I recently went to Disney with my girlfriend Amanda.  In Epcot, they have a minature train set setup I think near Germany.  I took this picture from the ground level view of the miniatures on that set (you can see a Godzilla like tourist roaming in the background). If you click the below picture, you’ll be able to see a 1920×1200 resolution version.

I recently implemented a triple redundant backup system to back up over 500 gigs of data.  After some reflection, I realized if I ever lost the data stored on my machine, I would be quite livid.  I ended up buying 2x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEMWD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEM and 1x Western Digital Element 1TB 3.5″ Black External Hard Drive – Retail.  The two Caviar’s are mirroring one another via Raid 1 while the external drive is backing up the entire raid about once a week.  My motivation for implementing triple redundancy is as follows.  Raiding the drives was because I wanted to have a live, real time backup in case one of the 1TB internal drives dies.  The problem with having an internal drive is if a power surge or lightning strike fries your computer, you lose both hard drives.  Given the fact that I have my entire dissertation, all of my research, thousands of pictures, and all sorts of other awesome data on these drives, losing both drives simultaneously would be unacceptable.  So, I stepped up my backup game and upped the ante to triple redundancy.  The pros of having the external drive are to overcome lightning strikes, power surges, or the computer being hacked and all the data deleted, etc.  The external drive is only connected once a week for a period of about 8 hours for the backup, and then it is disconnected the rest of the week.

Question:  So how do we sync the data onto an external drive?  Answer:  <Cobian!>

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Ok, so one of the primary objectives of this blog is to report particular, awesome internet tidbits to the rest of the community. After my hiatus, it is time to resume this blog’s function in that role.

I’m really excited to report that Mike and Jerry (aka Gabe and Tycho with PA), Scot Kurtz (@ PVP) and Wil Wheaton have again recorded another Podcast with noneother than Chris Perkins serving as their DM (dungeon master)!
I really enjoy these podcasts, Chris does an amazing job bringing his characters and encounters to life while tolerating the other four’s crazy antics.  Even if you don’t understand the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons (which I didn’t for the longest time), the podcast is still a blast.

So far, the <first> and <second>  episodes have already been released.

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Blu Ray rant:
I recently ordered Independence Day and have owned for quite some time Terminator 2 both on blu ray.  I have to say that the quality of ID4 and T2 are both grainy and rather shitty when comparing them to blu rays for recently released movies such as Iron Man, Casino Royale (Daniel Craig), American Gangster, etc.  In other words, if you buy a blu ray version of a movie that was released more than 5 years ago, the picture quality of the blu ray will not be as good as a blu ray version of a movie that was released in the last 5 years.  The quality of the cameras used for filming as well as the medium in which the movies are stored greatly influences the resultant picture of the blu ray version of the movie.  The T2 and ID4 blu rays, are slightly better than upconverted DVDs.  Whereas the picture quality for recently released movies on blu ray, such as Iron Man, seem a lot more detailed and crisp (and suffering less interpolation effects) when being shown on a 1080p TV (ie significantly better looking than upconverted DVDs).

Random Internets:
A previous PA comic featured ‘dickerdoodles‘.  After doing a dickerdoodle picture contest, Gabe has amassed a collection of hard core cookie porn.  Albeit the following link contains no nudity, it isn’t exactly work safe:

http://gallery.penny-arcade.com/gallery/6778417_VVkNj#433636014_q6won

Snow Wolf pointed out to me that in a recent PA Post, Tycho announced Tycho and Gabe will be doing another set of D&D Podcasts.  Recording for this venture began this past Thursday.  Hopefully we’ll see those PA D&D Podcasts sometime later this coming week.

I thought this pundit kitchen picture was hilarious!  These [1],[2] are pretty good too.

For those of you in the academia, I thought this recent PhD comic on journal impact factors was really funny.