Digital Media Realibality

On the 29th of Nov I put my computer into standby and went to bed. When I woke up on Friday the 30th, I hit the power button and nothing happened. Well I take that back, the machine powered up but no beeps, no peeps, and as far as I could tell no creeps.

After this I quickly realized that my Lightroom database (not my photos) is saved in the default place (My Documents), and that my system drive is on my Raid 0 array that lives off of my motherboard. Yes I do have backups of my LRDB but I think they are all over a month old. So what I am hopping for is that when I get my new board I can rebuild the array with out destroying the existing array.

This quickly made me realize that my plan of having my LRDB and Images Primary and Main back live on a motherboard Raid 1 (Mirror) is also a bad idea. I would still have a raid tied to a motherboard raid controller. Aka my backup is not readable by another machine.

So I now have a plan of attack to backup my LRDB and Images. It is really simple and not dependent on any hardware. I have 2 500G SATA drives that I got to build into that RAID 1. I ordered 2 external eSATA/USB enclosures to put the drives in. So now I plug both drives into my machine (I would like to still also run a Data storage drive so I am going to have to figure out if I can boot with a drive plugged into my secondary controller). For this we will call them Main and Backup. After duplicating all the my images to both drives here is how I will set up Lightroom. LR has a auto copy when importing. That I will point to dupe my import to 'Backup'. LR also has a feature to backup your LRDB. I will set it to backup every time I start to 'Backup'. More importantly I am going to change my save place LRDB to a place on 'Main'.

Now if I have a system failure I just yank Main and Backup and move them to my spare machine with a generic controller. I can also yank this and take it over to a friends house or such. Even better when I get a laptop this same system is scalable to that.

Well if all works out I should have my machine back up sometime the week before Christmas.

--MikeD

Heigh Ho, The Holly

Thanksgiving shot



Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly;
most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not.
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly:
most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly;
most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not.
Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly:
most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Heigh Ho, The Holly -- William Shakespeare

Grassoline

How about that price of oil...

Pinball Wizard

Paintball

Adam and Oly came by and said that they were that they were down the street shooting each other with paintballs. I decided to hike out there with them and shoot them with my Canon. Thanks for inviting me out there.

--MikeD

PDXLAN 10.5

Back from another good LAN party down in Portland. First I want to thank Vector and crew for doing the required work for throwing another event. I am glad that PDXLAN was able to do this .5 style of event, especially for the staff’s sake. I think I enjoyed the laid back style of this LAN better than the normal ones, this one feels more like a friendly living room LAN then a trade show. The one biggest thing I noticed was that there were no announcements from the stage telling you all about the next big event that you should be in / attend. The flip side of that is with no big sponsors there were not as many big prizes (video cards and mother boards). I even kinda missed not hearing about what the new products from the sponsors were.

Well I am off to Intel’s Infernal LAN in 2 weeks…
ZoneDancer

PS Click on the picture above for more shots from the LAN.

Nolte State Park

So I went out driving in the upper Green River area and found a state park that I had never been to before. Nolte State Park is a little park that goes has a trail around Deep Lake.

Barter Fair 2007

Another good OOF.

Des Moines

A shot I got killing time before the Seahawks game...

Looking Froggy

PDXLAN 10

PDXLAN 10 was last weekend.
Camping tomorrow.

Oversteer

P-o-t-D

Shot from the Packwood National Tour

70-200mm f/2.8L IS

My new toy came today. :) Now I just have to take some pictures that justify this baby.

Ok... I lied. That has a 2x extender on it. So it is a 140-400mm f/5.6L IS.

Muggin

Shot this little guy in my backyard on Friday. He would get nervous of my shooting and fly away only to return to the same place. I believe it is a Cardinal Meadowhawk (Sympetrum illotum) Dragonfly.

Lady's Practice Autocross

Just uploaded the shots from last Saturday's practice event.

Misty Mountain Morning

Good times this weekend

First on Friday I went to the Marley Concert. Stephen Marley featuring Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley. It was good stuff. Starting it off was DJ sets by the almighty Kid Hops. I finally got the to watch Kid Hops work. The opener was a Jamaican Hip-Hop/Spoken word band. Ya try following some Jamaican spoken word. Kid Hops came back and did another DJ set until Stephen came out. Stephen played about half his songs and half his dad's. Damian came out for about the last half and they mixed it up. When Jr did his 'Welcome to Jamrock' the band did a little versioning of the song and the crowd didn't like it at all. The crowd started to moan their way to a boo before the band mixed it back to the normal and back.

Saturday I went up to the Tulip Festival up in the Skagit Valley. Never seen so many Tulips in person before, but I had never seen industrial flower growing on this scale before either. Too many people milling around and too much crap in the background to get good landscape shots. It was still a learning experience so it was still good. From there I drove on up to Maple Falls to visit Cassia, Ian and Ziggby.

Sunday morning we wet out to breakfast and then drove out to were we were going hiking. Back up the Skagit Valley we drove. Turn left at Baker Lake / Concrete. Take note of the sign that says road out. We drove up the road until Cassia wanted me to take a some pictures of the 'Stump Lake'. I have seen stump lakes like this before but never been out among the stumps. They weren't any stumps, they were OLD growth Ceder stumps.

From there we got back in the cars and headed up the road more. And then around a corner we see the road blocked. Well the road was out at the 23 mile marker. Seems that the culvert got blocked this winter and washed the whole road out. That would have been a sight to see as the creak bed was at least 20 feet below the road with a good bowl and ravine on the upstream side. Well our fearless leader Cassia decided that we should march from here. Er... Cassia had the good idea of starting our Hike from there. Not bad idea as the trail head is only 3 miles down the road. We rested at the trail head and then hiked on. Wow. Once we got past the trail head we were into old growth Ceder forest. There was one cool steel/wood suspension bridge that was horse rated, but had nice bounce in the middle. It looked kinda like some of the bridges I have designed in the Bridge-It game. :) There were also some cool little caves amount the boulders. Most of them were small and looked like something had spent the night in them at least once.

Well the trail was washed out and we had to cross a creak. Shortly there after we decided to pause and nibble on some food. Then while debating if we should head back it started to rain. Well you know how that decision went. The funny part is that once we started heading back the rain stoped. But I used the early return to hike up a washout we had crossed before to go take pictures of a waterfall that we could see below.

Well about 10 miles of hiking and then a 4 hour trip home made for a really tired Mike when I got home, but I am extremely glad I went.

From Baker River Hike