Archive for October, 2007

26
Oct

The Better Mouse Trap Inside the Better Rat Maze

   Posted by: Matilda   in Ramblings

the better rat maze

Despite owning a software company, I’m pretty dumb. I’m too dumb to figure out how to program my DVD player. How anyone can stare at those 80 buttons and not give up immediately is beyond me. I’m too dumb to buy any watch with a digital interface. Frankly, I’m too dumb to enjoy reading any sentence with the word “digital interface” in it. Or just “interface,” for that matter.

I’m ok with my stupidity, though, because there seem to be a lot of us idiots out there, and a few companies have finally noticed. The Apple Ipod and the Nintendo Wii are proof that us morons, both young and old, actually like something that’s easy to use. We prefer thinking about Madonna or how to improve our golfing putt on Wii Sports. Certainly beats contemplating audio format compression rates or whether to mash the X and Triangle buttons in a particular order six or seven times in rapid succession.

(I don’t know if our own software is built for everyone as dumb as me. I hope so, and our ranking among the very best sellers on Amazon cookbook software seems to point to it. I’d love to hear your feedback, though.)

Anyway, as one of the legion of stupid, I’d like to personally apologize to all the manufacturers out there who build the better mouse trap inside the better rat maze. I’m sure you are very clever and very sophisticated to have devised an 80 button remote control for my DVD player. I know I couldn’t do it.

You may not get my money ever again, but I certainly appreciate that you are much, much smarter than me.

Congratulations.

Now I’m going to go practice my backswing on the Wii. My grandson has a very good short game, and he almost beat me last time.

__________

What are you favorite mouse traps? How about rat mazes?

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12
Oct

7 Steps to Backing up your Life

   Posted by: Matilda   in

No backup for pc

What if you woke up tomorrow and your computer was destroyed? Would you mourn the loss of a $600 appliance, as though it were a broken refrigerator? Good for you. You’ve probably got everything saved somewhere else. You’ve got a backup.

If that idea brought on a rush of panic, you HAVE to back up your data immediately. Every computer on this planet will fail. Yours, mine, the ones at NASA. All of them. It’s just a matter of time. When yours fails, you need to be ready. You need to back up your data. If you don’t, you will lose everything.

Step 1. Find a Backup Buddy. This is someone you will trust to keep your backup data with. The important thing is that they are offsite. If your house burns down or a hurricane swept through, it would be devastating on many levels. It will be even more devastating if you lose all your digital pictures and old emails too.

Step 2. Buy two portable hard drives. An 80 gigabyte hard drive is the smallest common size and should do fine, unless you have a lot of video.

Step 3. Use backup software to copy your computer’s data to one of the hard drives. Windows XP comes with a free backup utility under Program Files\Accessories. Windows Vista comes with Backup and Restore Center found in Control Panel. There are also a number of other backup softwares out there too.

Step 4. Get your Backup Buddy to backup their computer on the other hard drive.

Step 5. Exchange hard drives. You keep their hard drive and they keep yours.

Step 6. Back up your computer again on the other hard drive. Make a backup once a day or once a week. Only you really know how often you should back up. The test is to ask yourself, “If I lost everything on my computer from now until the last time I backed up, would it be horrible?”

Step 7. Once a month, exchange hard drives with your Backup Buddy.

If you are worried about privacy, use a fire-proof safe or a safety deposit box as a Backup Buddy. The important thing is to get the information on your computer out of your house and somewhere completely safe from fires, burglars, hurricanes or whatever else life throws at you. Having two separate back hard drives gives you the convenience of backing up your information right at hand, and the added security of knowing it’s backed up in two different places.

Some people may think, “Well, if my house burned to the ground, losing my digital pictures would be the least of my worries.” Those people couldn’t be more wrong. If you lose your house, those precious photos, emails and *ahem* family recipes could be the one thing that helps you get through it all.

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