World Backup Day

March 31st was World Backup Day - a day for reminding people that there are very few sounds more scary than the Click of Death coming from a hard drive inside your computer on which you have critical data files.

I've been pretty good at keeping duplicate sets of my media files, with a couple of obvious flaws in execution. First, I've been backing up on the fly, and while everything has been archived, it's not exactly organized well. Second, my backups have been essentially one-to-one, which doesn't take advantage of RAID architectures, is more labour intensive than it needs to be, and uses up more hard drives.
So, unRAID.

Everything I've read about unRAID suggests that it's a far better approach (cheaper, too) than buying a dedicated proprietary backup solution. Plus, it lets me tinker with putting a computer together, which I haven't done in a while - including having to pick and source components that will work together well and support  unRAID's requirements.

The server's up and running now with two data drives and a parity drive - the basic, free unRAID configuration. I haven't copied much over to it yet, but it seems to be running well so far. Fingers crossed!

HP and Microsoft follies

So, Saturday.

Started out by clearing the snow out of the driveway, after the dumping we got on Friday. Easy enough with the snow blower. For an encore, I fixed the lock on the garage door, so that we can keep the snow blower.

Enter girlfriend and her laptop. "I think I have a virus," she said as she handed it to me.

Upon boot-up: "Product information not valid. The following product information programmed into the system board is missing or invalid..."

Okay, hit enter to continue, get to the Windows 7 desktop. No more close-up picture of shaggy dog #1 - the desktop has gone black, with the message in the corner saying that the version of Windows isn't genuine. Crap.

Twenty minutes of diving through the Internet hive mind later, I have it sussed. HP pushed a BIOS update to the laptop, which somehow managed to wipe the product information. Since the Windows 7 check for genuine-ness depends on finding that product information, the laptop failed the check.

Basically, HP's sloppy pushed updates + Microsoft's consumer-hostile DRM = aggravation for me.

Anyhow, I fixed it. One of the great things about the Internet is that any problem you might have has most likely been had by at least a few other people, and if it's at all solvable, at least one of them has solved it and has talked about it somewhere online.

[Here's the how: There's a DOS utility from HP that can be used to re-write/re-generate the missing product information into the system board. Copy the utility onto a bootable USB key, change the boot-up sequence on the laptop to check the USB key first, re-boot the laptop from the key, run the utility. Provide all of the missing info (one piece of which is hidden on a sticker tucked into the laptop battery compartment). Exit, shut down, remove key, restart.]

The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird

The University of Chicago Press is following up on its re-issues of the classic and long out-of-print Parker novels by Richard Stark (a pen-name of mystery grand-master Donald E. Westlake) with new editions of other novels that Westlake wrote as Stark. In addition to the Parker novels, Westlake wrote four novels that focused on one of Parker's occasional partners in crime, Alan Grofield.

Per Wikipedia: "A career criminal and professional thief, Grofield is a devilishly handsome and charming womanizer whose main passion in life is the stage. In fact, the only reason he steals is to keep his summer stock company running, and if he were ever able to make enough money through his legitimate artistic efforts, he would have no trouble giving up his life of crime. Unlike his frequent companion Parker, Grofield is a somewhat inconsistent character, and his adventures run the gamut from hard-boiled crime stories (Lemons Never Lie) to more fanciful, James Bond-style globetrotting and intrigue (The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird)."

While Lemons Never Lie is still in-print as part of Charles Ardai's Hard Case Crime imprint, the other three Grofield novels have been difficult, or at least expensive, to track down - at least until mid-April.

Pre-order links are live now at Amazon.

It's been a busy three years...

New year's resolution: post to the blog more often. Considering that it's been three years since my last post, that should be an easy one.

Rudolph the red-nosed mystery...

A couple of years ago, I decided to whip up a mix CD of Christmas covers from a variety of sources. I found it today... without liner notes. I've been able to reconstruct the complete playlist and which disc it came from, but there's one song that's being elusive: the version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that I included. It sounds a lot like The Smithereens' version, but with more of a Brian Setzer twist.

Anyways, this is the list as I've reconstructed it. I've hyperlinked the Rudolph song in case someone can help source it.

1. Blue Christmas - Bruce Springsteen & Friends
2. Run Run Rudolph - Bryan Adams
3. Rock 'n' Roll Christmas - George Thorogood & The Destroyers
4. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus - John Cougar Mellencamp
5. All Alone On Christmas - Darlene Love
6. What Christmas Means To Me - Stevie Wonder
7. Winter Wonderland - Eurythmics
8. Silent Night - The Primitives
9. White Christmas - Doug and The Slugs
10. I Want an Alien for X-Mas - Fountains of Wayne
11. Here Comes Santa Claus - Clockhammers
12. Jingle Bells - Jumpin' Jimmy and The Mistletones
13. Christmas Song - Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds
14. Christmastime Has Come - Smashing Pumpkins
15. Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) - Hoodoo Gurus
16. The First Noel - Crash Test Dummies
17. Please Come Home For Christmas - Pet Benatar
18. Merry Christmas Baby - Sheryl Crow & Eric Clapton
19. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - (?)
20. Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree - Ronnie Spector & Darlene Love
21. Frosty The Snowman - Leon Redbone & Dr. John
22. Carolina Christmas - Squirrel Nut Zippers
23. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - U2
24. Christmas All Over Again - Tom Petty
25. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Pretenders

Rockcliffe Book Fair

The Rockcliffe Book Fair is a local Ottawa event that's been held each year since the early 1960s, to promote reading to kids and to raise money for the Rockcliffe Park Public School's library and various local kids' literacy programs. Growing up in the 1970s, my parents used to take my brother and I there each year to browse the new kids' lit being published - one of the various ways they encouraged us to read. We stopped going after middle school, I think - at that point, we were a bit older than the target demographic for the new books on display - and it was only a few years ago that I started to go again.

Maybe I just never remembered the scene fully from childhood, but it seemed as if, sometime during the intervening years, the focus had shifted significantly in favour of the Book Fair being a used book sale. These days, it's typical that I can visit the fair each year and walk out with a stack of great finds. Tonight was no different - this year's haul includes a bunch of Donald Westlake novels; four 1950s-era Pogo collections by Walt Kelly; a small stack of mid-1970s Archie digests reprinting some amazing 1950s/1960s art by Harry Lucey; novels by Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block; a book by former SNL writer/performer (and hopefully Minnesota's next Senator, pending the recount) Al Franken; and a 1950s kids' lit prose book illustrated by near-legendary comics/animation ace Alex Toth.

Total cost? Sixteen bucks, and for a good cause.

Finding Canadiana where you least expect it

It's election time here in Canada, so let's start things with a repost from my earlier blog experiment, a sequence of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland pages from 1911 showing Nemo's airship tour of Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa, and Toronto.

If you want to see more, there are two collections worth tracking down: one is the Taschen edition, which reprints all of the initial 1905-1914 run - there was a brief second run some years later - at a reduced size (roughly 10½" by 12"); the other is from Sunday Press Books, reprinting about one-third of the run at their original 17" by 21" size.