We have a 16 month old girl so you can imagine we take lots of photos and videos.  These are priceless photos that I would never forgive myself for losing.  Photos that reside only on your computer are not backed up.  The hard drive holding them can and will eventually stop working. If the hard drive has a hardware failure your only choice  of recovering those photos will be spending $X,XXX amount of dollars for advanced data recovery.  Even that doesn’t guarantee you will get your photos back.  This is why backing up your photos and videos is so important.  Here are a few ways to backup them up and the pros and cons of each way.

• Backup to another internal/external hard drive – This is one of the most common methods. External drives are pretty cheap these days and it is easy to setup an automated backup using any of the most popular operating systems.  While this method seems sound, it really only protects against accidental deletion or primary hard drive failure.  If someone breaks into your house and steals your computer, they will probably take your external hard drive with them.  Same thing goes for a fire.  You will lose the computer and the external drive.
• Another very popular method is to back your photos and videos up on CD or DVD media.  This is another good way but has some hidden limitations you might not expect. The usual method for buying blank CDs and DVDs is too look for a good price and buy them in bulk.  The problem with this is the cheap ones are cheap for a reason.  They aren’t guaranteed to last.  You need to spend a little extra on your media and get archival quality.  You will probably spend around $1-2 a piece, but the archival grade media is usually guaranteed to last 100 years.
• My favorite option is an online backup.  This basically backs your photos and videos up across the Internet to your online storage.  There are several large companies that offer this type of service.  You could even make your own using something like the Amazon cloud.  I actually use Google’s online storage in conjunction with their Picasa image software.  Picasa will upload my photos and keep my pictures folders synced.  You get 2GB free from Google, but I am using a plan where I pay $5 a year for 20 GB of online storage.  That is a little more expensive than using DVDs, but it gives you an offsite backup.  If my house burns down, I will still be able to log in from a different computer and access all of my pictures.  I say pictures because you will need to buy one of the bigger plans if you want to upload a lot of videos to this service.

The most important thing to take from this article is the importance of backing up your photos. Even if your method isn’t the best, it is better than none at all.  I promise you, all computer hard drives, internal or external eventually fail.  I don’t want to be the one telling you the pictures of your child’s first steps are gone.

The current website has performed well and drives a high percentage of visitors to the contact page. The contact page in turn sends in a few monthly quote requests and an undetermined number of phone calls.  This is one of the areas I want to improve upon.  To do a better job of demonstrating the importance of the website, we need a better way of capturing all of the information from the contact page including phone calls. Another key goal is to differentiate the contacts from people who came directly to looking for a phone number and those who found us organically.  Those organic numbers are the key to how effective our search engine marketing strategies are.

Purpose is the concept for the new site.  There are really only a few reasons for someone to be on a printing company website.  I plan on leveraging that knowledge to provide a clear path to the information visitors are looking for, hopefully in a clever and memorable way. I’ll follow up more on that in part 2.  The conclusion to part one is stating my desire to protect the website visitors once again, from flash intros, auto playing video, sound and all other sorts of ideas people want to add to the website, yet hate it when they see them on a website.

What is the purpose for the new website?  The purpose is sales.

I made a post a couple of years ago about how frustrating my experience was when trying to cancel my XBox Live subscription.  The post still gets hundreds of visitors a month so I thought I would update it with some new information from a comment at the end of the post.  Thanks to David for his comment!

You can cancel the auto renew of the Xbox live gold if you go to xbox.com and login to your live account, click you gamertag, click contact information, click membership level, and where it says automatic renewel, click where it says on. You will then have to click through a few screens where they are trying to keep you but then you will finally be able to set it to off!!!

Here is a blog post from jquery discussing the move to Google’s API.

This is a perfect example of the problem I blogged about back in January with using real information for your security questions. If Sarah Palin had not used real information when answering the Yahoo email security questions her email would not have been compromised by someone guessing her security questions.  Also keep in mind, Yahoo gives the same secuirty question challenges to everyone.  So if I want to social engineer my way into your email account I already know which security questions to start researching.

Every year we go with some friends to a cabin on probably the cleanest lake I have ever been in. The only way to get to the cabin is by boat.  We have to ferry all of our supplies over on the boat and carry the trash off each day by boat.  You have to do the trash daily or you may wake up with a bear eating you or your food.  It is a small price to pay for the relaxing atmosphere.

Well what about the important stuff, like my online bank accounts?  My banking account you say, funny you should ask.  My bank limits my password to 20 characters.

The first reason is taking the pressure and stress off traffic. I live south of Atlanta, the asshole of the world, and I have to commute into the city every day. Atlanta traffic is horrid and you would do better to ask a homeless man to cure cancer than ask everyone using the interstates heading into or out of Atlanta to pay attention and JUST DRIVE STRAIGHT! There is however, no better feeling than being stuck in traffic and not giving caring because you are so wrapped up in a book you can’t wait to hear what happens.

Another reason is it allows you to listen to books that improve you. You can listen to books that help your career, make you a better parent, or any number of topics you would like to improve. Anything is better than listening to absolute crap ( IE The regular FM stations that pollute the radio dial. If you are in Atlanta fire up star 94 for a taste of the biggest idiots to ever pollute the airwaves. Those people make Howard Stern seem like a good counselor). Cut the FM cord. It is worthless and will never help you.

Just sit back and look closely at the amount of time you spend in a car. An hour a day is a lot of time that could be better spent either entertaining yourself or improving yourself.

UPDATED: Canceling My XBox Live Gold Membership

It came time to cancel my Xbox 360 Live Gold Membership tonight.  I have no problems with the service or the cost of it, but I just don’t use it.  I haven’t played my Xbox 360 in months much less logged on to play someone else.

So, I log into my game console and look around for the cancel button.  I went through every screen on the account management tab but nothing.  I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Me being a naive Internet user ( 16 years and counting) I assumed Microsoft would make canceling the service as easy as it was to start.  I mean it took me 2 minutes and a credit card to start my account right on my Xbox 360.  Why should canceling be so hard?  We know why they make it so hard, but damnit I am ranting here.

So anyway, I hit Google with “how do i cancel my xbox live subscription” and about the second one down was the number I had to call to cancel my membership.  So I dialed it up and after 4 Indians, 3 Holds, and 2 reference numbers I finally got it canceled.  If I gave out a weekly you suck ass award, Microsoft would get this weeks.

Need to repair your Xbox?