Travis Pettijohn: Blog

After the first drive in my old file server died, I made a backup of all of my photos...or so I had thought. But actually, I didn't get them all. For some reason NONE of my Africa pictures got backed up!! YIKES. I discovered this tonight when I wanted the original image for the header on this web site. I checked the original card in my camera, my external hard drive..., the copy I had made on the new file server...nothing. A few minutes later I remembered that I had at one time burned other copies: one I sent to my Dad so he could view a slideshow on his DVD player, and another that I kept for myself. Thankfully, I found my copy in my "box 'o pictures" and have recovered all of the photos...PHEW.

It goes to show you: even when you make a backup (or even when you have an implicit backup with a RAID), you could make a mistake and unknowingly miss something. Be proactive in making backups, ESPECIALLY with irreplaceable things like photographs.

I would have been a sad little boy if I had lost all of those pictures. Imagine how it would make you feel if you lost all of those digital photos you have of your kids/grandkids/friends/whatever. Consider even burning another copy and sending the CD/DVD to someone else.

(Now that this blog is online, I may devote some time to that Amazon S3 application I've been wanting to write for encrypted off-site backups.)

I turned in my leased car on Monday (after a scare where I thought it was stolen but really the city towed it and lost the record of it having been towed, but the cops suggested additional places to look after filing the police report...long story). In it, I kept a log of every tank of gas. Anal retentive, I know. I got it from my Grandpa Coe; on cross country car trip vacations, he would keep a log and compute his mileage—using a slide rule, I should add. For whatever reason, I decided to keep a log with my first new car. Anyway, 4 years, 101 tanks and 27,547 miles later, I am no longer a car owner. I decided to type the odometer readings and fuel volumes into Excel and run some statistics.

• 2003 Honda Civic LX Coupe with a 5-speed manual transmission.
• Year 1: 11,873 miles, 38 tanks of gas, 355.62 gallons, 32.30 mpg average.
• Year 2: 9,364 miles, 37 tanks of gas, 291.30 gallons, 31.62 mpg average.
• Year 3: 2,766 miles, 13 tanks of gas, 95.46 gallons, 30.30 mpg average.
• Year 4: 3,544 miles, 13 tanks of gas, 113.24 gallons, 32.82 mpg average.
• Overall mileage: 31.90 mpg average, 41.20 max, 23.79 min, 4.02 standard deviation.
• Total fuel consumption: 855.62 gallons (which weighs 5,016 lbs).
• Longest distance on one tank: 387.00 miles on 10.55 gallons for 36.68 mpg.
• Graph of miles driven year over year.
• Graph of mileage of every tank of gas.

I wonder what my Grandpa would say. I bet he'd smile, chuckle and be pretty darn impressed with what Excel could do.

I was reviewing log files from my 1and1 hosted accounts. Some of these numbers blow my mind. After removing all known search engine user agents, in the past nine weeks, weathercorneralert.com has had visits from 4083 unique IP addresses. travisinafrica.com has seen 3638 unique IPs. Blows my mind, man.

Edit: I'm stupid and I don't know how to work a pivot table. That was total page requests served, not unique IPs. The unique IPs served numbers are more like 415 and 181, respectively. Not quite as mind blowing :)