I spend most summers with my family on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. This year, we haven’t spent much time at the “Lake,” but this hasn’t disrupted my pattern of yearly visits to the local hospital in Wolfeboro. There was the summer with the broken neck (a smith machine fell over on me at a gym – long story) and another with a broken toe (kicked a door stop in bare feet). And, last year, I fractured a couple of ribs (fell off my bike). I’ve been there so frequently for broken bones and torn tissue that they take me aside to ask if I’m being abused at home. No kidding. Last year I said, “only psychologically.” They didn’t think that was funny.
So, for this year’s injury I ruptured my extensor tendon on the middle finger of my left hand. The injury is commonly known as Mallet Finger. What the hell is that? That’s what I said too.
The extensor tendon is the tissue that basically holds up the part of your finger closest to the finger’s tip. Without it, there’s nothing to lift that part of the finger.
I did it while cleaning, wiping down a completely flat surface. The tip of my finger rubbed the surface, the finger bent back and I heard an audible (loud, actually) snap. My stomach turns just thinking about it. It grosses me out. After the initial pain, I felt nothing. And, this is from a guy who has the lowest threshold of pain on the planet. When I looked at my finger, though, I saw the picture above. Try as I might, I couldn’t lift the end of my finger. I tried lifting it with my other hand and it moved up and down without difficulty. Strange feeling.
The treatment is for the finger to be kept in this little sling thing for 6+ weeks. The sling holds the tip of the finger straight so that the tendon can heal in the correct position. Obviously, the sling has to be worn 24/7. Pain in the ass. There’s no real pain, but tying shoes, typing and shifting and braking a bicycle are a bit difficult.
Ya know, now that I think about it, I actually hope this is this year’s injury. I hate to think that something worse might come along . . .
On Sunday, I completed a 342 mile, 7-day bike ride across Italy. I had two simple goals: to raise money for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund and to survive. Thanks to the help of many caring donors, I raised $6,400 for cancer research and care this year (so far). Since you’re reading this, I obviously achieved my second goal as well. The ride is an official route of the Pan-Mass Challenge, an annual ride across Massachusetts (yeah, sort of a PIC – Pan Italian Challenge – instead of PMC) established 30 years ago to raise money for Dana Farber.
The ride was orchestrated by the terrific Ciclismo Classico that put together a special PMC version of their their standard ride across Italy tour – combining their final four days into just two. We started our journey in Fano, on the Adriatic and ended near Monte Argentario on the Mediterranean. We had two incredible guides (Massimo and Marcello – how perfect is that?) who kept our minds off the gallons of lactic acid flooding our legs, climbing loads of steep grades in 100 degree heat while crossing the country.
The first day of the ride was really just a warm up to test out bike fit – a short loop around Fano. The four subsequent days were made up of what would seem to be reasonable rides – 40 to 50 miles. The last two days were setup to mimic the PMC. Long rides both days, about 80 miles each. All doable distances of course, aside from the fact that there were loads of really steep hills including the Apennine mountain range that added to the challenge. We climbed roughly 25,000 feet over the 6 days of regular riding (not including the short loop on the first day). According to my bike computer, I burned something like 22,000 calories during the week. The food was so good though, I think I consumed about 35,000 calories (OK, I admit that more than a few of those calories came in liquid form).
In retrospect, while there were a lot of hills, some of them pretty steep, they weren’t the biggest part of the challenge. The heat was. Man, was it hot – che caldo! Italian roads seem to be missing any shady spots, too. So almost all of the climbing was done in direct sun and a lot of it in the middle of the day.
We stopped in terrific cities and towns and generally had a chance to spend an hour or two when our legs permitted to check out where the day’s ride ended. Gubbio, Spello, Assisi, Urbino, Orvieto and loads of small towns in between. Simply gorgeous places. Man, the Romans built a lot of stuff.
Anytime one is thinking about crossing Italy, one has to consider the Apennines, the spinal column of the country. It’s a mountain range that runs north to south and is sorta in the way if you’re looking for an easy way across. I think our route was along about the lowest altitude path available. Not quite as flat as a billiard table, but no shear, vertical mountain faces or anything like that.
