I’m going to do 2 little retrospectives this year, but I’m going to start with a personal one first, so if this isn’t your cup of tea, just move on to the 2nd article (which is more about the world at large) and read that instead.

The last 10 years (10 years!?!) have been quite interesting for me, now that I really sit down and think about it. Of course, a lot has happened (which I’ve written about in more detail elsewhere in my blog), so I won’t go into details here – but I will summarize, because summarizing and making “top X” lists is what the New Year is all about!

• I leave college after 4 years and start my own company (though not by myself).
• I got my first apartment in Fitchburg and lived officially “on my own” for the first time (the time I spent at college – even when I lived there over the summer – only half counts).
• Amanda, my long-distance girlfriend from Australia, packs her backs and moves to America to live with me!
• Amanda and I get married! Who-hoo!
• After a lot of prodding, I finally go back and finish the 2 classes I needed to graduate from college!
• Through a very bizzare series of events, I end up with 2 pet rabbits!
• I buy a new car (my beloved Mitsubishi Outlander) and end up getting screwed by a corrupt car dealership.
• I travel back and forth to Australia more than a few times, and see some really neat stuff while I’m there!
• I learn to cook more than just the meat & potato casseroles I used to eat in college.
• I move to New Jersey! (And I get to work from home!)
• I’ve gotten better at acting “grown-up” (though it’s still an act, because I’m still a kid at heart)

And that just about brings us up-to-date with the crazy journey that has been my life thus far. It’s been a wild ride, to be sure – there were ups, and there were definitely downs as well. But lately there seem to be more ups than downs, which is good, because now that I’m in my 30’s I’m getting too old for the drama of youth. But life is good these days, and fate has been relatively good to me lately, so I have no complaints. And of course I’m looking forward to the next 10 years of crazy adventures as well!

I’m sorry if this post has sounded a little sappy, or even self-serving in some ways. However, around this time of year I always like to look back fondly, rather than look back and see all the negatives. I know they happened (I can never forget them), but I’ve moved past them. I prefer to face the new year optimistically – that’s just the way I am.

So, if you’re looking back at your own life, hopefully you’ll look more at the positive things rather than the negative things, and see the possibilities of a brighter future ahead. I know I am!

Happy New Year, everyone! See you in 2010!

Sometimes I have to just stop and be amazed at the things we can do these days – things that would have seemed like futuristic science fiction when I was a kid (or even when I was in college).

For example, just this weekend I was doing some cleaning around the house (cleaning up the bunnies area) and I wanted to have some relaxing, chillout music on while I worked.

For me, the easiest way to accomplish this was to boot up my netbook, hook it into my livingroom stereo (via the same cable I use to hook up my iPod), and just play some streaming music from Shoutcast (the Digitally Imported Chillout Dreams stream, to be exact).

So that is exactly what I did.

Simple, easy, and straightforward – and it doesn’t take a whole bunch of complicated steps to get going, nor does it take very long (just long enough for my netbook to boot up – which is pretty fast – and to load the radio stream).

It is just amazing to me that this little computer can sit there, pulling music literally from thin air. And of course, the fact that streaming Internet radio gives me an almost unlimited library of music to pull from doesn’t hurt, either.

Now, while this was pretty darned cool, it did make me think of something that was… not so cool.

I have a Windows Media Center Extender right there, just to the right of the Wii in the picture. And the whole point of the Media Center Extender is to do exactly this sort of thing. So why wasn’t I using it?

Well, the short answer is because it’s too slow, too hard, and it doesn’t work with the streaming radio stations I like. The Media Center Extender takes a long time to boot up (longer than my netbook), the interface is slow and clunky, the remote control is awful, trying to enter text is an exercise in frustration, and getting streaming radio to work on it is… well let’s just say “not easy” and leave it at that. You need to add special add-ins to the Media Center PC (not the Extender), which of course must be downloaded, installed, set up in advance, etc. In the end, it’s just not worth the effort.

(In it’s defense, I don’t think the Media Center Extender was ever meant to work with streaming radio from the Internet – it was meant to stream music from a local Media Center PC instead… but really, if it can do that, it should be able to do both. But I digress…)

Anyway, despite the failings of the Windows Media Center Extender, listening to streaming music in my home while I clean is pretty darned neat.

The future is pretty awesome. I love living in the future!

So, I’ve been sort of stalking this particular model of netbook for a while now – the Acer Aspire One AOD-150. It had everything I was after:

• 10.1 inch screen
• 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU
• Webcam
• A good keyboard (perhaps one of the most important factors when buying a netbook)
• Good battery life (when you get the 6-cell battery)

So when I saw it on sale recently over at Newegg, I swooped in and bought it.

