arotau

Hopefully this will be the first post from my mobile…

I’m partway through upgrading the website’s software, so a few pages might be broken over the next couple of days.

Sorry :-(

I was going to upgrade this website to Wordpress 1.5, but only got far enough through my todo list to get backups working as I want them to. Now I have a complete backup of all my files to an external Firewire hard drive (if it’s plugged in), a partial backup to an account on a remote host, and a full backup of this website back to my home machine every night. That’s all done using rsync so it happens fairly quickly and efficiently.

The only thing that can’t be backed up remotely this way is our photos, which already amount to over 2Gb of images. Those will be backed up manually about once a month using an external Firewire DVD writer, along with a copy of all the other data, and the DVDs are then stored away from the house.

Getting it all set up was a bit tedious, but at least I now know that I can quickly retrieve any important files from at least two places, and that I have DVDs to fall back on (stored in a third location) if necessary. The thought of losing all my data is rather scary, so it’s a weight off my mind to have an automatic system in place. I wonder how many people realise how easily they could lose all their digital photos from a hard drive failure?

Nearly a month after the previous post (again!). I’ve just got a new phone from which will eventually let me post directly to the website, so hopefully this month I will actually manage to post news more regularly.

Looking back at the earlier posts, I realised that I forgot to say that Mim got the job she was interviewing for. She is now working as a PA for four of the partners in a hedge fund. One downside is that she has about a 30 minute commute on the District line twice a day, but the company she’s working for is very good.

We haven’t been out much in the last month, apart from seeing a few movies (by far the best was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events). We did go round to Steve & Rhi’s new flat for dinner one evening, and earlier this week went to an art exhibition by a partnership that one of our friends from church is involved in. On Wednesday I had the good fortune to be taken to the Arsenal v Bayern Munich Champion’s League game at Highbury by one of the brokers from work - it wasn’t a great game of football, but it’s the first really big football match I’ve been to so I enjoyed the atmosphere. Plus the broker provided a car home after the game - much more civilised than having to use public transport :-)

The Friday youth club at church has been running for three weeks now, and is going really well - each week we’ve had more young people turn up than we can let in, so there’s been a queue of people outside the door waiting in case others leave early. We desparately need more leaders in order to make it viable in the longer term though. St Helen’s are very kindly putting a notice in their service sheet from this Sunday onwards advertising our need, and we are still hoping that some more people from our church will volunteer.