there needs to be a futuristic solution to this. Preferably one that allows me to recover my data even if my house burns down.

I was going to continue pretending you are talking to me but I can’t be bothered so instead I’ll just get to the point. To solve my problem I have started using the Amazon S3 service + JungleDisk to backup all of my photos (and everything else eventually) to the cloud.

In case you have been living under a rock in space, cloud computing is the best thing since sliced cheese and twice as awesome. Using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) I now have an ultra reliable infinite sized network disk to store my files on. To backup my data I am using JungleDisk which makes the S3 service appear as a network drive on my computer. From there I can drag files into S3 or schedule an automated backup.

All this awesome isn’t free of course but it is cheap and the cost depends entirely on how much you use. It costs about 10c US per GB put data into it and uploading my entire photo archive of 37GB is going to cost me approx $6 US per month to store. Which is a freaking bargain when you think of each of the options available.

>> Buy another disk and put it in my pc

The disk will be about $120 (possibly less) for 500GB. I need to install it somewhere. I need to mirror to it. When my computer catches on fire it’s all gone. I can’t access it from anywhere else easily (at high speed).

>> Buy another computer and put some disks in there and start backing up to that

Same as above but it costs more.

>> Use S3

Slower to back up to (as its on the net). Monthly cost depending on how much you store. If my computer catches on fire I simply download it again from the net. I can access it from any computer like it was a local drive (using JungleDisk). S3 is so multiply redundant that I will never lose my data unless I purposefully delete it. It’s in the cloud man!!! (Ok, yes I am a trend whore but hey what you gonna do?)

So I went with S3 because if you are gonna do something do it properly and if you are gonna do backups do them really properly. JungleDisk also has a USB version so I can mount a network disk to my stuff really quickly from my USB drive which is cool.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted as to how it works out. The only issue is upload speed at the moment but that will become irrelevant once most of my data is actually up there.

In a belated attempt to preempt the next big thing (belated because I am about 7 months too late) I have been trying to register a good Android related domain.

So far all of the good ones have been taken with at least androidmobile.com and androidplatform.com taken by Google itself (MFs).

Looking through most of the rest of the records, it is interesting to see that most were registered on the 5th of Nov 2007. I can’t remember but I have a feeling that if I looked back thru some archives of the net I would find that that was the day Android was announced.

Now… All I need to do is get my shit together and ensure that the next time something as big as this happens I am not so carried away by the possibility of being able to hack my phone to Rick Roll me every time I receive a call that I forget to actually get in on the action.

Next time, next time…

It looks like this now:

I wonder if they are trying to soften or informalise their image by using the lower case G?

Ok, so I have just got back from another fruitful night of discussion (over beers) with Dan as to how we are going to a) revolutionise the software world and b) become GaJILLIONaires. The only problem is that I got so mentally lubricated (read: drunk) that I for some reason I mistakenly believed that a 7-Eleven donut was exactly what I needed at this time of night.

Now I have a sugar headache and feel like I am all hopped up on goofballs with nowhere to go. I have a feeling the only way to channel this sudden rush of low quality sweetener to my brain is to write a really insightful and witty blog post about it then attempt to fall asleep.

Damn, that’s 0/0 so far…

Sunderland Footy Stadium (I think)

Ey oop jimmy! I’m off to sunny Sunderland (lovingly described by Ben as “the arsehole of Britain) on Monday for some work related shenanigans!

FARK! (not the website)

One of our clients (CitiGroup) don’t like giving us information about how to integrate our bollocks piece of software with their bollocks piece of software so I am going to have to go up there and (hopefully) sort it out. At least I am staying in a really nice hotel. It’s even got a pool! (I’ll send you the pics of me in my togs when I get home ladies

5 Great Things About Sunderland

1) It’s not Iraq
2) It’s not Afghanistan
3) It’s not Iran
4) It’s not Shepherds Bush
5) There isn’t a fifth thing sorry.

Expect a nice long journal update on Tues or wed when I get back!

I just recently found out that most of the flying things I have been seeing (and trying to hit with a rolled-up newspaper. Shut up Sinan!) are not in fact wasps but in fact hover flies drawn from the sunny shores of France to England by the nice(ish) weather. They look nearly exactly the same as a wasp except they don’t have stingers and their yellow and black colouring is part of the short fur covering their abdomen so it is softer than a real wasp colours.

After some careful thought and experimentation I have found a foolproof technique for telling the various flying summer insects apart in order to safeguard you and your family. When an unknown insect appears, wave a rolled up newspaper around it but don’t try to hit it. If it goes apeshit all of a sudden and starts repeatedly stinging you and everyone around you then my research has shown that it is probably a wasp. If it goes crazy and stings you once before dying then its probably a bee. And if it bumbles around the place trying to work out what is going on before flying headfirst into your newspaper then its probably a hover fly.

Oh yeah and if it is a massive black ball that makes a noise like an old Nam era Huey chopper before divebombing into your face and clawing your skin off then its either one of those things out of the movie Pitch Black or one of those bastard bugs that kept trying to kill us when we were on Ios in Greece last year

I finally clawed open my wallet the other day and bought a new packet of razor blades for my Gillette Ultra Mach-Daddy Turbo Pro Plus shaver. They cost £7.60 at ASDA. Seven Pounds Sixty!? What the hell?

