I am a huge proponent of backing up.  I know from personal experience that hardware fails, usually at the worst possible time and as far away from your last back up as possible.

I use local drives for daily back ups.  I use network drives for weekly backup.  I have important data burned on DVD’s and “stored in the cloud.”

A recent item in my RSS feed got me thinking (and acting)—What about my on-line life?  I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (not supported yet), Plaxo (not supported yet), Delicious, Flickr, Picaso (not supported yet?), Google Docs, who knows how many places I have parts of my life scattered.

So I was intrigued to read that Lifestream Backup had re-branded as Backify, not for the rebranding, but for the reminder I don’t have a back up of my on-line data.

I’m now a trial user of Backify (with the disclosure I hope to talk them into providing a premium subscription “upgrade” to this blogger for blogging about them).

Signing up was quick, although I wonder what the mailing address might be used for.

Connecting Backify to my various on-line accounts was simple and fast, the hardest part being remembering passwords I’ve had stored in my password manager for a long time.

In the next few hours I expect Backify to back up all my on-line data to Amazon’s S3 service.

I wish they supported LinkedIn, Plaxo, Picaso, Twine, etc. which I assume they will add as time goes on.

It’s hard to believe it was only last June (2008) when I had multiple systems failures, two desktops and two notebooks.  One notebook never recovered (it was dropped and the extended warranty just refunded the purchase price so I didn’t replace it).  I’m typing this on the other notebook, repaired by HP under warranty.  The desktops, Desktop 3 and Desktop 4, were part of a 4 computer cluster I have in my office connected via the network and sharing a monitor et al via a KVM switch.  I ended up replacing both with a single new HP desktop, which has been Desktop 3 ever since.  It is a dual core processor with 3 GB RAM, dual 500 GB hard drives (one operational and the other as a backup using Bounce Back Professional) and Windows XP 32 bit.

A friend wanted to upgrade his system so I’ve been watching for a suitable computer.  Over Labor Day, Micro Center had a sale on a Dell 435MT that was 80% of his ultimate computer configuration at 20% of the cost.  He deferred, then agreed this week we should go ahead and get it.  Fortunately it was still on sale.  The old system had a Passmark system score of 356.  The base 435MT we got for him had a Passmark score of 1680.  I replaced the installed hard drive with a Western Digital VelociRaptor, using the "old" 640 GB drive as a back up drive.  The Passmark score is now 1970.  We’ll upgrade RAM later.

One of the “deals” websites I get via RSS had a nice offer on a blue tooth headset from Verizon, so I ordered it.

Got my confirmation email and left for Arizona for a week.

When I got back today, I’m going through my mail and parcels and didn’t see the headset.

So I check the order status on-line.  Status is “cancelled.”  No reason why.  Nothing.

And no notification.  If I hadn't gone on-line to find out where my "will arrive next day" shipment was, I would never have known. 

Think I’ll be switching to Verizon anytime soon?

Neither do I….

I usually watch political debates like the current one on health care reform with amusement and frustration—frustration about how facts get distorted by both sides, especially those “end of the world” TV ads.

I was at my doctor’s office this past week, visiting my physicians assistant (I can’t remember the last time I actually saw my doctor) for my annual visit so I can get my prescriptions extended for another year.  It takes less than 5 minutes.  Since I have an HSA, high deductible health plan, I saw the actual cost of my visit when I paid it--$140.00!

My PA and I briefly discussed health care reform while I was getting my blood pressure checked, she listened to my lungs and heart and wrote the two prescriptions.

All this leads me to a proposal for health care reform the government can implement immediately for basically zero cost (at least by government standards).  It has two parts:

1. Pass the Association Health Bill that has been floating around Congress for the past 5 years.  That bill would exempt association’s from the ERISA laws that currently require an association health plan to meet each and every state it is offered in and offer a national plan to its members.  That would create the buying group/cooperatives discussed already.
2. Sponsor, perhaps to the tune of $50 million or so, the development of an open source practice management application system for doctor’s offices with an emphasis on electronic records storage and electronic data transfer.

I am always amazed by the fact there are as many people doing paperwork in any doctor’s office as there are people providing medical care.

I have been helping a friend with a website that is exploding in popularity, was developed in HTML/CSS and has no intention of switching to a CMS, and has a registration/supporters page that has grown too fast to maintain with copy and paste.

I did a quick Excel formula that generated equivalent HTML to what GoLive produced and switched the registration form to a Google form that leaves the results in a Google Apps spreadsheet (eliminating data entry).

I have Excel 2003/2007 on my PC, she has Excel 2008 on her Mac, the thought was to write an Excel macro that would automate the maintenance of that page, so I did.

Whenever I got stuck, I had code examples in the Excel VBA help file and loads of examples via Google.

After a day of playing around with the macro (mostly learning how to dynamically identify how many rows are actually being used in an Excel worksheet), I had a fully functional pair of macros (one to facilitate preprocessing the updates before integrating to the master list, the other to covert the master list to HTML).

Guess what?  Excel 2008 for Mac doesn’t have VBA support!  Shame on you Microsoft!

I would never have expected Microsoft to leave out a major feature in the latest version of Excel.

In searching around for a solution we came up with the idea of using the latest version of Open Office, which had the same macro support across platforms.

While most of Open Office is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Excel, it would appear macros are not.