This was my sixth PMC. Those of you who know me, know that I’m a data junkie and collect as much data about my rides as possible. Here’s this year’s data, a lot different from my previous Massachusetts-based PMC rides:
Money Raised
$6,400 (so far)
Miles
342
Hours
25
Altitude Gained
25,000 ft
Average Speed
13.9 mph
Calories
22,000
Cancer has had a bigger impact on me this year than it has at any time in my life. My Aunt died of lung cancer earlier in the year and my mother, who is a cancer survivor, is very ill right now. All this made it even more appropriate, in a strange way, for me to have to work my ass off in this charity event. In a funny way, this ride was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Thanks so much to all my sponsors and supporters and to everyone on Twitter and Facebook who checked in with encouraging messages.
Oh yeah, pictures. I almost forgot. Most of them can be found here. More coming later.
Last week, my daughter’s 31 year old high school math teacher, Carolyn Girod, was struck and killed by a car while cycling in Washington. At the time, Girod was riding with her boyfriend on what is reported to be a fairly rural and straight stretch of road. According to the Washington State Patrol, the driver of the vehicle that caused the accident “was not paying attention and drifted onto the shoulder where the couple was biking.” The car hit the boyfriend, pushing him into Girod and pushing her into the active roadway. The boyfriend, who survived with minor injuries, was thrown into the embankment beside the road.
Needless to say, this is a tragedy and of a type that happens all too often. Cyclists are hit by cars frequently in the US. Many motorists refuse to recognize that in most states bicycles have the same rights on most roads that cars do. While cyclists certainly aren’t faultless in some instances, it’s the casual (or inebriated) tossing around of two tons of vehicle that’s usually found to be at fault.
Furthermore, it seems like there is little other than lip service being paid to fixing the problem. Signs posted here and there, rhetoric now and again (especially when an accident like this happens) and a new law passed, but not enforced, once in a while. This case is a perfect example, as reported in the article about accident:
“. . . the State Patrol rarely arrests drivers who are merely “inattentive” in their driving, “even if they kill someone” through their inattention.”
What? I’m not responsible for my lack of attention to my driving even if I kill someone? As a licensed driver of a vehicle, am I not responsible for all my actions behind the wheel? Isn’t attentiveness the responsibility of a driver? Geez, I don’t get it. As long as we don’t hold people responsible for their actions, we just condone their behavior.
The comments to the article even better represent the problem. Some comments predictably and incorrectly blame the cyclists. But more disturbingly, one woman sympathized with the driver saying something to the effect, “we all have fished around on the floor of our car searching for a flashlight or CD player.” Really? While moving? Once again, we show how a driver’s license is a right instead of a privilege in the US.
Reading Don Dodge’s post titled, “Business plans, business models, who needs them?” this weekend made me rehash many of the discussions I’ve had with VCs and entrepreneurs about the need for business plans over the years. In the post, Dodge makes the claim that investors don’t read business plans and, in fact, they “invest in people, not business plans.” While I mostly agree with this – I actually believe that there is a confluence of people, time and place that drive most investments – I think the argument against business plans misses a key and fundamental point: business plans aren’t for the investor, they’re for the entrepreneur or team developing the idea into a business.
In my opinion, it’s the process of business planning (which generally involves writing stuff down thus, creating a business plan) which has all the value and it’s value is huge. Understanding, researching and testing the product/service, market (customer), differentiation, channel and competition (see my post titled Business Planning – The Big 5), is critical and, shockingly, overlooked frequently. People tend to fall in love with their ideas and don’t bother thinking through what problem they are really solving for their target customer. Even when they do, they often don’t spend the time to test their hypothesis with potential customers prior to looking for funding. To me, this is what business planning is all about. How can a team even create a slide deck or answer questions from investors if they haven’t done this level of business planning?
In his post, Dodge uses the example of Twitter getting funding without a business plan or even a business model, for that matter, as an example. While I don’t think Twitter is representative of most (any?) investment cases, it does offer up a reasonable counter-argument to my point above. If you build something massive and pervasive on your own dime prior to seeking funding, you can do just about anything you want and still land investors. Generally speaking, though, it’s a bad idea to plan on this route. It doesn’t happen very often.
So, while I fully support the concept that business plans as written documents may not get you far with investors, the process of business planning, that yes, will likely include written material (documents, spreadsheets, drawings on backs of napkins), will. A business is way more than an idea. Successful businesses are about execution and you can’t execute effectively if you don’t know where you’re going. The argument against business plans is more about with what and how you present your idea to investors than it is about how you develop your business in the first place. A well thought through business is simply more likely to get funded than one which is not. That takes business planning.