When I got home I opened the packet and eagerly looked inside for the gold plated, irridium edged, diamond encrusted blades that I had assumed would have to be inside to justify the fraction-of-a-small-country’s-GDP I just paid for them but all I found was a couple of plastic shaving heads! they didn’t even have rare earth, nuclear powered anti-gravity ball bearings in them!

I mean, in this day and age, for £7.60 I would at least expect them to include some sort of coupon for say, 20% off my own robotic geisha or all you can eat at Big Jim’s Diner of Questionable Origin but no, it was only razor blades. Yes they work and work well but OMGROFLMAOBBQ they are a rip off!

I finally came to the conclusion that it musn’t be the actual materials they are made out of that drive the cost up but the fact that they are constructed in in a Venusian space factory leased by Gillette from a breakaway Chinese sect of space-faring monks. The bureaucratic red tape involved with this arrangement must be the reason for the cost of the blades. I mean, they couldn’t be charging that much for something that could be made for 20p a pop in Taiwan could they??

That it is nearly impossible to say ‘Beer Can’ without sounding like a Jamaican saying ‘Bacon’?

Man I gotta get a computer before I go crazy!!

Unfortunately due to financial constraints that doesn’t look like becoming a possibility until I get back to Melbourne so I am having to use all of my various zen powers to not go mental every time I become bored. Which, when youhave the aforementions financial constraints can be frequently.

I mean really, in the scheme of things, not having a computer isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I don’t have my legs or my eyesight. It’s not like my family have all been killed by rebel guerillas(sp?) with machetes and it’s not like I can’t afford food and have to live on the streets and sell my body for cigarettes and beer (Ed: wtf?) … Of course it’s not on the scale of any of those things and even mentioning them has reminded me that it’s not really a problem and I should really stop being such a wingeing biatch about it and go to a museum or something… It’s just that….

IT’S SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATING!!!
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Have you ever started saying a funny word or phrase as part of an in-joke or something only to find out that suddenly you couldn’t stop?

I have. As many of my friends know I have a habit of saying ‘dude’ or ‘man’ after every sentence. This is nearly totally involuntary and believe me I have tried to cut down on it. Contrary to what my mouth would lead you to believe I am not a Californian surfer bum and I wasn’t at Woodstock. I’m pretty sure it all started after one to many late night viewings of The Big Lebowski actually. It was funny to call each other ‘dude’ and ‘man’ like The Dude did throughout the movie and the terms stuck. Which is fine when you are at Uni and you still have a lot of surfer friends but on the odd occasion I think it would be nice to be able to talk to peoples parents and not refer to their mum or dad as ‘dude’. Since I have been in London it has reached the point where it is nearly impossible to emit a sentence without following up with one term of the other……………………………………………………………

MMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!

You see what I mean??!

Well the main point of this post is that unfortunately another phrase has recently entered my lexicon and that is…..

‘fo’ shizzle ma’ nizzle!’

Now I thought that ‘dude’ and ‘man’ were bad but this has opened a whole new worm canning factory right next door to my house. I get free cans of worms from the factory. They come with an easy open tab. It’s bad!

The problem with ‘fo’ shizzle ma’ nizzle’ (which incidentally means ‘for sure my nigga’. It’s rap related and was originally made up by Snoop Dogg while he was probably maxin on some crack or somethin so don’t freak out. Listen to ‘E to tha izzo, G to tha izzay’ or whatever that song is called for some cool izzo nizzo lyrics.) is that you can easily turn any normal phrase, like ‘that thing is really great’ into a shizzolated phrase real izzy, er i mean easy.

For instance the shizzolated version of the ‘that thing is really great’ becomes ‘that shizzo is damn grizzay’ which I think you will all agree is funny. Or maybe its just me.

Anyway, so now myself and certain coworkers refer to each other as ‘nizzos’, everything is ‘just grizzay’ and when something is really good its ‘da biznatchmium’ which doesn’t even make sense!

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to shizzle with ma bizzle on a izzle fizzo……… Dude.

Shizzolate your site or somethin’

“I got deese cheeseburgers maaan…”

Well another day, another couple of millimetres added to The Afro…

It’s pretty long now (Well compared to when I was bald at least) and it now getting hard to remember what it was like to be bald, my poor scalp naked sky and at the mercy of Britain’s cruel elements.

On positive aspect of shaving my hair off that you guys had probably not realised, is that my head is now visible in the infra-red spectrum. What I mean by that is that I no longer suffer from the condition that I have termed ‘Stealth Hair’.

‘Stealth Hair’ seems to only afflict people with big hair and the main symptom seems to be that whenever infra-red (And possibly other) beams are fired into the hair, the beams are absorbed or diffused into apparently nothing.

What does this have to do with the price of milk in China you say? Well I would like to see you try to walk through a supermarket automatic door when all you seem like to the door sensor is a slight fuzz of heat, a ghost in a world of er, non ghosts (Wheres that thesaurus gone?)

In the past I would go shopping and like everyone else I would walk up to automatic doors expecting to be let in, but unlike everyone else fifty percent of the time I would be left with my nose against the glass with both my face and my pride damaged. This led to me acquiring another condition this time termed ‘possible injury induced hesitation syndrome’ whereby I would hop around madly or hesitate with my hand out in front of doors to ensure they would open for me

So there you have it, a bonus feature of an already good thing. No hair = no hesitation.

I better make the most of it though. If Stealth Hair is caused, as I suspect it is, by the unique fractal diffraction properties of a whole lot of curly hair then things are gonna get steadily worse as The Afro grows in stature!

Hot shoe Door Opening Shuffle here we come!