February 6, 2010:
Back with GPMINI
We’ve travelled back down to Florida for a few days – so I have some more drive time with GPMINI 
February 5, 2010:
Motoring Alliance
Another MINI website, another nice “fridge magnet” …
Motoring Alliance, top left, if you couldn’t tell
(but I still don’t like the thickness and quality of Cooper Flags badges as much as those from Motoring Badges (note left edge of Motoring Alliance badge above, where the sticker started to peel off the magnet backing when I tried to peel off the protective sheet)
Nice badge from Motoring Alliance … though it didn’t quite make it to my “favorites area” 
(click for bigger)
February 3, 2010:
Google Reader and MotoringFile
I happened to visit the actual MotoringFile website today to see if they’d got the latest MINI sales figures; my first reaction was along the lines of “EEK!” related to the formatting of that site (the bold and fat headline font disturbed me!):
But formatting is personal (yes, Robert, I’m thinking of you), so no doubt lots of MF folks like it …
My second reaction was “oh, lots of stories I don’t remember” … Turns out, the Google Reader feed I set up were using the MotoringFile Clippings feed which they appear to not support even though they offer the link – so it’s not had stories updated since mid last year!
Oh well, so I’ve updated the Google Reader feed and it now includes recent MotoringFile stories. I wonder how often a website feed breaks like that? I suppose to some extent, MotoringFile actually doesn’t want me to use the feed, since then I don’t see all their advertising – but I would have expected a broken feed link to give an error, rather than just give many month old data.
Having the non-clipped feed from MotoringFile is a bit disappointing, since they have a habit of blasting HUGE number of copied-from-press-release stuff into a post sometimes, but overall I prefer to read newer news even if it’s a bit of a flood.
January 30, 2010:
Q5 recall
My first Audi Q5 recall (and with luck, the only one) … apparently I might get hurt by a piece of plastic if I crash the car – there’s a revelation!
Not a very big concern (certainly not like the Toyota recall!) – but maybe Audi can fix my “Audi advanced key”, since in the cold weather it no longer senses me and unlocks the car … I have to go through the awful drudgery of pressing a button on the remote!
January 23, 2010:
Backups, Time Machine, LaCie, and more
Yes, nothing to do with MINIs; move along if you’re looking for GBMINI … unless you don’t have backups of all your computer data!
Ever since I accidentally deleted all my email a few years ago, and even more so since a hard drive failure on a PC I owned, I’ve been slightly paranoid about backups. Unjustified perhaps, since really nothing on my computer is life threatening to lose …
Music (40GB)
I guess it’s theoretically all “backed up” on my iPod (though attempting to move music from one computer to another from the iPod was very unsuccessful – worst, I could re-encode it all from the original CDs – but that would take weeks!
Photos (40GB)
Many of my photos, arguably the “more wanted” ones, exist here on GBMINI, or over on MargaretAndIan, but they aren’t full resolution – I’d prefer not to lose the originals!
Videos (45GB)
Mostly un-edited, so I could pull them back off the original DV tapes (so long as those tapes are not too degraded)
Documents (< <1GB)
Very little data space - but stuff that couldn't be re-created. Although I'm not sure how important the source code for a college project from the mid 80s, written in BCPL, is now ...
Mail (1GB)
I actually, arguably, don't have a backup for this - Gmail has the originals; though Apple Mail has an IMAP copy of everything, I'm not sure how easy it would be to restore to Gmail if the originals vanished! I imagine if the files disappeared from Gmail, then Apple Mail would mirror those deletions ...
I no longer trust hard drives, so while a Time Machine backup is very good, a drive failure in the Time Capsule would be bad – so I use Time Machine with a LaCie 2big Network RAID drive! This arguably gives me three copies of my data, the original on my Mac, and copies on each of the two drives in the LaCie …
The LaCie lives in the basement …
But that’s not enough! What if something happened to my home – I need an offsite backup too …
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