Make sure you read Paul Kedrosky’s post on this subject, The Twitter Lesson: No Business Plans Please, which Don Dodge references in his post. He makes some very interesting points on the downside of sharing too much data with potential investors. Very interesting. He does not, however, make the point that you shouldn’t have the data, just that you might not want to expose it too early.
While I’m addicted to search like most people, I’m not married to a particular provider. I have a load of search engines in my Firefox search drop-down list which, conceptually, lets me choose the most appropriate one to get the fastest access to the best results. That said, Google has been my default search engine for as long as I can remember and I’ll usually hack through what Google feeds back to me before I bother with others. Just lazy.
Since I’m never happy with anything and feel the need to tinker with everything, I changed my default search engine to Bing a few weeks ago. I like it. It’s not life-changing or anything, but I’m impressed with the results and the flexibility it provides. There are three things in particular I like.
Each returned entry has more follow-on links than Google provides. If I’m really just looking for the “Downloads” link, for example, I don’t have to navigate to the home page of the searched site and click on that link. It’s in the Bing entry. Yeah, Google does this sometimes, but it’s much more frequently done with Bing. For some sites there is even a search box for the found site inside the the Bing entry (see below).
I like the “Related Searches” list in the sidebar. In search, sometimes it’s all about how you enter what you’re looking for. When I don’t get what I want, I often find that clicking on one of the related searches gets me there fast just because other keywords were better than those I entered.
Images. I can’t imagine why, but Bing returns a much better list of images than Google. They’re organized better, too. When you see an image close to what you’re looking for, you simply click on “show similar images” and you get more sizes and varieties of similar images. Nicely done.
Sports results. I search for sports scores and standings frequently. See below, Bing just does a better job.
Note here that I didn’t include the results themselves as a differentiator. I think that the Bing results are slightly better, but it’s not yet clear to me that this is so. The presentation of search results, though, is much nicer in Bing, IMO. For now, I’m a convert.
Bill Taylor’s recent post on Steve Jobs and leadership, “Decoding Steve Jobs: Trust the Art, Not the Artist,” is a must read for emerging leaders or those who aspire to lead. Taylor discusses how Jobs clings to the Great Man Theory of leadership which works well for him as an unusual skilled leader creatively, but fails miserably for others who try to implement it.
From the blog:
“So In terms of the impact his products have had on the world, Steve Jobs represents the face of business at its best. And yet, in terms of his approach to leadership, Jobs represents the face of business — well, if not at its worst, then certainly not as something worth emulating. It’s not so much the secrecy about his liver transplant or the controversies over backdated stock options. Those are matters of corporate governance and investor relations, which, while important, aren’t all that urgent. To me, the issue is more Jobs’s approach to leadership itself — which, despite the compelling and cutting-edge quality of his products, is strangely unappetizing and often downright retro.”
The author further generalizes:
“. . . The best leaders I know don’t want the job of thinking for everybody else. They understand that if they can tap the hidden genius inside the organization, and the collective genius outside the organization, they will create ideas that will be much more powerful than what even the smartest individual leader could ever come up with on his or her own . . . “
I couldn’t agree more. While there are a few very successful leaders who can pull off the smartest guy in the room thing [count ‘em on one hand kinda numbers], most great leaders don’t and can’t lead this way. Replicating Jobs’ tirades, my-rules-are-the-only-rules attitude and overall hubris would destroy most leaders and would doom almost any person trying to establish a leadership role to a crash-and-burn type failure.
Don’t get me wrong. None of this is meant to take anything away from Jobs as a leader himself – he’s proven to be a successful leader on many levels. It’s merely to point out that trying to copy his leadership techniques will likely end in failure. Your odds are much better when you use the capabilities of those around you and share the credit wisely. Humility is an incredible leadership tool and is very easy to use if you keep your ego from getting in the way.
Read the article. Its author does a much better job telling this story.