Well, it just arrived yesterday, and I spent some time setting it up – of course, even though it’s brand new, it still needs to spend a few hours downloading updates, and of course I have to pull out all of the stupid “bundleware” that comes with computers these days.

Of course, the hardest part about getting a new computer for me is just choosing a name for it. Long-time readers here will remember me prattling on about my old computers – and of course you’ll see there’s sort of a “theme” to the names I give my computers.

I was at a loss as to what to name my new netbook until I sat down with it and suddenly it came to me: Ryo-Ohki. It just makes sense. The cute little netbook that is surprisingly powerful!

Oh, and I also split the hard drive into 2 partitions and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It is quite possibly the sweetest little UI for a computer I’ve ever seen – like something out of the future. Anyway, it’s really, really nice.

What’s really amazing to me is how everything just works. I’ve used Linux before (back in the day – get off my lawn you young kids, etc.), but it always had a sort of… unfinished look to it. It never quite worked as well as Windows, especially with built-in stuff like, say, those crazy blue “function” (or “fn”) keys on laptops – you know, the ones that let you adjust the volume or the screen brightness.

Well, I can tell you right now that Linux has come a long way since then.

I didn’t have to do anything special to get Ubuntu up and running on this little netbook – and everything just works. The webcam works great, the sound is great, the volume and brightness controls work great, the wireless works out-of-the-box, the battery meeter works perfectly – even the little SD memory card reader on the side, which supposedly has some trouble on some models of the Acer Aspire, works fine – I put in my memory card and it read it right away. It even knew it was from a camera and offered to download pictures from it for me!

In short, these days, Linux really is a viable alternative to Windows, no questions asked.

Anyway – moving along – the little netbook is all set up today, happily purring along in either Linux or Windows. I kept Windows “just in case” I need it for something Windows-specific. After all, it’s got a fairly big hard drive, and I don’t plan on keeping huge amounts of files on the drive itself, so it just makes sense to split the drive and dual-boot. If I have any files, I’ll probably keep them on a USB drive or maybe a SD card I’ll just keep in it all the time (SD cards are cheap enough to make this a viable option).

So in the end, I’m quite happy with this netbook. The keyboard is small, but easy enough for me to type on comfortably (the right-hand shift key is full-sized and in the right spot – a major annoyance for me that I found on some other netbooks), and the touchpad, although small and a bit … touchy? … is actually easy enough to use once you get used to it.

So if you’re looking for a netbook, you could do far, far worse than to pick one of these Acer Aspire One’s up – and the price certainly is right!

It might come as a surprise to some people to hear me say that I am not a slave to technology – after all, I’m a self-described “computer geek.” You’d think, therefore, that I walk around with an iPhone or Blackberry (or both!) strapped to my chest at all times, checking email and looking up information on-line everywhere I go.

However, you couldn’t be farther from the truth.

While it’s true that I am a major computer geek, and I would love to have (say) a nice little netbook for looking up information, sending email, writing blog posts, etc., the fact of the matter is that it’s because I’m a computer geek that I’m not a slave to technology.

Because I’m confident about it, I don’t allow it to control me – I control it.

For example, I know many people with mobile email who are, quite frankly, addicted to it (think: crackberry). They’re always checking email – all the time – no matter where they are. Even if I had a mobile email device (which I don’t), I wouldn’t be checking email all the time. As it is, I don’t check email often, even when I’m at my computer. I’m confident enough with the technology to know that I don’t need to answer every single email at the moment it comes in – that I don’t need to be “on-line” all the time. I control the technology – I use it when I want to, not the other way around.

Another example is when the power goes out – for people who are slaves to technology, to computers, the Internet, email, Twitter, social networking, what have you, the power going out is like having their “fix” cut off – they don’t know what to do. Without email, chat, or whatever, they’re lost. They’re so badly enslaved that they don’t know what to do when they are “freed” from it, for whatever reason.

As for me, even though I spend my entire day at the computer (and often much of the evening, too), writing code, answering emails, being online, writing blog posts like this one and so on – when the power goes out, I just shrug, grab a book from my bookshelf, and go read. Or, if it’s dark, I’ll go for a drive, or a walk, or just plain go to bed.

I control the technology around me – it doesn’t control me.

For many people today, the opposite is true. It’s worth it to sit and really take a look at yourself and see whether you are one of those people – whether you’re a slave to technology. Even in today’s connected world, it’s important to be able to just leave it all behind sometimes, to just “let go.” It’s the difference between being controlled and being in control.

It started innocently enough – Internet Explorer 8 came out just the other day, so I figured I’d give it a try. Little did I know that this was to become the catalyst for a computer meltdown unlike any I’ve had in a long, long time.

