Brian Dylan

Time has slowed.  It’s an incredible feeling - a lot like exhaling.  We have said our goodbyes, we have finalized our itinerary and we have made progress.   Once we left Pennsylvania, the minutes until we were out of the state shifted into the hours we had until our next location.  Once we crossed into Central Standard Time, we were suddenly out of people we had to visit and had gained an hour.  We have officially shifted out of our old lives.

The first three days of our journey were frenetic.  Rush to leave, hurry to visit family and race to get to some place unfamiliar.   We needed to slow down, so we staged ourselves in Ohio.  We visited dear friends.  We staged our belongings and realized a little more of our itinerary.  Still, we did not feel entirely free.

We could not really relax until the terrain changed, until the town names sounded unfamiliar and until we saw a few new restaurant chains dotting the road.   Once we left Mansfield, Ohio, we melded with the open “road” and really began to enjoy the “trip.”

We ate Venezuelan food in Columbus, got surprised by the abrupt vista of Cincinnati and saw the world’s largest Louisville slugger in its namesake city.   I donated ten dollars to itinerant beggars at a rest stop and ate deliciously uncooked eggs at a Waffle House.  We also drove.  We drove so much my ass went numb.

Currently, we reside in the cheapest hotel available in Cave City, Kentucky.  This is my first new state.  It’s so lush; the hills look overcrowded.  Kentucky rolls.  The highways rise and fall in long straight lanes through hillocks exploding with green.

Tomorrow, we visit Mammoth Cave and tour western Tennessee.  We will try for Arkansas, but we might get delayed by Nashville or Memphis or even Clarksville.  We were already supposed to be in Tennessee.  I am glad we decided to stop.  We’ve remembered to breathe, to inhale our new surroundings as we expel the pent up tension of our former, structured lives.

Even with the detours, we have a lingering sense of go, go, Go!   However, a funny thing happens when you cross into another time zone with no immediate plans of returning.  Everything slows down and you suddenly have time to do everything.  Actually, you suddenly have time to do everything you wanted to do.

It’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete… - Piano Man, Billy Joel

We’re moving to New Zealand.  At this point, that statement reaffirms the slow sinking reality of the situation.   We have quit our jobs.  We have vacated our apartment.  We have struggled through the voluminous paperwork, applications and address changes.  We have severed all of our material ties to Lewisburg, yet we have lashed ourselves more tightly to the important pinions of our lives.

Without our friends, we would be homeless and our lives would be devoid of an entire swatch of colorful people.  While we have sufficient capital, we depend entirely on the charity of our friendships and their emotional support.  Rather than tax their good natures, our vagrancy has deepened our connection.  Granted, it may be because we are leaving that they are so longsuffering, but superficial hospitality generally does not culminate in the giving of gifts and raucous parties filled with good times, teary eyes and cacophonic karaoke.  Not only have we have been housed, fed and pampered, but we have been supported, embraced and loved.  People swelled the ranks of the sendoff and heartily wished us well just as easily as they opened their homes and pantries.

Without our families, this would not be possible.  There is the latent freedom and independence our parents have instilled in us that makes such a grand adventure possible.  However, they have provided incredible logistical support and an unerring acceptance of what we are doing.  They have all given everything they could in their own fashion and we consider ourselves very fortunate to be so blessed.

June 10th, our anniversary, we leave.  The situation changes irrevocably.  All of our connections will have to evolve.  It is a wonderful thing.  If these trying few days have taught us anything, they have taught us that the occasional swirl keeps the mixture from separating, from hardening and from stagnating.  We’re moving to New Zealand, but we’re reinvigorating ourselves and our friends.  The reality of our move is that distance does not matter.   Love does not require a change of address.

You need only lose most of your life’s work once to learn the hard lesson of backups.  We all know that it’s necessary, so I won’t lecture you.  Instead, I will recommend the steps I have taken to protect my files and explain what happens when you miss that one little detail.

If you got something that you are changing and constantly tweaking, you really need to use Subversion.  It’s what some programmers use to track their daily changes.  It adds “versioning” which is the backing up of files as changes are made.  These are made in batches called “Commits.”  Basically, if you change sixteen files, you apply those changes as batch and then you can roll back any or all of them.  This is a trivial client-centric view of a very complicated system, but, if you use Dreamhost like I do, you already have a Subversion server at your finger tips.  Then, you just need to worry about the client portion and TortoiseSVN makes it easy to do.  I love it because it tracks what files I change, add, etc and checks them in the most optimal fashion.

Granted, I could be using rsync to synchronize my work.  Most of my files are binary so I realize I am using subversion stupidly and I rarely need to rollback to an earlier blog post.  I am, however, seriously considering LaTeX.  Not only does it gain me L33T points, but it stores everything in plain text which would make difference checking oh so much more useful.