To celebrate my son’s graduation from high school, we decided to spend some time this summer touring baseball parks around the country. While it would be great to align our schedule with that of the Red Sox, practically speaking, it doesn’t make sense. Since teams generally play 3 games in each city they visit, following the team would mean big gaps between cities and parks. It’d just take too much time. Even when one doesn’t care who’s playing, scheduling a trip turns out to be a bit more difficult than it might seem. Finding times when teams within a particular region of the country are all playing at home in the same week is, sometimes, a challenge. Add that to flight schedules, hotels and game ticket availability and scheduling becomes an effort. Our plan was simple. Fly into a town in the morning, hit as many tourist sites in the town as possible, attend a ballgame in the evening and crash in a hotel. Then, start again the next day. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We decided to start out tour on the West Coast catching four games at four stadiums – Dodgers Stadium, Angel Stadium, Safeco Field and AT&T Park. While our benchmark for each stadium was The First National Church of Baseball, Fenway Park, we tried to objectively compare our experiences using these critical criteria:
Hot dogs (and other food offerings – what? You think that’s not critical for good baseball?)
Field view
Noise level
Attendance (Fenway just celebrated its 500th consecutive sellout)
Concourse maneuverability
Depth of outfield
Scoreboard and information
Day 1 – Dodgers Stadium, LA (Dodgers vs Athletics): Built in 1962 and looks it. Not that it’s beat, the style is just very reminiscent of the 60s. I liked it a lot. Maybe it’s because I’m from the cold Northeast, but the fact that there are palm trees beside the scoreboard made me like it all that much more. The seats were comfy and roomy, the concourses, reasonably wide and maneuverable and the food was great – Dodger Dogs are terrific (not quite Fenway Franks, but close) and the garlic fries are disgustingly fantastic – I’m still digesting them. I would have never have guessed that the stadium seats 56K people. It feels more intimate than that. A good thing
Food – excellent. Dogs were great and garlic fries are to die for (or with or by, they’re pretty greasy). Next time I’m gonna try the Brooklyn Dodgers Pizza
View – was great from almost anywhere, surprising since it’s such a large venue. Even the seats further from the field have a nice view
Noise level – polite southern California crowd as interested in the taste of their pinot noir as the game they were watching. The left fielder made two errors during the game. Fenway fans would have had him taken out back and shot. Dodger fans did little to acknowledge the mistakes.
Concourses – not as wide as a modern ballpark, but WAY bigger than Fenway and other ancient ones. Had no issues, but there weren’t a zillion people in attendance either.
Outfield – deep and uniform, no adavantage for right or left handers.
Scoreboard – adequate, but nothing special
Day 2 – Angel Stadium, Anaheim (Angels vs Dodgers): Built in 1966 and converted to 45K seat baseball only stadium (the LA Rams football franchise played there for a while) in 1996 and looks as if it could be almost brand new. The place looks and feels like a modern park. Concourses are wide and views are good. I had to dig through my hot dog bun to find the actual hot dog part. It looked like a foot long Slim Jim in a roll. The rest of the food selection sorta sucked. Seats were reasonable in width, but were scientifically engineered to make your butt numb by the end of the second inning (just like Fenway).
Food – disappointing. Hot dogs were thin, salt strips. Almost nothing else worth eating (or digesting) after that. Should have stopped by one of the vendors outside the park (but within the gates).
View – good. It looked like some of the upper deck seats down the first and third base lines might require a space suit or some sort of breathing apparatus, they were so far off the ground, but even then, they were pretty close to the field – horizontally, anyway.
Noise level – well, this game wasn’t a good benchmark. It was a “freeway series” of the two “home towns” (see picture of the woman’s t-shirt above for how Dodgers fans feel about that) so the crowd was noisier than is usually, I’d suspect. I don’t know what the Angels fans sound like normally, but the Dodgers fans were as loud and obnoxious as any Red Sox or Yankees fan. There were even a few boos. The simultaneous chants of “let’s go Ang-els” and “let’s go Dodg-ers” sounded like gibberish.
Attendance – surprisingly low. Even though this was a freeway series, there were plenty of open seats.
Concourses – nice. Not as wide as a new ballpark, but comfortable. Small rest rooms though.
Outfield – deep and uniform, left and right field are approximately the same depth.
Scoreboard – uber-cool. High res bit-mapped displays everywhere. Totally modern with very nice graphics and video. Loads-o-information everywhere you look.
