Blog

Cloud Backup, Episode III

Iā€™ve written a couple
of times
before about what I do to backup all my important data.

My last post on the topic was more than a year ago though,
so Iā€™ll forgive you if youā€™ve forgotten. Hereā€™s a recap: originally I was using
a fairly traditional consumer backup service, ADrive.
This worked well because theyā€™re one of the few services that provides access
by Rsync, which made it easy to run scripted backup jobs on my linux
server
. Their account structure didnā€™t really meet my needs, however: you
pay for the storage you have available to you, not what you use. When I hit the
upper limit of my account the next tier up didnā€™t make financial sense, so I
switched.

About 15 months ago I moved my backups over to Googleā€™s Cloud Platform. This gives me an
unlimited amount of storage space, and I just pay for what I use at a rate of
$0.02/GB/Month. This has been working well for me.

In December I
found
Backblaze
B2
. They offer a service very similar to Googleā€™s (or Amazon S3, or
Microsoft Azure, or any of the other players in this space that you may have
heard of), except they cost a quarter of the price at $0.005/GB/Month. Thereā€™s
even a free tier, so you donā€™t pay anything for the first 10GB. When I first
looked at them their toolset for interacting with their storage buckets really
wasnā€™t where I needed it to be to make them viable, but theyā€™ve been iterating
quickly. I checked again this week, and Iā€™ve already started moving some of my
backups over.

In time, I plan to switch all my backups over. So far Iā€™ve
moved my documents folder and backups of my webserver, which totals about
2.5GB. Thatā€™s nice, because it means Iā€™m still within the free tier. The next
thing to tackle is the backups of all our photos and music, which combine at
around 110GB. That means I have to transfer 110GB of data though, which is
going to be a painful experience. Iā€™m still thinking about the best way to do
it, but probably the direction Iā€™ll go is to spin up a VPS and have it handle
the download of the backup from Google and the upload to Backblaze, then it
doesnā€™t hog all the bandwidth I have on my home internet connection.

The only other thing to think about with Backblaze is
versioning. Google offers versioning on their storage buckets, but I have it
disabled. With Backblaze there is no option (at least not that Iā€™ve found) to
disable this feature ā€“ meaning previous versions of files are retained and
count toward my storage bill.

Iā€™m torn on this. The easy thing to do would be to disable
it, assuming one of Backblazeā€™s future iterations of their service offering is
in fact the ability to turn this off. Iā€™m thinking though that the smarter
thing to do is make use of it.

For me and my consumer needs, that will most likely mean I
put together a PHP script or two to more intelligently manage it, however. Some
past versions are nice, but some of the files in my backup are changed pretty
frequently, and I definitely donā€™t need an unlimited history.

Still, Iā€™m very much pleased with the price of B2, and
watching the feature set rapidly improve over the past couple of months gives
me confidence that I can move my backups over and keep them there for the
long-term, because the transition from one service to another is not something
I want to put myself through too often.

Blog

With the craziness of buying a new house in the last couple of months we never did get around to making Christmas cards this year, so if you’ve been waiting by your mailbox you can stop that now. I promise we’ll do some extra-cheesy ones next year, and I hope everyone has a very merry Christmas and a happy new year, from our family to yours.

Blog

With the craziness of buying a new house in the last couple of months we never did get around to making Christmas cards this year, so if you’ve been waiting by your mailbox you can stop that now. I promise we’ll do some extra-cheesy ones next year, and I hope everyone has a very merry Christmas and a happy new year, from our family to yours.

Blog

A manager is someone who tells people what to do. A leader is someone who inspires people to do great things.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn (via forbes)
Blog

The Curse and the Blessing of Arbitrary Deadlines

The organization that I work for has a fiscal year. I dare
say the organization that you work for has one too. For us, it runs from April
1st to March 31st.