Here’s the story, broken down into little snippets for easy consumption. Our story begins mid-morning on a Friday…

• Hmmm, IE8 is getting a lot of press. I guess I should give it a try.
• Downloaded & Installed IE8. It said “you need to reboot and install some more Windows updates.”
• Ok, reboot. Wait forever for startup programs to finish.
• Try to connect to VPN for work… Windows says “I couldn’t find any connections!” Huh?
• Notice that the network connection icon has a red “X” on it. Hovering over it gives the message “Connection status: Unknown. Access is denied.” WTF?
• Even more strangely, the Internet connection works just fine – I can get on-line. Curious.
• Something fishy is going on with my user account and permissions & things… certain control panel applets won’t open, like the add/remove users applet. It normally would give a UAC prompt, but now it just opens a blank window which immediately closes. Huh?
• Try to fire up VirtualBox to look at my virtual Vista machine for comparison, but VirtualBox won’t start: “E_ACCESSDENIED” it says, quoting error number “0×80070005.” Something about COM?
• Spend some time looking up help (thank you, Google). Tried some solutions like adding the “LocalSystem” account to the “Administrators” group. Didn’t work. (Shouldn’t be needed, anyway.)
• At this point I’m getting rather frustrated, so I enable the Administrator account and try logging in under it, just to see what’s up. To my surprise, everything works. Hmmm.
• So, must be a problem with my user profile… not surprising, since it was sort of half-assed migrated from XP. Maybe it’s just time to bite the bullet and make a new profile and copy my relevant data and a few program settings over.
• At this point, I’ve basically given up on getting any work done for the day, so I fire off an email summarizing my sad story thus far, and settle in for spending some quality time with Windows.
• First step: dismount my user profile drive so nothing gets touched.
• Delete old account.
• Create new account.
• Mount user profile drive.
• Log in under new user account… d’oh! Windows goes and makes it’s own, new directory for the profile instead of using the one I mounted. (Now I have Users\Keith and Users\Keith.ELYSION).
• Log back in under Administrator, move drive mounting to the new user profile folder that Windows created.
• Try to log in under that account. Nope! Windows says “I couldn’t read the user profile, so have a temporary one!” Damn.
• Obviously, I’ve got some files to delete, probably NTUSER.DAT.
• Let’s see if I can start again and do this right – instead of mounting the volume as a directory, I’ll use a directory junction instead.
• Log in as Administrator.
• Delete user account.
• Oops, Windows Vista doesn’t just leave the user profile directory where it is if you choose not to delete the files – it “helpfully” tries to copy the profile to your desktop.
• My user profile is huge – the whole reason it’s on a second drive, after all – so this isn’t going to work. Rather than wait around, I try to cancel it.
• Can’t cancel it – so I shut down instead.
• After restart, made directory junction to a new folder on the 2nd hard drive.
• Moved the new (empty) user profile over to this new folder.
• Logged in under the new profile – now I’ve finally got a user profile that’s correctly running on the 2nd hard drive. Now I just need to move my user data over selectively.
• Easy stuff first – Documents, Music, Videos, Pictures, etc.
• Hard stuff second – specific folders from Application Data and Local Settings (Firefox/Thunderbird profiles mostly).
• Finally got stuff moved around, but… why does my Documents folder only contain files starting with the letter P or later?
• Horrible moment of realization: the “helpful” copy that took place when I deleted the profile a few steps (and by now, a few hours) ago wasn’t just a copy – it was a “move.” And apparently shutting down wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
• Half of my “My Documents” folder is gone. Begin slight panic.
• Calm down, remember that I’ve got Mozy. Backups are GOOD.
• Begin trying to recover files from Mozy. Because only half of my stuff is gone, I have to go through and select what to restore manually, by hand. Mozy is not the fastest program in the world, so this takes some time.
• Begin the arduous process of restoring files from Mozy.
• [Many, many hours pass.]
• Mozy’s not super-fast at restoring files (and it doesn’t help that I had it set to throttle back its bandwidth usage during the work day – oops!) but it gets the job done. Thank goodness for backups!
• Files restored, but of course to totally wrong folders, since now everything’s “Vista-Style.” Why, oh why did Microsoft decide to re-arrange where user’s files go???
• Spend some time copying/moving files around. OK, documents, music, videos, pictures, etc. Back where they belong, nothing seems to be missing. Cool.
• Fire up a few programs (Winamp, iTunes, Quicken) to make sure they work – they do… sort of. iTunes says it can’t save the iTunes library file, and Quicken says I don’t have permission to open the file. Huh?
• Winamp also won’t save any settings – it keeps resetting to the default style. Something is not right.
• Find out that there’s a weird permissions problem on my new profile – the CREATOR OWNER doesn’t have ANY rights! Ah, the joys of NTFS file permissions.
• Spend some time fiddling with the permissions – setting my new user account as the “Owner” of the files, giving myself full control, etc.
• OK, permissions set – programs working. Excellent.
• Fire up Firefox – and it starts walking me through the “new profile/new settings” wizard. Crap.
• Try to figure out where my Firefox (and Thunderbird) profiles are.
• Second horrible moment of realization: my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles weren’t backed up. Apparently, they both have a “Profiles” folder under Application Data, and another one under Local Settings\Application Data. One contains the real profile – the other contains some, I don’t know, extra .xul files or something. Guess which one was part of my backup set?
• Manage to find an old copy of the “real” profiles folder in Mozy and restore from it.
• Spend some time re-creating the “profiles.ini” file for Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Open up Firefox – my profiles appear!
• Try to start my default profile – and Firefox crashes. Ditto Thunderbird. Some problem with an add-in?
• Start Firefox and Thunderbird in “safe mode” with no add-ins or extensions. Disable them all, restart.
• Go through extensions one-by-one until I find the troublesome ones. (Enigmail and the Calendar plugin.) Ok, fine, they’re not that important, I can always re-install them later. Uninstall them for now.
• Success! Firefox and Thunderbird open properly. Except…
• For some reason, Firefox has lost all of its history, saved form data, and saved passwords. Fuck. I kind of depend on them.
• At this point, it’s well past midnight for a process that started mid-morning. I’m tired, and aside from the saved passwords thing, my computer is mostly working. Well enough that I feel OK going to sleep and picking it up in the morning.
• [All too-few hours of sleep pass.]
• The next morning, I fire things up again, and it’s working as well as you could expect. Actually, it’s working just fine. I feel a lot better about the whole affair now that things are back together again!
• After a good nights sleep, I hit upon a brain-wave. I occasionally use MozBackup (not Mozy) to do complete backups of my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles! I can use these backups to restore my passwords and other settings!
• Looking through my files, I see I did a backup not long ago – less than a month, in fact. SWEET!
• MozBackup, restore profiles, lather, rinse, repeat.
• Ka-ching! Profiles restored. Bookmarks, saved passwords, cookies, history, the works.