Day 3 – Safeco Field, Seattle (Mariners vs Diamondbacks): Built in 1999, Safeco Field is a thoroughly modern stadium with a retractable roof and 47K seats. Fortunately, there was no rain when we were there, so the roof remained open. Concourses were big, seats were comfortable and the food selection was big. For a Saturday night game, there were surprisingly few people in attendance. The entire right-center field grandstand was empty and other sections were spotty. The fans were into the game though and robustly cheered for the aqua-men. Like any closed or optionally closed-roof stadium, stands tend to be built up instead of out. As such, some seats are pretty high off the field. We walked around the stadium, though, and never felt too removed from the game.
Food – hmmm. Selection was good and broad – including “Sushi & Sake Ichiroll” (a play off the name of the Mariner’s right fielder – Ichiro Suzuki). Hot dogs were a bit different – grilled with toasted rolls. Not bad, but not ballpark franks, IMO. Yeah, I’m picky.
View – good. We walked around the park during the game and found reasonable views from almost everywhere. As usual with modern stadiums, the seats get pretty high off the field which, IMO, is better than being far from the field.
Noise level – great. Even though the stadium was far less than full, the fans were into the game and were pretty loud.
Attendance – surprisingly low for a Saturday game. They didn’t announce the numbers, but there were thousands of open seats.
Concourses – typical of new ballparks, they were pretty wide and not too bad even between innings. of course, the ballpark wasn’t packed, either.
Outfield – again, deep and uniform. Especially considering that it’s an optionally closed roof venue.
Scoreboard – I expected scoreboards more like the ones at Angel Stadium considering how new Safeco is. They were pretty mundane. Key info was always accessible, though.
Day 4 – AT&T Park, San Francisco (Giants vs Rangers): Built in 2000, AT&T is a truly unique park with it’s location adjacent to SF Bay. At 41.5K seats, it’s rather small, but the field gives up loads of potentially seating space to open up the outfield to the Bay and beyond. The stadium is a virtual amusement park for every age group. There is even a playground in the outfield stands. Food selection was enormous and the scoreboards were incredible. The only major drawback to the park was the seat Nazi (a Giants employee) who planted herself at the end of the row. We basically had to raise our hands to ask permission to come and go.
Food – great selection. Almost anything you’d want. The dogs were good, close to Fenway Franks, but not quite there and the garlic fries (no, not a baseball standard, but after having them in LA, we had to try them somewhere else) were even better than at Dodgers Stadium.
View – great. In our seventh inning walk around the stadium, we didn’t go anywhere that would have been poor for game-watching. The outfield seats were pretty cool and didn’t feel too far from the action.
Noise level – reasonable. It was announced that the game was a sellout, but we saw many open seats. The fans were definitely into it, but I’d say fairly reserved compared to American League East fans. Maybe it’s the calmer Californians . . .
Attendance – sold out, but I guess some people had other things to do?
Concourses – they were pretty wide, but always seemed to be packed. It was hard getting anywhere. Come to think of it, maybe that’s where all the people from the empty seats were.
Outfield – deep and almost uniform. There is a nasty center field corner where several balls got trapped like in a pinball machine.
Scoreboard – was lifted right out of the Starship Enterprise. This thing had more information than a baseball stats book. This could be done because the centerfield screen was ginormous and had about a zillion pixels of resolution. Additionally, there are high res displays around the park so that you don’t even need to strain your eyes looking at the 10 foot tall numbers on the outfield display. Gillette Stadium, take note please.
All-in-all, phase I of the ballpark tour was fantastic. Both my son and I would have happily squeezed in another city, park and game even with the frenetic schedule we had. I’ll conclude with the rankings. I’m afraid that while we shared a great time, our thoughts on the stadiums were wildly divergent. Maybe an age thing? I surprisingly liked Dodgers Stadium the best, followed by AT&T Park, Angels Stadium and Safeco Field, although the last two are a toss-up. my son liked AT&T, Safeco, Angel and Dodgers Stadium, in order. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Way back before digital photography, when dinosaurs roamed the surface of the planet, families packed themselves into smoky living rooms to watch trays full of color slides projected onto uneven plastered walls. These photo viewing sessions along with some of the most outstanding print photography in history were brought to you by Kodachome, Kodak’s long-lived transparency film. Kodachrome, created by Eastman Kodak in 1935 (specifically, by scientists Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes, known as "God and Man" inside Kodak), has been around longer than any photo product in history. Today, Kodak announced that it is “retiring” Kodachrome.