Each year around March thereā€™s a mad rush to get work items
completed, closed out and signed off before March 31. Everyone is running
around like chickens with their heads cut off, and this bothers me hugely. Why
is this largely arbitrary line in the sand so important? Are our accounting practices
so deficient that we canā€™t deal with a body of work that crosses this boundary?
(Hint: no, theyā€™re not). Nobody has ever been able to adequately explain it to
me because, I suspect, there is no adequate answer.

image

To add to my frustration with this situation, I have in the
past experienced a distinct and noticeable lull in my workload in April. The
nature of what I do is such that thereā€™s often definition and even planning
required of others before work lands on my plate, and if this effort doesnā€™t
start until April 1st then I will have nothing to do until at least
the middle of the month. So tell me again why I tore all my hair out trying to
get everything I was working on complete by the end of March?

In fairness, Iā€™m exaggerating the picture Iā€™m painting here
and in recent years my team especially and my organization generally have
become much better at this. Nevertheless, it illustrates my point: arbitrary
deadlines are very much a pet peeve of mine and you donā€™t just find them at year
end, theyā€™re everywhere ā€“ from the project completion date that was estimated
before anybody understood the effort required but somehow became set in stone,
to the two hour meeting that somehow fills exactly two hours even though, upon
reflection, there was only 50 minutes of valuable content (thatā€™s the opposite issue
to the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off scenario, but the same root cause).

Thinking back over the past couple of days, however, it
occurs to me that I may be a massive hypocrite.

Iā€™ll be away from the office next week. Actually, Iā€™ll be
away beginning at about lunchtime tomorrow, but the specifics are unimportant
and I digress.

Over the last couple of days I have been extraordinarily productive. Seriously,
itā€™s been amazing. I have amazed myself. Things are getting completed, closed
off and delivered all over the place. Why? Because thereā€™s going to be a few
days where Iā€™m not around and I donā€™t want any of these little outstanding
items to still be on my plate when I return or, worse, on my mind while Iā€™m
away? Iā€™m pretty confident in saying that in the normal course of things, if I
werenā€™t taking some time off, some of the smaller tasks would have sat
languishing at the bottom of my to-do list until well beyond the date when I
get back to the office. One or two of them, I suspect, I would quite literally never have been done

ā€“ Iā€™d have just sat on
them until everyone else forgot that they were ever asked of me. So why,
really, has the arbitrary deadline of tomorrow at noon become so critical to me?
Donā€™t know. I canā€™t adequately explain it to you because, I suspect, there is
no adequate answer.

Iā€™ll leave you with two thoughts:

  1. Why am I apparently not capable of this weekā€™s
    extraordinary levels of productivity in a more typical week, where I donā€™t have
    a looming arbitrary deadline to contend with? I actually have a theory. Iā€™ll
    post about it soon (but not by any particular arbitrary date. I only commit to
    those in my professional life).
    Ā 
  2. Iā€™ve sucked those around me into my arbitrary
    deadline world too. I donā€™t work alone, I have teams that I work with. If set
    myself an arbitrary deadline for a task, letā€™s call it a, then that means I need othersā€™ input and contribution by a-2, or end of day a-1 at the absolute latest, please. And low, the circle of arbitrary
    deadlines becomes self-sustaining and spreads across the land.

I hope those affected by #2 are also congratulating
themselves on this weekā€™s extraordinary productivity, and I hope they enjoy the
distinct and noticeable lull in activity while Iā€™m away without questioning it
too much. I hope they donā€™t take to the internet to bitch about it on their
blog, but if they do choose that path then thatā€™s OK. Thereā€™ll be no hypocrisy
from me.

Blog

Chromecast Audio

On Tuesday I wrote about how I was very much un-wowed by
Googleā€™s recently announced latest addition to the Nexus line of devices
, the
5X.

There was, however, something announced at last weekā€™s
Google event that I was very excited about.

image

Meet the Chromecast audio.

Chromecast devices have been around for a little while now,
and theyā€™re a USB-powered dongle that plugs into a spare HDMI port on your TV
and allows you to ā€œcastā€ video from your phone to display it on the big screen.

The audio version follows a very similar concept. Itā€™s also
powered by USB, but then it plugs into your existing stereo and allows you to ā€œcastā€
music to it from your phone.

