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Last night I wanted to go see a light hearted comedy, something I didn't have to think about for some quick laughs.  It seemed a little childish, but we choose Kick Ass... Kid Super Heroes???  How silly could it get?

In this case, I was wrong about the movie, it was a rather dark comedy about kid super heroes, definitely not the light hearted 90 minutes I expected.  While the premise is a bit odd, awkwardness displayed by Aaron Johnson was perfect for the part.  I thought Nick Cage's Big Daddy was good although I thought it could have done without the Batman reference.  It was funny, but a little unneeded as the rest of the characters seemed very unique (although I can't claim to be a huge comic book buff).

If you miss this in the theater, I recommend adding it to your Netflix queue.  This is a nice dark comedy set on a rather odd premise.

Last fall I purchased a network storage device (NAS) to store all of my music and pictures in my house.  This allows for Jenny and I not to duplicate what we have on our computers and instead share everything.  This is also a great place to run our backups to.  The NAS is running RAID 1 so my data will be safe even if one of the drives fails.  Hard drives will fail so you need to plan accordingly.  Anyone who writes their data to only a single drive (especially an external drive that they move around) is just asking for trouble.

Once I got this online and moved my data and my backups to the new NAS, I felt much better knowing my data was secure.  However, I realized that a fire or flood would destroy both drives as well as my computers so I still wasn't really safe.  One feature that I'm glad I had on my NAS was a built in FTP server.  Actually, me having it is nice, but my brother's NAS having FTP is what is really great.  With a built in FTP server, I'm able to FTP my really important files to his NAS in California and he is able to do the same to D.C.  It is really pretty cool that we are able to do this without any real cost.  Now even if one of us has a fire and we lose everything, we will still have some important files (like insurance documents or scans of important paperwork).  Now except for Clan Warfare, I'm pretty ok.

One really important component of my remote backup plan is the use of Cobian Backup.  I first found out about Cobian while at school at Carnegie Mellon.  I figure if it is used there, it must be decent.  It is a great freeware backup program (no longer open source, but Cobian seem to be well supported none-the-less).  In Cobian, I setup a job to backup everything on my computer to the NAS each night as an incremental backup with a full backup once a week (and since I have the space, I keep a few full backups).  I then setup another job to do a full backup once a week with differential updates each night that is zipped up, encrypted, and FTPed to my brother's NAS.  It seems to work pretty well and it was surprisingly easy to setup.  So easy in fact, my brother and I are setting up our parents' and grandparents' computers to do that backups as well.

Now if you don't have someone you can trust with your backups, you can always use a service like Mozy or Carbonite that allow you to backup to the cloud.  This seems like a good option as well, but at around $60 a year, it is cheaper to just backup to back up to a friend's NAS that is already paid for.  If I had a lot to backup, the unlimted space that is offered by these companies does seem to be reasonable priced.

Another alternative that a friend of mine mentioned was using a GMail Virtual Drive to backup to.  If you created a new GMail account just for your backups, this would give you 8GB of free storage.  The down side to this is that this may not be compliant to the terms of service of GMail, but since they haven't stopped this ustility from working in the past five years, you should be ok.  If they do turn it off, you should still have access to the files, you just wouldn't be able to write any new backups to GMail.

To the point, spend the $0 and get Cobian (or something like it), and do a remote backup somewhere either to Google or to a friend NAS that isn't in your house.  If you run a business, this is even more important.

While I miss the dollar theater I used to go to back in Texas, Jenny convinced me to go to the movies today.  There wasn't much playing but the one thing that I wanted to see was Alice in Wonderland. I like Tim Burton's movies in general so I thought it would be worth it to spring for the 3D tickets.  That was of course before I realized that two 3D tickets would cost me $28.  Since I'm still used to the $1 per ticket price, there was a bit of sticker shock.  But I digress, as for the movie, it was pretty good.  I liked the idea that this isn't a remake, it instead is a sequel to the previous movies based on the book.  That being the premise, Burton was able to pull off a different story line with the same characters compared to what has been done before.

