I’m on this organization kick lately.  Long story, but let us just say that I have recently been taking steps to address a bit of a Disorder due to a Deficit in Attention.

Anyway, one of the characteristics of this “disorder” is the inability to throw junk away.  Instead, I *used to* keep it.  It could be broken (as in “garbage”) or semi-functional (as in “garbage”).  Broken stuff would get put away for the day that I’d need the parts or fix it (as in “when hell freezes over”).  Semi-functional stuff would stay out to be used once, frustrate me, and then collect dust until the next time I consider throwing it out.  Use once, frustrate, collect dust.  And repeat.

A variation on this theme is stuff that is completely functional but doesn’t meet my needs or perform at the level I’d like.  I’d had just such a situation with my laser printer and fax machine/scanner.  While they worked OK, they were both starting to lose their quality mojo.  Also, they were separate components and required an additional box to enable them to be put on my wireless network.  The last little annoyance was that the printer did not do full-duplex.  Often, I’d print out long documents, and to save paper, I’d manually divide the job and flip the sheets over.  Eesh. (continue reading…)

Not too long ago, I, Mr. Check-me-out-I’m-so-technical-and-cool, had a catastrophic data loss.  As implied by the use of the word ‘catastrophic’, I lost some stuff that… I did not want to lose.  At all. Lost, lost.  Too bad.  Sucks to be me.  How could this happen to a guy who does this for a living?  I’ll tell you how: procrastination.

I knew that off-site storage was necessary.  I have space on remote servers in secure locations… one of these days, I’m going to figure out a good way to, uh… hey, I gotta go pick up the pizza!

But, it’s worse than that.  I actually have a mirrored-disk, network-attached storage (NAS) box specifically for backups.  I have external drives specifically for making local backups, too.  So, short of my office burning down, I should be covered, no?  Uh… no. (continue reading…)