Alain de Botton: A Guide to Happiness
Every now and then I return to de Botton’s book “The Consolations of Philosophy”. It is quite thin, to the point, and is very easy to read. I was thrilled to find that the Finnish broadcasting company YLE chose to broadcast the TV series “A Guide to Happiness”, which is based on the book.
Rather than spending an hour praising the book, I’ll settle for recommending it. If you think life sucks, pop out to the bookstore and see what de Botton has in store for you. You can get it really cheap, and that’s excellent value for money.
[/life/philosophers] permanent link
2005-05-19A Downside to Buying Upgrades
I have spent the last few weeks slowly reinstalling software and recovering data. I figured the easiest way to get the computer operational would be to install software “on demand” instead of trying to figure out all the things I had installed over the years.
Last weekend Mia really decided it was time to start walking, and I managed to catch it on video. My video editing software originally came bundled with a FireWire card I no longer use. I also bought an upgrade quite some time ago, and store that CD with the rest of my software CDs. It was time to get the video editing software operational. I put in the upgrade CD, started setup, and it asked me to insert the original CD. Guess if I could find it. It took me two days to remember that the software was in a CD case labelled with the name of the original FireWire card, not with the software title. Duh.
Sofar, I have had trouble getting three different legally licensed applications installed and working. I would almost bet there will be some more before I am done.
[/computing/software] permanent link
2005-05-11New bike: Tunturi H81
My old bike was really getting old, and would have required a major overhaul to be useful. Fortunately for me, our company has a bike leasing program which is quite cheap. I decided to get me a Tunturi H81 trekking hybrid. I suppose most manufacturers would call it a “commuter bike”.
I picked up the bike yesterday, a little less than 10 km from home, and the ride home took 40 minutes. Bikes have changed since the 80’s; they are lighter and easier to ride. I suppose that benefit will be gone once I pick up the child seat for the bike and put our 3-year-old on it.
Going to work by bus takes me 30 to 40 minutes, riding a bike may take 45 minutes plus the time to shower and change. Unless my hey fever prevents it, I expect to go to work by bike at least a few times this summer.
[/life/society] permanent link
2005-05-09Backups running fine
I bought the TeraStation, and installing it was really easy. The SMB performance is rather bad, I get only 50% link utilization on a 100 MB LAN, but I now have ample space for the recovered data from my old drive and the backups from my PC.
I am really quite impressed with the TeraStation. If it performs reliably in the future, I will be recommending it as a backup solution for home use. Eventually I may also look into an off-site solution using TeraStations and something like OpenVPN.
For backups I am evaluating Acronis True Image 8.0 and Techsoft MirrorFolder. True Image seems to run fine, but MirrorFolder is giving me some trouble with fast user switching.