Visually, the movie was pretty impressive.  Perhaps not as breathtaking as Avatar, but very good none the less.  One thing that I could have done without though is the 3D.  In Avatar, I found some scenes very difficult to watch and although that occurred less with Alice, there were still some times where I found myself closing one eye to make it easier to see.  I think I'm done paying the extra for something that is just distracting.  The scene I remember being most impressive in 3D in both Avatar and Alice are the credits.  They looked really cool in 3D but I don't see the need to pay $3 or $4 just to see them.  I'll try 3D again in a couple of more years when they can improve the technology a bit more.

Apparently while I was at work today, Jenny got a call at home from Costco.  They were conducting a survey to see whether or not we would be interested in buying health insurance from them.  While I do like Costco and I think they sell many quality products, I'm not sure I want to buy my health insurance and toilet paper from the same place.  I can't help but think about Mike Judge film, Idiocracy.  In the movie (seen on the left), Costco sells everything.  The main character's lawyer even got his law degree there.

Regardless, it is Costco, and I trust them so once they start offering insurance in Virginia, I'm sure I'll at least get a quote from them.

Welcome to Costco... I love you.

A couple of months ago I downloaded the public beta of Office 2010.  Overall it seemed fine although it was difficult to see what was really changed.  Most of the apps looked essentially the same as in Office 2007 except I did notice that Groove was renamed to SharePoint Workspace.  It seems to work the same (with some small enhancements) but overall, it looks the same to me. 

The one exception to this was Outlook 2010.  It didn't sync correctly with my BlackBerry so I couldn't use it for long and had to revert to Outlook 2007, but the one feature I really liked was the Social Network integration.  This is similar to how smart phones sync with Facebook (and how Linked In should) so the profile picture and phone numbers stay in sync with what your contact has listed on the site.  This is a great feature to help ensure you don't have stale email address or phone numbers which both seem to change a little too often now a days.  In Outlook 2010, Microsoft allows 3rd party developers to create connections between Outlook and what ever internet service they want to help sync the information. 

This integration is made most obvious through the "Person Pane" (see to the right) in an Outlook mail message although you will see it when you open a contact directly as well.  This single feature would have pushed me to upgrade to 2010, but Microsoft did something unexpected that will make me rethink that...

They released this feature as a free add-on to older versions of Outlook.  You can download the beta version of Outlook Social Connector which works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 (and of course this is built into Outlook 2010).  Once you have the Social Connector installed, you can get the connector for LinkedIn from their site for free as well.  You can expect that a connector for Facebook will be forthcoming after the release of Office 2010 (or perhaps even earlier), but for now, I'm happy with LinkedIn since those are the contacts I'm not concerned with anyway.

Yesterday Jenny and I were out and stopped by a local restaurant for lunch.  It is obvious to me that we have now come to the time of Snowmageddon.  Why else would you have a sign like this on your patio?  As a native San Diegian, this is just not right.

After lunch we stopped by a nearby Home Depot.  While shoveling the never ending snow the last week, we broke the shaft on our steel reinforced snow shovel so we decided to pick up a new one.  The local grocery stores have been sold out for a while, but we figured that Home Depot may have gotten some new shovels in this weekend in preparation for the next round of snow next week.

As a Christmas present, Jenny got me a Home Brewing kit from Mr. Beer.  I had mentioned in the past that I wanted to brew some "Stout's Stout" mostly as a joke (since I don't really care for stouts) but underneath that joke, I really did want to try a home brew.  This kit was a great starter, it come with everything I needed and instructions on how not to screw it up.  To the right you can see some of bottled beverages that were produced.  Now we just a have a few more weeks to wait while the carbonation kicks in a then the Stout Ale will be ready for consumption.

Brewing is fun but what I really want to try is distilling.  I'm not sure if it is legal where I live but after I do some more home brewing, I think I'm going to look into that. Have you had any luck with home distilling?

We took pictures from the brewing a few weekends ago along with the bottling from today.