Hmm I wonder if listening to the Glee album going to spoil the show for me, I’ve only seen the first two episodes (love glee!)

I’m quite confused as to why Star Wars is never on Sky! I’d like to see them in HD, but not available on Blu Ray. What’s up George Lucas??

We got stuck in traffic so played Trivial Persuit on my iPhone (I won!) now having Burger King while we wait for traffic to go!

I’ve been eating vegitarian food most of this week as I watch “Kill it, Cook it, Eat it” on BBC 3. Had a bean burger at Burger King.

I would go veggie full time if I thought the difference it would make (climate etc.) would be huge. But one person can’t change the world.

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

The snow is falling down quite slowly but in large chunks! Very pretty, looks like a winter wonderland outside my office window! #uksnow

If you had been born in India, I daresay you would be saying the same thing about Lord Krishna and Lord Shiva. If you had been born in Afghanistan, I daresay you would be saying the same thing about Allah. If you would have been born in Viking Norway, you would have been saying the same thing about Wotan. If you would have been born in Olympian Greece you’d be saying the same thing about Zeus and Apollo.

The human mind is extremely susceptible to hallucination.

Richard Dawkins.

I absolutely love this quote, and it really sums up religion. How can you be sure that you have the right religion, when religion requires no evidence (only faith)? Surely they are all on a level playing field. You only picked your particular religion because of where you were born. So stop being so sure about it!

Doctor Who was awesome, I will miss Tennant but am glad the writer is changing because RTD can get a bit much at times. Roll on new Who!

We all had a great time at my sister’s, they made home made buffet and we made fools of ourselves on the Wii good times!

New Super Mario Bros Wii is absolutely hilarious when played with 4 people, some slightly drunk, shouting and screaming with laughter!

The house is full of fun, games and laughter. Merry Christmas everyone! Can’t wait for DOCTOR WHO 🙂

The kids tucked in bed. Oliver texting me from his new mobile phone. One more sleep til Christmas!

Caring for Your Introvert

Caring for Your Introvert

Reminder: Backup your data!

Last week something terrible happened; my computer refused to start up. Rescue disks reported that the hard drive had failed.

This can happen to any computer at any time; it is the one thing Macs are not safer from than PCs. Luckily it is also something that Mac OS X has a built-in mechanism to avoid, as long as you do a few easy steps to turn it on.

I’m talking about Time Machine, the automatic backup system that you can just set and then forget.

Of course, you have to set it up first, and this is where people make the big mistake of not bothering. They think it will never happen to them – wrong!

All it involves is buying an external hard drive (I went for the Time Capsule as it was wireless, and is also a full-featured WiFi base station), connecting it and then when the Mac asks if you want to use this as your Time Machine backup, just say yes.

So luckily for me, I had everything backed up. I also use this machine for my business, and we have extra backups for that, too (If the hard drive you are backing up to is located in the same room as your computer, then it is not a good backup in case of fire, theft etc. We use both Dropbox and iDrive at work to back up important data).

All it took for me to restore my Mac to complete working order was to get a new hard drive, then take the computer home and start it up. The Mac OS startup process said “Would you like to migrate everything from your Time Machine backups?” and I said yes. After a couple of hours (there was a lot of stuff!) the computer restarted and it was exactly as I had left it before the hard drive failed!

I was amazed at this; not only every file in its place, but all the preferences set correctly, the software was all activated and up-to-date, all my work was ready to go as I had left it.

Considering my last experience of a hard drive crash was when I was on Windows, and there was no built-in automatic backup system, and backups basically meant sitting there for hours making DVDs of my stuff, Time Machine has been an absolute marvel.

As Joel Spolsky recently said:

“The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.”

So now, having done a restore from my Time Machine backup, I can heartily recommend using it. If you do not have a backup strategy, do it now before it is too late!