Thursday, January 12, 2006

At the New Years party this year I said something that sounded stupid or perhaps even insulting. Someone was talking about something that that one of their kids had done that resulted in some sort of punishment. It made me think about the girls and our experiences over the past almost 4 years that we have been living without Cindy. Since Cindy died I've been criticized for some of the decisions that the girls and I have made. I say "the girls and I" because for the decisions that affect their lives directly I try to let them be part of the decision making process. Things like choosing the style of clothes, haircuts and makeup all the way up to choosing which High School to attend. I'm sure some of that is because I have a hard time making choices. I always fear making the "wrong" choice so much that I can become static and not make a choice at all. As I was listening to the discussion about some digression by one of the other kids I was feeling thankful that the girls have been so for lack of a better term, well behaved. It's not that they are perfect kids. Their rooms get to be a mess, they can sometimes leave the house a mess, for a variety of reasons they make me crazy at times, but all in all they seem to always try to do the right thing. As those thoughts were rolling around in my head I inserted a thought into the conversation. "I'm so glad that I haven't had any discipline problems with the girls, it must be that Cindy did a good job raising them." Or something to that affect. I think I intended it as a somewhat self deprecating comment in that I didn't think that there was any skill involved on my part in affecting the way the girls behave. More that they had somehow learned early on, during the time when Cindy was home with them, values that have guided them and formed the behavior and personalities that they have today. What came out I think sounded to the moms I was talking with more like, I'm sure glad my kids were raised better than yours. Even more evidence that my deprecating comment was deserved, I am an idiot at times. Here I was thinking about how to praise Cindy and her memory (or at least my fading memories of her), and instead end up insulting the moms that I have relied upon for so much help these past years raising the girls. To the moms I've insulted, I apologize. It wasn't my intention to have those thought come out the way they did. I'm not sure there was a good way to express my feelings in that situation and I think I've learned that in some situations I probably need to spend more time with my mouth shut than with it open. 3:16:54 PM

Dave has always liked the thought of having all your data on your desktop, or laptop. As apposed to the server based applications. In the weblog aggregator world it is tools like Radio Userland compared to Bloglines, and Blogger where the data is stored on the server. Today he mentioned a post by Paolo that talks about the potential problems of regular folks (users) having all this data on a local machine and what happens to it when something goes wrong and it's all lost. "I think that one of the main issues with Radio UserLand is that ultimately the user has to manage an ever growing database on his computer. While advanced users know how to deal with little problems, do backups and know that databases (and hard disks) tend to get corrupted, break or get lost, regular users don't and they often end up loosing their stuff." I'm a happy Radio Userland user and I feel for the users that regularly post to the discussion group asking about how they can get their data back after a disk crash, or a laptop is stolen. There is one thread going on there right now. If they were savvy enough to turn on the switches to enable backups to the server then they might be able to copy all those files and get back up and running. If they didn't have backups turned on, or somehow they got turned off at some point (seems that happened to me when at some point. I recently checked for my backups and saw that somehow they stopped a year ago) they are generally out of luck. I've talked about this before in regards to MP3 players and other small, large capacity storage devices. I've said repeatedly that I don't want to be a data center manager. The more data that I can keep under the hopefully watchful eye of a real data center that will journal, and backup, and RAID and whatever it takes to protect all my data for me the better. Soon we will have the capability to store Tera bytes of data in a device that will fit in our pocket. I just wonder if that's what I'm really striving for. Another aspect of this has to do with Dave's comment about having all your data with you on your laptop. "And sometimes you go somewhere where there's no wide-area Internet, like on an airplane. This is why people who travel a lot, like Scoble, like to have all the data on their laptop, available to them whenever they want it." It's kind of funny that having data available whenever and wherever I want is the reason I personally like having my data on a server somewhere. I'm one of those people that doesn't carry around a laptop, but instead find myself at different locations on desktop machines wanting to access my data. I'm at my PC at work and want to get to stuff that is at home and visa versa. I'm traveling somewhere and want to post to my weblog, or check on my RSS subscriptions. Things like Bloglines and Blogger let me check on things anywhere I can get access to a web browser with an Internet connection. With Radio Userland running on my machine at home I'm constantly running into problems being able to access my data remotely. At work the firewalls keep me from accessing my machine remotely. And when I can get access I have to go through some hoops to be able to figure out what IP address my cable modem gave my router the last time it's lease expired. I have the same firewall problem with OPML that prevents me from being able to use the automatic root update process. This prevents me from using all the cool new stuff unless I go home and do the root updates and then bring those updated roots to work. This really sucks when Dave releases a cool new feature like River of News and I can't try it because I can't do the root update to get the new stuff. After helping my friend go through the process of reinstalling his OS after a disk crash recently, I was actually relieved that he was an AOL user as all his AOL "stuff" came back without me having to do anything. I think that there is a real market for products, devices, services that will take care of data for me so when my PC, iPod, laptop, hard drive etc dies I can just get a new one and all my "stuff" will still be "out there". Either that or there is a real market for tools that make managing the little data center in my PC/iPod etc much easier than it is today. I don't know if that is RAID or disk mirroring, or nightly disk imaging, .Mac or what but personally I think that right now it is way too complicated and requires that I be a part time Data Center manager trying to keep track of the data on my PC and the PC's of my daughters. 11:17:11 AM

When Cindy died we had so many people wanting to help us. The families at schools the girls attend collected donations for us. One of our friends in the neighborhood brought over the manila envelope that had all the donations in it. I was so overcome as I opened it and saw what it was. As I went through the donations there were many checks and one that really struck me was for $1.00. It wasn't the amount that mattered to me it was just that there were so many people thinking about us. So many people that cared in some way about what had happened to us and wanted to express that caring in some way. So when I read this story on one of the photo sites I follow I knew what the widow was going through, and also now understood what all of our friends were feeling during our time of loss. As much as wanting to give her some money, I hoped that like me, just knowing that there are people out there that care about her and her family would give her some comfort and reason to have faith in human kindness at a time when it is so hard to believe that is true. If I haven't already I wish to thank everyone who helped is in one way or another, and also to thank those who did no more than think about us, and care. 10:33:10 AM

© Copyright 2006 Rod Kratochwill.