When I was young and dipping my toe into the very deep waters of photography, I primarily used black and white print film which was my stock in trade because I could process and print it myself. When I wanted color, I used Kodachrome and it’s younger sibling, Ektachrome. The colors in Kodachrome were great – much better than color prints at the time. In retrospect, slides held up way better than prints as well and are much easier to scan into their digital versions.
The passing of such a product is a reminder about how things have changed and how companies need to be dynamic and change with their markets – hopefully leading them. Kodak has made the switch to digital (they still, of course, produce plenty of film), but in the change, lost the market leadership that they once had. While I’m sad to see such a landmark product die out, it makes me excited to think about all the potential replacement products in all markets as inevitable change happens.
Nintendo lost its utter dominance of the home electronic game market when Sony, then Microsoft beat them at their own game, using new technology. Nintendo then reemerged from its failure with another breakthrough product, the Wii. What’s going to happen now to wristwatch sales as virtually everyone under 25 uses their phone to get the time? How about compact camera sales? As cell phone cameras keep improving and software processing on phones gets better, who will want to carry both a compact camera and a phone? You get the idea.
What about your market? What fundamental and underlying changes are happening that you can take advantage of? Don’t think only technological, societal changes are even bigger driving forces. Whatever they are, get there first and you’ll have a substantial advantage.
My good friend Dave just sent me an article from Wired magazine, “MIT Hopes to Exorcise ‘Phantom’ Traffic Jams,” about research going on at MIT in mathematically modeling randomly occurring traffic jams to discover their source as well as potential remedies. Since I’m not a mathematician, I developed a somewhat less scientific theory as to why such traffic jams happen – morons and ignorant motorists who shouldn’t have licenses. If people paid more attention, the chance of randomly occurring traffic jams taking place would be greatly eliminated. Read the signs: Slower Traffic Keep Right.” But, if you’re interested in a more rational theory, check out the article.
When it comes to my data, I’m a suspenders and belt kinda’ guy. It can’t be in too many places or have too many layers of security. As with investing one’s hard-earned cash, diversification is critical to success. As such, I have loads of internal backup and security methods that are part of my routine. I ghost a copy of my primary drive in my desktop to an auxiliary drive inside the same machine; I have a Windows Home Server in my house which does a differential backup of my files every few days; and I even sync critical files with a USB memory stick that I can take with me if I need/want to. OK, maybe that’s a couple of sets of suspenders and a belt or two. What can I say?
I’ve been thinking about also syncing and backing up some data to the cloud over the last six months and took the plunge a couple of months ago. I’ve thought about what I really want out of cloud storage and have tried several offerings. I’ll talk about these specifically, but first, a little background on my thinking and what I was looking for.
It seems to me, the when it comes to the storage of data in the cloud, as opposed to the actually use of it, there are three general types of storage solutions – raw file storage, synced/backup file storage, and content-specific storage. Raw cloud-based file storage is simply disk space somewhere on the internet that you can do whatever you want with (think Amazon S3). Synced storage is similar, but it’s usually set up specifically to facilitate the synchronization or backup of data between a PC and disk space similarly elsewhere on the net. Content-specific storage is specifically set up for particular data types like email, photos, music, etc.
When cloud storage is segmented this way, one quickly realizes that all email users have been cloud storage consumers for a while. Whether you use a basic POP or IMAP server for your email or something heavier duty like Exchange or Notes, your email has been in the cloud at least for some period of time. So, you, like me, are already likely a user of cloud storage. This rationalization helped me feel more comfortable about moving my data to someplace unknown.
In the end, I found I was most interested in having storage for backups and syncing to keep multiple computers up to date. Services for the latter often assume the former – a cloud-based synced storage provider often has nice backup capabilities as well. After all, backup is the same storage mechanism without the sync function. I also wanted to expand my specialized storage to include my large photo collection. For this, I wanted a photo-specific site that offered galleries and photo management. These, of course, are not offered by the raw or synced backup folks.
Amazon S3 – S3 is simply raw storage and it lies underneath many of the other, higher-level cloud storage services out there. There’s no high level interface per se and, as it states clearly on the Amazon AWS site, it’s “intentionally built with a minimal feature set.” At $0.15/GB/Month it isn’t even that cheap compared to some other services – 200GB of backup costs $360. Oh yeah, I can do basic math . . .