You could argue that Bluetooth works just fine for doing
this ā€“ indeed we have a Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen for just this sort of
thing. Google tells us that a WiFi device can offer better sound quality than Bluetooth
is capable of and has some other benefits too, but I donā€™t care about any of
that.

What Iā€™m excited about, is the possibility of whole home
audio. I built my
whole home audio system
from a collection of raspberry pis because I
thought the existing offerings in the marketplace didnā€™t offer good value.
Apparently Google agree.

The Chromecast audio wonā€™t have whole home audio
functionality at launch, but apparently itā€™s coming in a future software
update. I for one am very excited about this.

The benchmark system for whole home audio is quite clearly Sonos ā€“ thatā€™s the system against which all
others are measured. They have a product called the Connect which allows you take
a set of speakers you already own and, for want of a better term, make them ā€œsmart.ā€

The Chromecast does much the same thing, but for the price
of one Sonos Connect you could buy ten of them.

Blog

Thoughts on Googleā€™s Nexus Event

If you werenā€™t aware, last Tuesday Google held a product
announcement event. This was very interesting to me, chiefly because of the new
Nexus phones that were being announced.

About two years ago I bought a Google Nexus 5, either on
launch day or shortly thereafter. Iā€™m very glad that I did, itā€™s a fantastic
phone thatā€™s still popular today, and it was about half the price of its
similarly-specā€™d competitors. The important thing about the price was that it
changed the model under which I purchase smartphones: instead of getting them
deeply discounted or free through a carrier (providing I promise to stay with
them and not change my phone again for two years), I bought the phone outright.

I now have a phone plan that costs me $25 a month for
unlimited calls and texts, and 2gb of internet and the maximum speed my
provider can deliver (it gets throttled if I go over that limit, but even then
I donā€™t pay more). I got that deal precisely because I already owned my device,
and because I didnā€™t buy my phone from the carrier Iā€™m not tied into a contract
with them either. If they were to choose to stop offering that kind of
excellent value then I can simply choose to go somewhere else.

Last year at Googleā€™s annual Nexus event they announce the
Nexus 6, and it represents a significant mindset shift that I didnā€™t like. The
Nexus 5 focused on real-world performance and eschewed bleeding-edge components
in favour of offering superior value, but the 6 took the opposite approach. As
a result it was more money than I wanted to spend on a phone, and it also
followed the trend of flagship phones having huge (six inch) displays, putting
it mighty close to ā€œphabletā€ territory. I donā€™t like this trend.

Others felt the same way and the Nexus 6 didnā€™t see nearly
the same success as the 5. Thatā€™s why I was so excited about last weekā€™s event:
a return to the way of thinking that resulted in the Nexus 5 was anticipated,
and in fact many details of the Nexus 5X were leaked in advance.

As the event progressed I kept an eye on coverage of it from
a couple of my favourite sites, waiting to be wowed, but the wow moment never
came.

I think itā€™s because two years ago the thinking that led to
the creation of the Nexus 5 was outside the box, almost revolutionary. The idea
that a flagship device didnā€™t have to cost $1,000 was crazy. The model was so
successful though that other manufacturers have taken notice since then. OnePlus
and Motorola are two notable examples offering fantastic phones that are easy
on the wallet.

In retrospect, I donā€™t know what I wanted from Google. It
was the revolutionary nature of the Nexus 5 two years ago that blew my mind and
this time around I was looking for an evolution that also blew my mind. I got
my evolution, but of course my mind remains intact. It also doesnā€™t help that
the Canadian dollar is not performing as well against the U.S. dollar as it was
two years ago, so the value isnā€™t there to quite the same extent.

I will probably still buy myself a Nexus 5X. Thereā€™s a lot
to be said for the pure Android experience, the way that Google intended it
(along with immediate updates when new versions are released). What I was
hoping for is a phone that clearly offered a better value proposition than the
Moto X Play (which I believe to be the best value out there right now). The 5X
is a bit better, but also a bit more expensive. Itā€™s a toss-up.

I do wish it had wireless charging though. If it werenā€™t for
that omission Iā€™d never have gone on this rant.