If you got several gigs worth of photos and you balk at paying Picasa, Adobe or Flickr for storage, you can have your cake and eat it too.  There’s a wonderful little utility called Zenphoto which is a web app that couples FTP uploading with a database and an image gallery.  I upload all my photos to a directory on my website and Zenphoto takes care of the rest.  It creates galleries that I can then administer, organize and describe.  It has even added EXIF support which means I can keep all metadata with the image and then display it to the users.  Comments and usage statics and a clean AJAX user interface - what’s not to love?  Considering I also have backups on my Network Area Storage (NAS) and my local machine, I have backed up my files, shared them with friends and stayed within my webhosts Appropriate Use Policy (AUP).  Most web hosts have clauses in their AUP prohibiting the use of your site for a backup repository.  Since my subversion repository protects my writing and my photo application shares my photos, I am taking advantage of a very useful service that I am already paying for.

Finally, get a residential NAS like the My Book World Edition.  Think portable hard drive that you set and forget on your network.  Mine sits right by router and is accessible by all of my devices (computers, Xbox, PS3, etc).   Since it’s running Linux (it’s a very minimal ARM build that I have kludged the hell out of), it’s also running an SSH Server and any utility I care to wire up.  With a little work, I could have rsync or a media server or a bit torrent box that frees up my systems resources.  The only limitation of the system is the paltry 30 megs of ram, but these little black box (mine’s white and shiny) systems are only supposed to do one thing well, so I don’t mind.

Soon, I will be adding a dumb external drive (the mybook world has a USB 2.0 out) that I will then backup my NAS to.   Some crazy folks recommend I disconnect the drive and back it up on a weekly basis, but those are the same fruit cakes who believe lightning can actually damage electronics.  That’s what surge protectors are for, right?  *wink*

So, I have taken reasonable steps to backup all my essential data.  Unfortunately, I had neglected to take reasonable steps with my PDA.  To be fair, my Clie was an old reliable dog with about five minutes of battery life.   It had become my password generator, since the only app I ever ran was my keychain application.  After I rebuilt the computer that hosted all of the backups made during syncs, I never bothered to reinstall the software and recreate the backup.  It just sat in the cradle and got dusted when I needed to log into some rarely-used web application.

One day, I needed one of those arcane passwords and I powered up my PDA.  For whatever magical reason understood only by Sony, it had decided to reformat itself.  It booted up, walked me through the initial setup and displayed the factory applications along with a few of my own old ones.  My ebook reader and my Space Trader game were still installed.  My password utility, however, had disappeared.

In a flash of my solid state memory stick, I was locked out of the particular system I was trying to access and all of the passwords I would eventually need to ask for.   No one likes to ask for passwords and IT folks hate to ask other IT folks to reset their passwords.  At the very worst, it warrants a lecture on proper backup practices.  At the very best, it warrants a rambling blog post on proper backup practices.

It may strike you as odd that I took tremendous trouble to backup my porn collection and my collection of DnD character sheets, but not my passwords, but I assure you; it is all a matter of priorities.  Passwords can be changed, but good luck trying to find some of things I have downloaded over the years.

Do yourself a favor.   Create a layered backup strategy that hosts files elsewhere.  Make it routine, automatic and mindless.  Even better, make it a part of the process.  Nothing backups photographs more than uploading to them to your own host where you are free of space concerns.  If you make backing up a tedious extra step (like burning to optical media), you will never do it.  Just like I never bothered syncing my PDA.

A delicious vegetarian pasta dish that’s as quick as it tasty and an alternative to traditional “add-sauce-to-box-pasta.”

Ingredients:

1 Package mock chicken -  (Morning Star Farms Chick’n Strips (Vegetarian alternative))

1 Package frozen chopped spinach

1 glove garlic (crushed)

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 tablespoon dried basil

1 teaspoon dried parsley

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 package linguine florentine (green and yellow variety)

1 cup fresh mushrooms, chopped

2 tablespoons sherry

5 tablespoons olive oil (olive oil is like wine.  There’s no excuse for cheap substitutes)

Steps:

1.  Cook linguine florentine according to the package.

2.  Meanwhile, in a small frying pan, saute the mushrooms in the sherry until they release their juices and begin to cook.

3.  Meanwhile, in a large sauce pan, saute the garlic in the olive oil (stir fervently, do not burn your garlic).

4.  Meanwhile, cook the spinach (microwaves are perfect for thawing/blanching spinach).

4.  When the garlic turns clear, add the oregano, basil and parsley and stir until soaked.

5.  Add the mock chicken to the oil, garlic and spices.  Cook until the mock chicken is firm.

6.  Add the cooked spinach to oil, garlic, spices and mock chicken.

7.  Add the mushrooms to the oil, garlic, spices, mock chicken and spinach.

8.  When the pasta has about a minute left, stir the Parmesan cheese into the oil, garlic, spices, mock chicken, spinach and mushrooms.

9.  Toss the pasta with the mixture and serve.

Serve with:

garlic bread

Caesar salad

A white wine like a sauvignon blanc or a chardonnay