How Do You Back Up Your Photos?

I've gotten to a point where I've almost run out of room on my hard drive again. One of the culprits is my pictures folder. Some of the pictures, such as wedding pictures, I obviously want to make sure I never lose. How do Mod-Bloggers back up their critical photos? Right now, the solution I'm looking at is Flickr Pro plus 2 backup CDs / DVDs. One to be kept here and one to be kept in another location.

On another note, I was happy to find out that if you let your Flickr Pro account lapse, they still keep all of your photos, they just don't show them to you until you renew. My heart stopped and then raced for a few minutes while I worried about that. Glad to have the account renewed with all of the pictures and a free 3 months for renewing to boot.

Gas prices

Gas prices
Originally uploaded by nomad7674.

Free Anti-Phishing Protection

I posted this to Twitter already, but it seemed worth re-posting here. This article is a good explanation of what OpenDNS is and how it can be used to reduce the risk of phishing (i.e. fraudsters luring you to a fake site that looks like a real one in order to harvest personal info).

I installed Open DNS to our Airport this morning, and I must say it is MUCH faster than the DNS servers offered by our ISP as well.

Baby's first Guys Nite Out

Baby's first Guys Nite Out
Originally uploaded by nomad7674.

(Sent from my 3G iPhone)

WiFi Comes to Airplanes Again

Delta has announced that they'll be offering wireless internet access on domestic flights, powered by GoGo. Costs will be $9.95 for shorter than 3 hour flights and $12.95 for flights lasting at least 3 hours. Alaskan Airlines and Southwest Airlines are testing a different technology. It appears that American Airlines either already has or is planning on using the GoGo service as well. While having wireless internet in the air would be nice to pass the time, the bigger issue really is battery life. I'd prefer that they actually finished putting AC outlets in every row before they started offering something like WiFi. And at $9.95 / $12.95, would it be worth it to you?

Deep Thought of the Day: A Universe of Laws

It is not uncommon when talking with my athiest friends for them to use the lawlessness of nature as one evidence against God's existence. They point to the randomness and seemingly immoral interaction of predator and prey, rot and decay, death and destruction as evidence that a legalistic God like the one shown in the Bible simply can not be the one in charge. If He were, the argument goes, things would be a lot more orderly.

So it has stricken me recently, while watching some programs on the Discovery and History channel, how profoundly ordered, consistent, and - if you will excuse the expression - legalistic our universe is. Consider animal behavior. As scientists look more and more at extinct animals like dinosaurs, the more they recognize what they see as being consistent with the behavior of animals alive today. Predators act like predators (aggression, territoriality, ambush over long chases, etc.) and herbivores act like herbivores (herd behavior, size over aggression for protection, etc.) Or consider stellar phenomena. While we are recognizing more and more kinds of stellar events, we are seeing more and more how they fit into existing laws of gravitation, nuclear fusion, entropy, etc. The fact is that while there is a huge number of possible phenomena to observe, they are all governed by a small number of "laws" whose interaction produces them.

This seems absolutely consistent with the Biblical God who "spoke" the universe into existence. It is not proof of God, but it is consistent.

Funny, But True Attitude of Most Politicians

From the comic Speed Bump