SkyDrive – It’s “integrated” with Microsoft’s unbelievingly confusing array of Windows Live services. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Microsoft stuff, but this Windows Live thing is hard to understand. It works nicely, but there isn’t any client on the PC side, really. Uploading files is done a handful at a time and there is no syncing. It’s really about sharing files and doesn’t offer any automated backup or syncing. Even for bulk storage, it’s too difficult to use. They offer 25GB of storage for free.
Live Mesh – I like Live Mesh a lot. Live Mesh is all about synchronization between multiple machines, including Macs (beta) and mobile phones (“soon”) as well as online through a web browser. It works totally behind the scenes, is fast and has the best reporting about what it did and what it’s doing of any service I tried. It also offers features like accessing the desktop of a Live Mesh-connected computer and a nice chatting and feedback facility for sharing and commenting on shared documents. My only problem with Live Mesh was the level of file granularity for syncing. Live Mesh only understand directories, not individual files. Sometimes, you just don’t want the entire directory synced. The initial 5GB of storage is free. It’s still in beta.
Syncplicity – It’s my favorite of all the sync/backup solutions so far. It makes assumptions about the directories you want to sync or backup and adding different ones is a tad confusing, but once you get it, it’s all a piece of cake. The reporting on what it’s doing isn’t as nice as Live Mesh, but it’s just as seamless and it’s pretty fast (like Live Mesh). Unlike Live Mesh, individual files can be added or removed from a sync tree by right-clicking them (Windows) and just specifying whether or not the file should be included or not. Also, it’s easy to specify whether you want files to be synced with other machines or just backed up. I’m still not completely content with how Syncplicity deals with conflicts. No data is ever lost, but it can be duplicated leaving copies scattered in your directories. Also, I had one really nasty problem with the service. The Syncplicity client was sucking up 10%-50% of the CPU time on my machine – all the time. I sent messages to Syncplicity support and complained about the problem on their forum. Nothing, zero, no response for weeks. In fact, to this day, I’ve gotten no response. I eventually figured the problem out myself. A TrueCrypt encrypted volume in a directory on my machine was screwing the client up. Once removed from the sync tree, the problem was gone. Just horrible service. There is a free 2GB trial and then $99/year for the first 100GB. This is a 50% discount offer that’s been running for a while.
KeepVault – I tried this out because it integrates nicely with the Windows Home Server Console. I’m using it specifically to back up my server – no desktops included and no synchronization, just backup. It seems to work well, but the initial backup of 150GB of data took about 16 days even when I was not throttling the speed of the connection (a nice option for a server, BTW). Additionally, the backup process stalled about 20 times during the initial backup. Now that it’s only dealing with a handful of files, albeit big ones, at a time, it seems to be working well. Jury’s still out. No trial, but a 30-day money-back guarantee. $180 for 200GB of backup.
SmugMug – I have 42GB of photos on my server which represent the most cherished of all data I have. At the very least, I needed to backup these files to another physical location. At best, it would be nice if the data could be organized and viewed from that location as well. I looked at many sites, including Flickr (the relative standard in this space) and chose SmugMug. The difference is that SmugMug is aimed at photographers who at least think there is some level of professionalism in their shots. SmugMug’s pages are totally customizable and they understand not to mess with pictures being uploaded (unless you want them to). It’s about the gallery first and about sharing second. Just what I wanted – I’ve never learned how to share well
There are loads of other services out there including some I considered, but decided not to try on this first pass – DropBox, ZumoDrive, iDrive, Soonr, Jungle Disk, etc. In general, I’m feeling better about having my data somewhere else. The process is easy and, as far as I can tell, secure. Syncing can certainly get better, though, and when there’s a failure, it’s very hard to debug, even if you can detect that it happened in the first place. Sometimes, as with any backup, you don’t know there was a problem until an emergency happens and you really need to restore a file. Not painless, but fairly low barriers to experience. Come on in, the water’s fine . . . so far.
August 9th, 2009 | 
So, for this year’s injury I ruptured my extensor tendon on the middle finger of my left hand. The injury is commonly known as Mallet Finger. What the hell is that? That’s what I said too.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3968f5c2-76b4-4aee-8863-8499995b3231)
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