A One-Eyed Man is King

A while back, I broke down and bought a Kindle.  It’s shiny.  It’s well-made.  I take it with me everywhere.  It does not, however, accelerate or even keep a pace with my reading speed of paper.  A while back I said that I would be testing this thing out with my first three books.  Here are my results:

Just for a reference point, I read paperback fiction at around 2.3 – 2.5 pages/minute.  It goes down from there for technical and business type books.

So, I read slower on the Kindle.  Quite a bit slower, actually.  I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time, but then it dawned on me.  I have to turn the page MUCH more often.  There is the slightest delay as the screen redraws itself and it happens every time you hit the Next Page button.  I’m pretty sure that’s the culprit. 

Anyway, apart from the speed issue, I love the device.  I can get books in the airport, sitting in the car waiting for during my kids’ piano practice, or in my bed at one in the morning.  Some titles I’ve looked for and they don’t have for Kindle yet, but the vast majority of what I have wanted was right there.  It’s too easy, actually.  When you search on the device for books, the Buy button is highlighted by default and if you click on it, it’ll charge your card and start sending the book in less than 20 seconds.  Impressive, but dangerous for someone like me…

Ok, so that title is a lie this week.  Not even a little true.  The cool software that you NEED to check out right now is not free.  It is a whopping $5/month per computer.  Let me tell you why I have violated my own free software principles to recommend this package. 

But first, indulge me while I relate a cautionary tale.  This week a gentleman that I know came to me with his wife’s iMac and told me that the hard drive was dead.  I took a look at it and quickly verified that it was not just dead, but what I like to call dead dead.  As in the drive doesn’t spin up at all, no movement no vibration, nothing.  I can do nothing for someone in this situation other than recommend some high priced recovery services which will charge you whether they get your data back or not.

He said not to worry, they had an external drive for a backup.  I thought little of it until the next time I saw him when he told me that his wife was a basket case because the external drive had failed also. All of their picture, financial data, email, etc was now apparently gone.  What a horrible feeling!  As a technology guy, that’s one of the worst things to have to tell someone.  (Don’t worry, I got their data back from the external drive.)

The moral of this story is that hard drives are evil.  There are only two kinds of hard drives in the world.  Dying and dead.  (If I were a morbid person, I would say the same thing about people.)  Don’t trust them.  They will hose you.  If your pictures don’t exist in more than one place, you will regret it sooner or later. 

This brings me back to the software topic that we started with.  There’s a great service called BackBlaze and your $5 per computer per month will get you UNLIMITED storage.  That’s right UNLIMITED storage. 

It works for both Mac and Windows clients (no servers though).  It compresses your files, de-duplicates, it slices and dices all for a low low price.  Seriously, you NEED to back up your data.  Go now.  This is your first official directive from me.  If you are not backing up, or if you are only backing up to a drive or dvds or something at your house (what happens if there’s a fire?), go get this service.