So now I’m pretty much back up & running. I’ve still got a few niggling little things to work out (like my Outlook/Exchange email for work), but nothing terrible. I’ve also got to go through Mozy and make sure that I really did restore EVERYTHING I need before I let it start backing up the newly arranged profile – because Mozy doesn’t store differential backups; you’ve only got the most recent backup, and that’s it. So if I start backing up now, and I forgot to restore a file, it will assume I deleted the file and it’ll be removed from my backup. So I need to do some further checking, but I’m confident.

I also need to go through my backup sets and make absolutely sure that they include the entirety of my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.

Although in the end I didn’t lose anything important (some virtual machines were lost, but they’re easy enough to re-create and I just use them for testing anyway), the whole experience was very frustrating.

When computers break down, when things go wrong like this, it totally destroys the metaphor of the computer. When you find out that your carefully arranged media libraries are gone now because you physically moved the files on disk, you really begin to curse and swear. I think Neal Stephenson described it as metaphor shear, and I think that’s a good description.

Suddenly, you’re not dealing with pictures and movies and documents anymore – you’re no longer working “in your terms.” Instead, you’re now working with the computer’s terms – folders and files and paths and ACLs and profiles and user accounts and permissions and so forth. Honestly, it’s terribly disheartening. It almost makes you want to give up on the whole “computer” thing, maybe go live “in the cloud” where you don’t have to worry about this sort of shit anymore.

But in the end, it’s all just fluff, all just levels and layers of metaphors piled on top of one another, abstractions built upon abstractions – and like any other work of man, eventually it all falls down and you’re left holding broken sticks and trying to figure out how they used to be put together to make the Internet.

It’s a humbling experience, in a way. And one I hope not to go through again for a long time!

For the future, though, I’ve learned (or re-learned) a few things:

1. Check your backups carefully on some sort of regular schedule. Things change, and you don’t want to have something be left out!
2. When deleting a user profile, if you want to keep the user’s data where it is, don’t use the Vista control panel applet to delete the account – use the “Computer Management” MMC console to do it instead.
3. Hard drive space is cheap; although I used to turn off “System Restore” because I didn’t like the disk space it used, my disks are big enough these days that there’s no reason not to have it turned on now. If I had used it to create a restore point before installing IE8, I probably could have avoided this whole mess. And Vista has “Volume Shadow Copies,” too, so I probably could’ve recovered my missing files easier, too.

Ah well – always something new to learn! At least it’s over now, and I’ve learned my lessons. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle!