My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bought this with an old gift card at the Harvard Coop last week. I’ve long enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s hosting of NOVA scienceNOW (a show I DVR), as well as his various guest appearances on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and I had followed the news coverage of Pluto’s demotion by the IAU in 2006.

This book is a nice overview of Pluto’s discovery and eventual reclassification (as the subtitle indicates), written in Neil’s whimsical style. There are some funny photographs of various astrophysicists, and good coverage of the cultural impact of Pluto’s demotion, such as various editorial cartoons and handwritten letters from elementary schoolchildren. I’m glad the appendices included song lyrics (including one by JoCo!) and the full text of various documents regarding Pluto.

My only complaint about the book is that I would have liked a little more detail, both in the history and the science, but of course it’s intended to be accessible to a general audience, a task at which it succeeds.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I checked this one out from the library at work. It’s a basic collection of science anecdotes, mostly from the Enlightenment period up through WWII. The author is a British marine biologist, so most of the scientists mentioned are British, and the modern-day stories in particular naturally focus on the author’s mostly British contemporaries in the marine sciences.

One fairly clear agenda that the author has is wanting to recognize various scientists who made major “home front” contributions during WWI and especially WWII, often risking their lives to develop all sorts of non-weapon technologies necessary for the war effort, such as bomb disposal and submarine escape hatches. Many of them were Quaker conscientious objectors, and received no medals or official recognition of some of the dangerous experiments they performed on themselves to save lives on the battlefield.

There are a number of gross-out moments, mostly related to the symptoms of various terrible things either self-inflicted or applied to the public due to bad science.

I suspect there are fewer post-war anecdotes thanks largely to the standardization of experimental procedures with regards to informed consent and other protections for test subjects. Overall interesting, but not engrossing (as evidenced by it sitting on my shelf half-read for a few months).

Looking at my recent blog history, you’ll find that it has been rather book-centric. This is largely a function of a quick book review being easier to write than a longer, more personal post; however, it belies how much of my time I actually spend reading books. I sometimes bemoan the fact that I read less than I used to, but I think I can chalk that behavior up to three factors:

• I read a lot more in high school
• I still get to read more than most people
• I now read more content online

The first point is part of growing up, and the second point is part of a larger sociological question that I’m not qualified to address, so I’ll focus on the third point: how and where do I find and read short- and long-form content on the web? The list probably won’t be too surprising (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news sites, etc.), but I’ll go into more detail on what clients I use to keep track of everything. It should not be surprising that my acquisition of an iPad in April of 2010 significantly changed how I interact with text online.

This has been a topic kicking around my head for close to a year, since I spend a lot of time connected, although some of my reading/archiving methods have changed over time. The most recent inspiration to write this up was a discussion I had with my mom back in October about how to save articles that she finds online, the way one might clip an article from a physical newspaper. Another one was this post from Brett Nordquist in May of last year about personal online recommendations, in which we happen to use a lot of the same sources/services.

Below the cut, my rather verbose recommendations on how to quickly filter a wide variety of text content online for eventual reading.

Definitions

Before I dive in, some quick definitions. This is how I organize things. It’s probably also why my posts get so long… but I think it would be useful to make the distinction between a few categories of things, although in some cases there are overlaps, or things that fit multiple categories.

• Channel – A place where I can read content from multiple individual sources – Twitter, Google News, etc.
• Source – An individual content producer – friend, blog team, news site, etc.
• Service – A tool that makes it easier to read and share items from channels and sources – Google Reader, Pinboard, etc.
• Client – An app that makes it easier to interact with one of the above – Twitterrific, Instapaper, etc.
• Device – The hardware on which a client runs – iPad, Mac, etc.

Channels

One of the important features of how I define a channel is that it has a style. That style both encompasses the typical length of content, as well as the general type of content (mostly text, or more image and video) and who it comes from (friends and family, other individuals, or other groups). That matters because when I decide to view a particular channel might be based on what mood I’m in. I also handle channels differently – some I manage more carefully, keeping track of read/unread, and others I don’t mind if I “missed” something. To some extent that behavior varies based on the capabilities of the service/client I use for a given channel, and whether or not the channel is also used for communication, not just content discovery.

You’ll note a lot of Google “products” in this list, probably because they offer the advantages of single sign-on and tend to have relatively minimalist interfaces and unobtrusive advertisements.

Google News

I access this as a site in my browser, and I haven’t customized it much. I’ve removed the Sports and Entertainment sections, and added a custom one for Mali. This is where I go for general news, and some neutral political coverage, but I don’t tend to dig very deep since there’s not much focus, and on most topics that I care about I have better sources via other channels. However the headlines alone are a good way to remain generally aware of what’s going on in the world, and thus might spark discussions on other channels.

Facebook

Facebook for me consists primarily of personal updates from friends and family, so it generally doesn’t generate a lot of content to read, although I have a couple of friends who primarily share links here. A lot of the sharing tends towards images and video more than text. That said, Facebook’s comments architecture, combined with mobile notifications, means it’s often easier to have follow-up discussions on articles. Additionally for many of my friends and family, Facebook is the best way for me to keep on life updates that I might not otherwise hear about.

Twitter

I tweet. A lot. I don’t know where I fall on the distribution, but my general sense is that I’m on the high end. I follow a wide variety of people, some friends or people I’ve met, some who are strangers. Because tweets are short, a lot of the reading is just getting quick thoughts or links, and sometimes it’s not obvious from someone’s brief description whether a link will be interesting. Twitter tends to be where I get more specific technical or geeky content, since I follow mostly technical and geeky people. I also have a close group of friends for whom Twitter is the place we go to trade a lot of sass and humor. It’s worth noting that Twitter was one of the ways my wife and I got to know eachother better when we were first dating.

Google Reader

I use Google Reader as my feed reader, so for me it’s effectively the RSS channel even though it’s a particular service. I subscribe to many feeds, most of which update only rarely, and a few of which might update dozens of times a day but for which I ignore most individual posts. A big part of my morning or evening routine is skimming the unread list and quickly ignoring articles that don’t look interesting to me. I didn’t ever use any of its social features (which at various points were absorbed by Buzz and more recently Google+), so I wasn’t upset by their disappearance. I generally try to keep the unread count at or near zero, but sometimes that involves a bit of cheating using Instapaper, which I’ll get into more below. For the most part I don’t follow links from blog posts, unless I want more context, or unless it’s a blog that tends to be in a link + commentary format.

Guild Forums

This channel is very specific to me, but it’s one of the ways I keep in touch with my World of Warcraft community, even though I don’t play much anymore. I also maintain contacts with guild members via Facebook and instant messaging. This tends to be where I find out about video game news, as well as hearing about a lot of viral internet memes.

Instant Message

This is predominantly random personal conversation on a wide variety of topics, but for longer discussions on politics or other current events it beats the other channels. Those discussions in turn require some linked content for context, which I usually read immediately to continue the conversation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, by “instant message” I really mean Jabber, with my Google Talk account.

Email

Not a whole lot comes this way anymore, but my mom will occasionally send me news articles. There was a time where most of my internet memes came by way of the various SWIL alumni mailing lists, but the activity on those  has fallen off a lot in the Facebook era.

I think that’s most of them. There are exceptions, but for the most part I use each of these in one form or another most days.

Sources

I’m obviously not going to enumerate and describe every Twitter user I follow, every blog I read, or every website I visit, but I wanted to highlight a couple of high-quality, high-volume sources that probably influence me more than others. I’ve grouped them somewhat by topic, and then in some cases again by related groups of people.

Science & Technology

This is my primary interest in news, so the vast majority of non-friend Twitter feeds I follow are in this area, as well as a lot of the blogs I skim or read. Even when the topic is some tech I don’t actively work with, I like staying up to date on what’s out there. I’ll break this up into subtopics a bit, since this covers so much.

Apple

I follow the feeds of the major rumors sites, such as AppleInsider and MacRumors. Even though their accuracy is low, it’s fun to speculate. I mostly focus though on Daring Fireball by John Gruber and the blog of Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper. You could call them the 5by5 guys, since along with John Siracusa they’re members of the same podcast network that I listen to regularly. They all discuss more general tech issues, although the focus is mostly Apple. My introduction to them was probably originally through Siracusa’s infamously epic OS X reviews.

Tech

Probably the most prolific source is the relatively new site The Verge, to which I was introduced by the aforementioned Gruber. They cover a lot of stuff I can skip easily (like CES), but with enough interesting articles worked in. Unfortunately their RSS feed isn’t full text, but their site design is clean enough (with citations!) that I don’t mind.

Science

One of the more amusing sources of science news are the Twitter accounts for various probes and rovers, such as Spirit and Opportunity, and Curiosity. As far as general news sites, I find that the BBC’s science reporting is superior. In some cases, Wikipedia has near-current information about new discoveries.

Politics

Especially during campaign season, I’m pretty hooked on election coverage, as well as finding out the latest insane bile being spewed in Obama’s direction. My biggest source is Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, which fits my socially liberal/economically moderate leanings well, although he takes some positions I don’t agree with and can be stubborn at times. He has a lot of other content I skip over, but he filters a lot of other political blogs so I don’t have to. The other top one would be 538, whose statistical analysis can’t be beat. (Note: NYT doesn’t allow a full feed, but someone cooked up a Yahoo! Pipes version of 538.)

Another good resource for following up on various political coverage (which I also sometimes get by watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) is PolitiFact, which grades politicians’ statements. These are unsurprisingly often false.

Entertainment

There is a lot of amusing stuff on the intertrons, but as far as longer form reading goes, few can beat the dry humor of McSweeney’s. In a totally different (and eclectic, probably not-safe-for-work direction) there’s the blog of Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, of early Netscape fame; he naturally has a lot of tech-related snark as well. I read a few web comics still, such as xkcd, Penny Arcade, and Scenes From a Multiverse, but they don’t exactly fit the reading discussion (although they all have associated commentary).

To some extent, I wish I had kept track of when I started following each of these sources, and how or from whom I found out about them. It would be an interesting trend to plot, especially as I get close to source saturation and have to start either ignoring sources or filtering more.

Services

So, how do I read, save, and share all of this content from so many different sources? To some extent this process is deeply integrated with the channels listed above, but there are two standout services that I’ve already alluded to: Instapaper and Pinboard. The former is a way for me to quickly move an article from one of my channels to a medium-term store, which is especially useful when I’m mobile but don’t have time to read; the latter is a way for me to organize links for sharing as well as my own reference.

Instapaper

I’ll talk more about the Instapaper client itself in the next section, but as far as the service is concerned, the primary use for me is that it lets me timeshift my reading. This is especially useful with the client, which can download and store the text of articles for offline reading, which I like to do when I’m on an airplane.

Secondarily, it serves as a low-pass filter on the flow of what I’m reading. That is, by moving articles from Google Reader or Twitter feeds to Instapaper, and then not coming back to them for a few days, I might have a different sense of their relevance to me, and I can decide to simply delete them without reading them.  In recent months I’ve gotten pretty behind in my Instapaper queue, but that just means that I’m more aggressive in ignoring articles that I once thought might be interesting.

Finally, Instapaper is a pretty good track of what I’ve read online in total, since there aren’t a huge number of longer articles that I read that don’t pass through it. I would also add that my positive impression of the service is probably enhanced by the fact that I consume content produced by its creator, Marco Arment.

Unfortunately, Instapaper does not handle multi-page articles very well. Most of the time, if you aren’t able to enable some kind of single page or print view before saving an article to Instapaper, you only get the first page, and there’s no guarantee that when you go back later you’ll be able to access the original article (especially if you’re currently offline). This pageview-enhancing layout choice is increasingly common on news sites, desperate for ad impression cents. Additionally some pages don’t get parsed very well, or are actively trying to thwart services like Instapaper; I’m looking at you, New York Times. The end result then is that Instapaper is really just storing the link, and you have to read the content in its original form.

It would also be nifty if the service could cache PDFs or multimedia content, but I suspect that gets murkier from a copyright perspective, and stops being about “paper”.

Pinboard

A brief bit of history: Pinboard is for me a replacement for Delicious. I had been using Delicious since February of 2008, before it was sold by Yahoo!. I had never really used the “social” aspects of that service, such as subscribing to tags, except to see shared items from a small handful of friends. Fritz convinced me to join Pinboard in December of 2010, while the subscription fee was still quite low (under $3 as I recall). I was initially using it as an archive of my Delicious feed, using the Delicious interface to save and tag links, and having Pinboard store a copy of all of them. My migration to Pinboard happened in May 2011, after Yahoo! announced at the end of April that they were selling Delicious to AVOS. I finally shut down my Delicious account (deleting all bookmarks, which were now duplicated on Pinboard) a few months ago.

Once again, I don’t really use any of the social aspects, except to subscribe to the feeds of a few friends (and share similarly). In some cases I end up seeing links that they’ve shared elsewhere. I understand from the official blog that the creator of Pinboard, while creating a simpler service than Delicious, has gone to great lengths to accommodate the fanfiction community that has fled from there.

So, for me, the main purpose of a bookmarking site is to comment on an archive links for my own future reference. It might be to indicate that I read something interesting; or it might be something that I would want to reshare with someone after an initial posting has faded from memory. It also gives me some flexibility in deciding when and on which channel to share something, since I can pop back to my history to grab some past link (with tags and notes to remind me what’s what). On occasion I go back to a document for my own reference, and the pinned page is easier to find that just googling it.

I also use Pinboard to archive all of my tweets. Unfortunately it can’t go back in time in the Twitter archive to grab tweets from before I used Pinboard, and sometimes there’s a delay, but as far as searching my own tweets goes, it’s vastly superior to Twitter’s interface.

Another reason I like both of these services was their very forthright and honest handling of a major disruption in service they experienced in June 2011 due to an overly broad FBI raid on the hosting provider where they both happened to have servers located.

I should briefly mention that I used to use Readability, contributing a few bucks a month to help support publishers. I really liked the idea of paying a little bit for content online. However, since I never used the text conversion aspect of their service (relying on Instapaper), and I was cutting back on extraneous online expenses, I decided to close my account. In addition I felt that if I was contributing real money for each pageview (as far as I know, a dollar or so is significantly more than most advertisement rates online), I shouldn’t have to deal with the obnoxious stuff most sites do to make money, including multipage articles, ads, and tracking.

If I’m feeling feisty, I’d like to play around with the Instapaper and Pinboard APIs to generate some nice graphs of my usage over time. That would I think make for an interesting follow-up post. I suspect that it tends to be spikier than my actual reading habits, since I don’t always save or pin everything I read, or immediately after I read it.

Clients

A big part of using these services the way I do is dependent on the quality of their interfaces, which is either a web application or a native client. In my experience the native clients are simpler and cleaner, but for full functionality you need to use the service’s website. This distinction is blurred a bit by the availability of APIs that allow various channels and services to expose some of their functionality to other clients, allowing for tighter integration, where you might not need a dedicated client because it’s just a function of another client.

I’ll cover channel clients first, and then service clients (although there’s just the one). For anything mentioned in a previous section that’s not discussed below, you can just assume I use the website, although I will briefly talk about bookmarklets since to some extent that counts as API integration with the browser as a client.

Facebook 

The official Facebook app for iPhone and iPad is pretty notoriously bad. Even after the recent update that improved things like photo viewing, I get all sorts of weird UI rendering errors. I pretty much just use these for viewing push notifications, and occasionally to update my status while I’m mobile. Another annoyance is that you can’t turn off Facebook chat (or hide your buddy list) in the iPad app.

Twitterrific 

My client of choice has changed a lot of the four years or so that I’ve been active on Twitter, and only very rarely do I use the actual Twitter website (especially as it’s changed over the years to grow more and more complex). My favorite by far has been Twitterrific, by The Iconfactory (I think I used one of their free icon packs back in the OS 9 days). The interface is clean, and the use of contextual menus (well, action sheets, but you know what I mean) makes it very easy to read and share.

There are two features they’ve added fairly recently that are useful to me and relevant to this discussion: Instapaper integration (I can send any tweeted link to Instapaper instead of viewing it), and support for Tweet Marker, which makes jumping between my iPhone and iPad much nicer now. They also have improved handling of Twitter’s stupid t.co automatic link shortening, as far as getting back to the original link is concerned.

At home I mostly use my iPad for web surfing, email, Twitter, etc.; the times when I’m at a desktop at home or work, I use the Chrome extension Silver Bird (formerly Chromed Bird). The interface isn’t pretty, but it works, and has desktop notifications. I’ll probably grab Twitterrific from the Mac App Store to replace this at some point, especially if I spend more time on my Mac this semester.

Now a quick review of past clients, and why I moved on from them. When I first started tweeting, I actually used the instant message interface for a while, because I liked the notifications, and I already had IM clients installed everywhere. On my original iPhone, before the App Store existed, I used a web interface called Hahlo that at the time was better optimized for Mobile Safari. My first desktop client of choice was Spaz, also an AIR app. If you view my Twitter stats, you can see that I used TweetDeck a lot, and for a long time, before they were bought by Twitter proper; this was mostly due to their cross-platform nature, and before I realized how terrible Adobe AIR is. I also used the TweetDeck iPhone app for a long while (after moving on from the Twitter mobile site), but it was pretty unstable and had a crappy UI. I never used the official Twitter app (née  Tweetie). My TweetDeck usage also coincided with my most prolific period of tweeting, and my highest involvement with the social media community in Boston.

Reeder 

This iPad app is my preferred method for accessing Google Reader. It’s one of those interfaces that “gets out of the way”, and the integrated (and configurable!) sharing menu makes it much easier to pass RSS feed items from this channel to one of the other channels/services. It’s very easy to quickly skim through posts, either reading them then and there, ignoring them, quickly sending them to Instapaper for later consumption, or tagging them for saving to Pinboard.

The only major downside to reading RSS feeds on the iPad is the totally inconsistent way videos are embedded. I think this is mostly the fault of the original author (or their CMS). Sometimes they play using HTML5 <video> in Reeder; other times the video only works by viewing the original post; and, of course, some videos/players either disable embedding or don’t have a non-Flash version, although that’s decreasingly common. I sometimes get crashes in this app, but it’s mostly either associated with video playback, or when I’m viewing a linked site in a WebKit view; both are presumably due to memory limitations on my iPad 1.

I do use the web interface for Google Reader, if I’m at my desktop. The recent redesign didn’t bother me at all, since I never used any of the sharing features that got replaced by Google+; it took just a little while to get used to. I think if I used a desktop Mac more often, I’d probably consider the full version of Reeder. I pretty rarely have reason to look at the mobile interface on my phone, which is why I didn’t buy the iPhone version of Reeder. (This is one of my biggest complaints to iOS developers – I’d rather pay more for a universal binary I don’t fully use than to have to deal with multiple versions.)

Instapaper 

Suffice it to say I wouldn’t be using Instapaper as a service if it weren’t for the app, whose killer feature is that it can cache your saved articles from Instapaper on your device for reading offline. There’s not much more to say; this is a great, wonderfully designed app, and it works very well. I predominantly use the iPad version; the few times I’ve used the iPhone version has mostly been at the gym. There are a few tasks that are better managed on the website, but not many.

When I am offline, and I want to mark an article as read but I intend to post it on Pinboard later, I move it to a local folder called “Pinboard”, which I then go through, tagging articles. I haven’t played around much with the font options, but you get a lot of control over the presentation of the text. Like Reeder, there are a lot of sharing options built in, so if I’m reading a saved article I might tweet it directly from in the app.

This is not relevant to the client per se, but when I’m reading articles that I found via Google News, or were otherwise loaded in my browser, I often use the Instapaper bookmarklet to save extracted text. I don’t use any of the Instapaper “long reading” feeds, but it is to a large extent the client and service through which most of my text consumption flows.

My client usage has shifted over time, and which clients I continue using depends in large part on how well they’re kept up-to-date in terms of compatibility with services and usability on my current set of devices. At this point I think my current choices are going to be stable for a while, given that I’ve got a pretty good setup now for how they all work together.

Readflow

Most of the individual steps in my reading flow have been discussed in the preceding sections. I’ll summarize with this flowchart, which simplifies some of the options, but gives a general idea of how I process text as I read it (or ignore it).

I read sources from channels using services and then share via channels.

Conclusion

Conveniently, this post has at over 4500 words easily reached the length threshold that makes it perfect to use with a service like Instapaper! I didn’t do that intentionally from the outset, but I seem to have quite a few opinions on this perhaps overbroad topic. Hopefully this (or a portion of it) has been helpful in demonstrating one way to process a lot of mostly-text information from the web.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, so it is probably no surprise that I tore through this book in just a couple of days and gave it five stars. I remain in love with his overly verbose writing style, and his nerdy asides. I’ll echo something Fritz said when we discussed the book briefly, which is that it hearkens back to some of his earlier work, before the heavily researched and almost academic vibe of The Baroque Cycle and Anathem. That is to say, this book is heavier on the action, but even that action is incredibly detailed, all the way down to what you could easily classify as “gun porn”.

I very much enjoyed his portrayal of the MMORPG T’Rain, and the amusing barbs directed at fantasy writing and settings wrapped up in that. I would definitely play a game with that level of obsessive detail, especially the geophysically realistic terrain generation and real passage of time, although I doubt it would turn out to be a WoW killer because it wouldn’t have that broad of an appeal.

The near-future setting felt realistic, especially because he regularly refers to real-world companies and internet services. It’s interesting to me that from a trademark perspective, an author can do that in writing, but present-day movies generally have to make up news networks, search engines, etc. because otherwise they’d have to pay for the rights. It’s jarring when they’re forced to do that, so I’m glad that distraction wasn’t present here.

One of the more amusing examples of Stephenson’s style was his apparent obsession with the word “talus“. I guess he didn’t like “scree” or “loose rock” and really wanted to emphasize the instability of the terrain the various characters were walking on. I think the final chapters mentioned it on about every other page.

As for the characters, I generally wanted to like everyone, even the bad guys. I think a big part of this was that almost all of them were non-stereotypical or outsiders in some way, making them not fit our assumptions for how they should look/sound/act.

If you like Stephenson, you definitely won’t be disappointed; if you’re new to him, this iteration of his work is also considerably more accessible than some of his work in the last 10 years. I think I will still stand by my claim that Snow Crash is the best introduction, but maybe that’s just because that’s the first book of his that I read, and I was hooked. REAMDE stands alone in his various universes, and is a bit less geekily intimidating than his other books.

Steve Jobs: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think the main feature of this book that I would emphasize is that it is, in fact, a biography about a flawed man, and not so much a history of his technical achievements. As a computer geek and long-time MacAddict, I found that a little disappointing; I didn’t care as much about every anecdote of his emotional instability, I cared about how he did what he did at various companies. There was barely anything on his time at NeXT, and even the major changes at Apple in the last 15 years pretty much got a single chapter each. I was also surprised to find a couple of spelling mistakes, although I suppose since I read an electronic version that could get patched later.

Overall I would echo John Siracusa’s Hypercritical podcast episode in which he reviews the book as having been writing by “the wrong guy”, making the point that Isaacson is someone who was generally incurious about technical matters. I think my rating of this book would be higher if he had delved into that side of Steve more.

That all said, it is probably the best collected summary of what he was like, mostly due to the access Isaacson had. I learned a lot of trivia, and there were a lot of interesting quotes that I marked in iBooks. I knew very little about his early life, or his family life. I just would have liked more of a study of what made his technical and design successes. There were some good stories from, among others, Bill Gates, Jony Ive, and Steve Wozniak.

I think it’s a reasonable first look at The Steve, but I would definitely read other history books first, or generally familiarize yourself with the history of Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. For the latter, the documentary that appears on the WALL-E DVD, The Pixar Story, is excellent.

I think my favorite quote from Steve featured in the book was this one, which is more philosophical than technical: “The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”. As in my initial reaction to his death, I think Steve clearly achieved that.

Initial Reaction

I was sitting at my early-2007 Mac Pro, Targ, ready to start my cs281 homework, and I just didn’t want to think about probability theory. My first response was to join in the collective mourning on Twitter (“twourning”?), joining in on the #RIPSteveJobs hashtag, simply tweeting the Apple logo character U+F8FF, and reading and retweeting a few of the early responses to his death.

Even though publicly we’d known about Steve’s cancer diagnosis for several years, and the various medical leaves culminating in his recent departure as CEO, it had never really sunk in for me that his career as a designer, visionary, cultural icon, and much more, would likely not last into old age. At 56, Steve was within a year in age of both of my parental units, so perhaps there’s an indirect confrontation with their mortality wrapped up in my response. I’d never met Steve Jobs, though I would have loved to hear him speak. Possibly my sadness at his passing was also in part a missed opportunity.

I think though, more than anything, even before I really understood who he was, his work and his products have a front-row seat to my home, school, and work lives, and were very influential in me growing up as a computer geek.

A Brief History

For many who know me, Macs are fairly integral to my geek identity, but that wasn’t always the case. Our first home computer, in 1987, was an IBM PC XT (the model without a hard drive but with two floppy drives). I have fond memories of playing the DOS port of Tetris, and learning to program BASIC with the help of a Biblically-themed book of tutorials.

At school, of course, we had various generations of Apple IIs, so I used a few IIgses in the library when I was in 1st grade (color!), while it was mostly IIes elsewhere. When I was in 3rd grade, our school got a big donation of Macintosh LCIIs from Medtronic, which was a pretty amazing leap. We started word processing in The Writing Center, playing Oregon Trail and Number Munchers (damn you MECC!), and in 4th grade we even had a recurring science project using Hypercard. Since my dad started teaching at the school around the same time, I spent a fair bit of time after school in either the computer lab or his classroom, mostly playing games, although I was also fond of creating custom tessellating desktop patterns in System 7.

While my brain was slowly being warped by post-Steve Apple products at school, our XT was still going strong, so there was little point in replacing it, even as school switched to Macs and many friends had either Macs or Windows PCs at home. My first all-nighter was playing the original Civilization on an LCIII at my friend (and this year, Best Man) Gus’ 10th birthday party, after everyone else had gone to sleep. Around then I also remember being embarassed turning in a paper in 6th grade English that was printed at home on dot-matrix, when almost everyone else had inkjets or was bringing in 3.5″ disks to school to print on their laserjets.

This all changed that year, Christmas 1994, when we upgraded to a Performa 6115 CD. I caught a peek of its box that morning at my grandma’s house, walking to breakfast, and I assumed that it was intended as either a home computer for my grandma (she didn’t have one at that time), or an upgrade for my cousins. As it turned out, my parents had a family friend who was also driving from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls deliver it for them. My sister and I were naturally very excited: it would be easier for us to bring homework to the computers at school, and we could listen to music and play recent games. It was also our first step online, as it came with a 14.4 modem and a free trial of Apple’s abortive eWorld online service.

In addition to being a leap into then-modern computing and multimedia, it came with two free issues of MacAddict magazine. I subscribed, and it was within its pages that I first learned who Steve Jobs was, what a Reality Distortion Field was, and cemented my love for the Mac. I definitely remember having arguments with people about the Megahertz Myth, desktop interfaces, and the like, while they pointed out that I couldn’t play “any” games. My friend Joe, a fellow gamer, liked asking me how I liked the new Reader Rabbit.

I don’t have a picture from that Christmas, but a few years later, my uncle Mike gave me a Zip Drive (SCSI, naturally). I think this image captures my excitement about new technology products:

100 MB was a big deal in 1996. I was excited.

I should add that throughout this period, I owned a couple of shares of Apple stock. I certainly have impressive on-paper earnings, but at this point I don’t imagine myself selling. It’s a vote of confidence that dates back to when few people believed in Apple and the company’s survival hinged on an influx of cash from of all places Microsoft.

I won’t review my complete Mac history (there are a number of computers and devices in there leading up to my new iPhone 4S which I just preordered), but my interest in the company and the platform has only grown. I followed the Second Coming of The Steve in MacAddict, and started watching the keynotes online. The switch to OS X on the laptop I got for college in 2001 prepared me for using various Unix flavors at school (in both engineering and computer science courses), including developing some of the programming and system administration skills that help me daily in my job.

In more recent years, between the iPhone and the iPad, Steve’s vision of the future have more or less made my childhood Star Trek fantasies a reality. It’s striking the ways in which science fiction and technology feedback on one another. In some senses even TNG seems a bit dated now, because the characters generally aren’t portrayed using computer networks, and yet thanks to Steve most people above a certain income threshold can get online from anywhere, in 2011, not 2361.

Reactions Around the Web

I didn’t really choke up until I started reading and hearing personal stories from people who either knew Steve personally, or worked even more closely with his creative output. I must admit I can’t entirely explain it; I remember scoffing at people mourning the deaths of other celebrities, like Michael Jackson. There weren’t tears, but I definitely felt a strong albeit impersonal connection to Steve, as a geek who likes to make quality things.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• John Gruber
• Walt Mossberg
• Stephen Wolfram
• Ron Gilbert
• Various 5by5 podcasters

And, of course, we can’t forget The Onion honoring Steve in their own way. I would also recommend checking out Devour’s collection of Stevenotes, including his Stanford commencement speech, as well as this unaired Think Different ad narrated by Steve.

We’ll miss you Steve. Thanks for everything.

You know I can’t say no to lists and statistics.

I originally started compiling this list almost 2 years ago as a blog entry, but since I just got tagged by Andrle on Facebook, I thought I’d finally finish and post it. I’m not sure on the provenance of the list, other than I know it’s from one year of the BBC Big Read project. I found one version of the list on their website, but that differs slightly from the list below (which oddly enough is the same ordered ranking as the version with which I was just tagged).

There are of course numerous quibbles to be had with the exact construction (and ordering) of the list, but it’s a reasonable metric for one’s familiarity with “the classics”. It also appears to avoid the common online book list voting problem where Ayn Rand ends up all over the top 10. This particular list is skewed towards 19th Century British classics, with a few books that were very trendy at the time it was compiled (for example, on a list from about two years ago I would have expected to see Eat, Pray, Love in the Top 100). There are also several books I’ve never heard of, although in some cases I’m familiar with the author.

I’ve read 30 of the entries (some of which are multiple books), started but never finished 3 books, and been exposed to another 13 in various other forms. Not too shabby for an engineer who took effectively one humanities course in college, and that in another language! If anything, it’s a demonstration of the quality of my high school’s required English program, that I was exposed to a number of books I otherwise wouldn’t have elected to read. That all said, I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, and when I do, it’s typically new fiction. That means there’s a good chance I’ll never tackle any of those that I’m missing, or never finished.

Full list below the cut.

Legend

Read in its entirety
Started but never finished
Exposed to in another form (movie, children’s condensed, or comic book version)
[my comments]

List

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien [all three at least 4 times]
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling [all 7, some 3-4 times]
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee [at least twice]
6. The Bible [a lot, but not the more obscure books]
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman [all 3, at least twice]
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare [been in and read various plays, but nowhere near complete]
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien [at least 3 times
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [the movie sucked]
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy [gift from mom, too thick for middle school me]
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams [twice, first time at the right age]
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky [tried tackling this twice]
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll [read Through the Looking Glass as well, plus multiple movie versions]
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame [Just the Disney movie]
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis [read all 7 at least 6 times]
34. Emma – Jane Austen [movie]
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis [read at least 6 times]
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne [various stories, plus the Disney animated and live action episodes]
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown [never saw the movie though]
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert [plus both movie versions]
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley [read twice]
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck [plus the movie]
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas [just the recent movie]
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker [classic movie version, plus blog reordering, plus kid novel version]
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett ['90s movie version]
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Inferno – Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens [read it, but the Muppet version is the best]
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [read a number of collected stories, but definitely not all]
90. The Faraway Tree Collectaion – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery [can't remember why I didn't finish it - boring?]
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams [plus the trippy movie]
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas [Classics Illustrated comic book!]
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl [plus both movie versions]
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo [musical]

Three Sundays ago, my primary Mac OS X hard drive failed. Those of you who follow me on Twitter got somewhat of a play-by-play as I discovered the depth of my drive failure I got home to the Spinning Pinwheel of Death (SPOD), and discovered quickly that my computer would not wake from screensaver or boot. However, I didn’t panic. Why? Because I have what I believe to be a relatively robust backup system for home use.

I can’t stress enough how important regular backups are. Data loss is one of my personal nightmares (well, that, and Lego or Andrle loss), since most of my life (professional and personal) is on the computer. Among other things, I’d lose every picture I’ve ever taken since freshman year of college, every homework assignment I’ve written on the computer since late 6th grade (when we got our first Mac), not to mention substantial configuration work and those precious saved games.

I sit atop what I call the Backup Tripod: regular clones to an external disk stored off-site, hourly incremental backups to a local disk or local network storage, and as-needed on-save synchronization to cloud storage. I’m sure there are many other articles out there that recommend a particular strategy, but this is my solution for Macs. I even convinced my parental units to use a similar setup. I’ll go into detail on what solutions I use and why (as well as recovery strategy) for each below the cut.

I can’t emphasize enough how important data backup is for the typical modern power user.

Offsite Clones

Why do an offsite clone? First, this is primarily to solve the “your apartment burned down” problem. You want to be able to recover as much of your data as possible, all at once, but you might be okay in that situation with a little bit of recent data loss. The latter can be mitigated of course by using the other two legs of the tripod in combination

I’ve been using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner for several years to make cloned backups of my primary hard drive. It’s a Mac-specific solution that has seen regular improvements over that time, including a migration to launchd as part of updating for Mac OS 10.5 that enables some features I use, such as “initiate backup on mount”, which triggers my standard clone job as soon as my external drive is plugged in. Cloning the actual disk is of course only half of the solution: you need to be responsible for storing your backup drive in a safe location, and bringing it home for regular incremental updates, to minimize the annoyance during a recovery.

I store my home hard drive in a locked drawer in my office at work; my parents keep an old iPod with important files in their safe deposit box. I should also admit at this point that, for this particular failure, my clone backup was almost 4 months old, therefore making recovery a fair bit more annoying than it needed to be had I been keeping my clone more up-to-date.

Incremental Local Backups

Why do incremental backups? This is primarily to smooth out the frequency of your backups: now instead of a backup only as recent as the last time you remembered to bring your clone drive home, you can have one as recent as a few minutes ago. The other major advantage is that, when configured properly, they are completely automated. For the most part, you shouldn’t even care that they’re set up; they’ll just run silently in the background, and you’ll only notice their existence when you need them to perform a recovery. Note that in this context, by “local” I mean “in the same building”, not necessarily on the same machine, since some network solutions are viable here.

Being a Mac junkie, I use Apple’s Time Machine. Given my experience with this recent near-loss of data, I can safely say that for me, this is now Apple’s most important product ever (no matter how magical and revolutionary the iPad may be, it hasn’t saved my bacon… yet). Since my primary computer is a Mac Pro desktop, I have Time Machine configured to back up to a second internal drive. My parental units, since they both have laptops, use a Time Capsule as their backup system (and primary wireless router).

I can’t from personal experience recommend a particular incremental backup solution for Windows or Linux, but TSOR suggests TimeVault for Ubuntu. At work they use a network version of IronMountain Connected Backup, which is at least the fourth Windows backup solution IT has tried since I’ve worked there. So far it seems to have staying power, and I assume it’s working, but a running backup causes a massive performance hit on my Windows XP development machine, making it essentially unusable due to I/O when the backup is running. (I should add that in my experience, Time Machine does not cause a performance hit, even when playing a processor-intensive 3D game like World of Warcraft. I believe this has to do with Apple’s implementation using FSEvents, although Siracusa’s review of Leopard explains the underpinnings of Time Machine better than I.)

One of the major caveats of an incremental backup, as I learned the hard way during this particular recovery, is that they are bad at dealing with single large files that change often. In other words, databases of various sorts, as well as writeable disk images. Examples include the iTunes Music Library file, and the Mac OS 9 disk image used by the SheepShaver PowerPC emulator. There are two problems that these files can cause: the first is that they may cause your backup to fail due to file locking (especially if the program using the particular file is currently running); the second is that, since most incremental backup systems operate at filesystem granularity, they have to back up the entire file even if only a small portion of its data has changed. The latter leads to your incremental backup disk getting filled with many version changes

This is where careful management of your incremental backup’s ignore list comes in: I had both of these files ignored in Time Machine, so I had to restore them from my clone drive. More on that in the Recovery section below.

Cloud Storage

Why use cloud storage? Or, in this case, a better question might be “Why not use a cloud backup service?”.

I’ll answer the second first: I don’t trust them. Maybe this is some bizarre geek control freak paranoia, but I just don’t believe that their service can actually deliver what they promise while simultaneously being sufficiently secure. There are at least three parts to this: the first is that I don’t believe that the service will necessarily be available when I need it (whether during backup or recovery), the second is that I don’t believe they’ll actually delete my data completely when I ask, and the third is that I don’t believe they can completely protect my data from an attack on their systems. To some extent, these factors are all true of existing cloud services I rely on (such as GMail), but that data is a lot less critical or private than the full contents of my hard drive (and, in the case of e-mail, I keep a full local cache). I haven’t used any of the major cloud backup services out there for full backups, so I don’t want to bash any of them by name, but I would argue that they all suffer from these potential problems.

That brings us to my (admittedly limited) use of the Dropbox service. I only use the free 2 GB level of service, and I use it primarily for temporary file transfer to my iPhone or iPad. However, for a handful of important files that I’m actively working on, I use it as a sort of temporary remote version control. That is, as I reach a point in a particular document that I want to make sure I don’t lose, I’ll save the file locally and then copy it to my Dropbox, generally not overwriting the previous copy. That means if I need to “restore”, I just retrieve the appropriate copy from my Dropbox. When I’m done, I delete that particular working folder.

Recovery

Since I refer to this setup as the Backup Tripod, then there is the platform being supported by the three legs described above: quick and relatively painless recovery of your lost data. How do you use these three levels of backup to restore your data after a disk failure? To a large extent this depends on the type of failure you experienced, and how broad it was.

If you’ve accidentally deleted a single file, or somehow produced a corrupted version, then pulling a previous copy from either your cloud storage or your hourly local backup is probably a sufficient level of recovery, particularly if the first iteration of the file was created since your last offsite backup. (Depending on what you’re working on, there may also be a place where a distributed version control system like git can play a role.) Deciding how many past versions to keep over the course of a work session is up to your discretion (and the importance of the file). Of course, if the “single file” is one of the files described above as being difficult to backup incrementally, you will probably have to recover the version from your clone drive. Again, regular backups here are critical, in order to make recovery possible.

If you’ve lost the entire drive, you have two options, assuming you were using Time Machine as your incremental backup solution: you can restore from the last successful hourly backup, or you can restore from your clone (obviously both require purchasing a new drive and replacing the old one). Most likely you need to do a combination of the two: restore from the incremental backup first, to get the most recent version of various files, and then manually restore any files you keep on the ignore list such as virtual machine images or databases, plus any “high priority” files you have stored “in the cloud”.

For my particular recovery, in the case of the aforementioned VM image, this was fine, since I hadn’t used it since my last complete clone; in the case of my music library, I had to reimport a number of apps from the backed up iTunes data folders and eliminate duplicates and stale versions. This was mostly a task of synchronizing the state of the iTunes Library with the fully backed up on-disk state. Annoying, but avoidable/minimized by keeping more recent clones than I had. This was also a case where I didn’t need the cloud storage leg at all, since the failure occurred while I wasn’t home, so I wasn’t actively working on an important file that I wouldn’t have wanted to lose if I had a local disaster.

Incidentally, my hard drives would probably be the first thing out of my apartment in the event of a fire. <.<

Conclusion

Those are the three legs to the Backup Tripod, blending a balance of manual vs. automatic, offsite vs. local, and complete vs. incremental. I claim you need all of these features to insure a complete, up-to-date backup under a variety of failure conditions.

If you follow the general gist of this guide, and keep good backup habits, there’s a reasonable chance that a complete hard drive failure will be nothing more than a minor inconvenience. You’ll have to order a new drive and wait for it to arrive (or pick one up at your favorite tech shop), and then most of the process is waiting several hours while your computer does the restore, during which time you can get outside or something. Maybe a little bit of manual file restoration. All in all, annoying, but not a massive tragedy that would be the loss of all your home data (and a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring a data recovery expert).

Seriously. Back. Up. DO EET NAOW!!!

(And while you’re at it, make sure the IT guys at your work are on top of this.)

This all went down the Wednesday before last (July 7th, or 7-7-2010… seven might be her favorite number…) while we were visiting a friend’s cabin in northern Minnesota.

Now, below the cut, some (goofy) photos of us on the dock where I proposed under the stars…

Two star-trekked lovers.

Nick points out the ring.

We’ve started the initial planning process. There are many, many decisions to be made in the coming months! (We’re currently eyeing a small wedding on a date sometime next spring.)

Did I say “huzzah” yet? Huzzah!

There once was a lady from Boston,
a city she often got lost in.
She made so many merlimewes
it put her hair in curlicues,
so none stopped for the walk she crossed in!

What, I’m an engineer, not a poet. Points for effort, right? Bonus points for pedestrian-squishing?

And yes, I do take requests.