Quite how much time should we put into our computer backups? No idea, though it seems I spend too much time on it, particularly this week. I’m happy so far with Time Machine built into OS X from 10.5 on, but the one thing it misses is the ability to boot from the backup it takes. Big deal? Well, if a drive or the whole MacBook goes completely, then you need to do some serious reinstalling before you can get to a base from which you can then start recovering from Time Machine.

Thus encouraged me to try SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket software. This allows point-in-time backups of whole volumes (for free) or certain parts (if you pay) - and can make them bootable. Like TM, it constrains you to using volumes formatted as HFS+, not any Windows formats, such as FAT32 or NTFS. And you further have to use the GUID Partition Table standard (not APT or MBR) to make it bootable on Intel-based Macs. I have an external drive, so I thought I’d give that a go. I’d not idea how many hours it would take to get it working.

Turns out a bug has crept into OS X v10.5 that makes certain partitioning in Disk Utility fail with the ‘Partition failed Input/Output Error’ message. OS X Tiger (10.4) doesn’t have this problem, which seems to be with weaknesses on external drives for how they’ve implemented the USB standard. I found that trying it on the old MacMini that runs Tiger) didn’t work unfortunately, but trying another tip did. Some reported that using FireWire to the drive sidesteps the issue, so one FE cable purchase later I was able to run it OK on OS X v10.5.2. (This is all according to this Apple support thread which seems to be the most useful on the topic.)

Having sorted that, I’ve now got SuperDuper! to work. It’s simple enough that non-techies can use it succesfully, I reckon. And I can testify that support is super-quick, despite it being a one- or two-man outfit. However, they really don’t help themselves with having some error messages that are much less helpful than they could be, and it doesn’t check for some things that are bound to cause obscure fatal errors after many minutes of operation.

All 4 of us went to this concert recently, at Birmingham’s great Symphony Hall. It included such classical ‘pops’ as Grieg Morning and In the Hall of the Mountain King, Strauss Radetzky March, Delibes Prelude and Mazurka from Coppélia, Elgar Nimrod, Tchaikovsky The Sleeping Beauty Waltz.

In the second half it moved to emulate the ‘Last Night of the Proms’ with the likes of The Dam Busters March, Jerusalem, Nessun Dorma, Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory. This was all accompanied by hundreds of flags - mostly Union Jacks, but some English and Welsh ones too. Plus some form of red ensign I couldn’t quite identify. I felt slightly uncomfortable seeing all this. Partly because it’s so rare to see lots of national flags in the UK (except at sports matches I never attend), and partly because the movement was almost enough to make me feel sea-sick! I also feel I ought to know what’s right and wrong with nationalism, but I can’t claim to. All I know is that the US flavour of it - with their flag everywhere — feels crass and slightly xenophobic because you can’t get away from it.

But back to the music. The tenor and baritone soloists weren’t that audible, but appeared to do reasonable justice to Bizet The Pearl Fisher’s Duet, Nessun Dorma, and leading the singing at the end.

The highlight for me was hearing Delius’ On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, which I hadn’t really
appreciated before - a beautiful piece. Oh, and the seats up on level 5A opposite the stage, have headrests.
Worth remembering in future.

One book I won’t be throwing out just yet is Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups, written by a retired UK Colonel who clearly knows what he’s talking about. I found it a surprisingly easy read for a history book, even managing to make his discussion of the battles I knew nothing about (Barbarossa, Yom Kippur, Singapore and Dieppe) as interesting as the ones I did (Falklands, Gulf War I, 9/11, Pearl Harbor).

He traces the causes of the failures - often on the apparently victorious side as well as the defeated - showing that sometimes it was scared Intelligence Officers saying what they knew the Dictator wanted to hear, sometimes it was a failure of collation, sometimes of not having good enough dissemination, and sometimes lack of direction from the top. The lack of coordination between the intel agencies in the USA comes under particular fire: a full 6 decades after Pearl Harbor, the same structural problems prevented the mass of intelligence ahead of the Al-Qa’ida attacks of 9/11 being collated and acted on. The UK’s Joint Intelligence Community (JIC) approach is normally held up as the example on how to do it, but even then it failed over the Falklands. He also said it failed over its ’sexed-up’ dossier published to the public to persuade them of the need to invade Iraq in 2003, though here his analysis didn’t go far enough. If the press reports are right, this was less of an issue in the JIC, and more the inevitable problem of intelligence from on a few MI6 agents that couldn’t be corroborated.

On almost the last page Hughes-Wilson offers a rather bleak summary and outlook for intelligence:

For whatever pearls of infonnation can be put before any nation’s leaders or policy makers, as long as there are human beings in the system, then the system is vulnerable to the vanities and frailties of humanity: another Mountbatten, too ambitious and concerned with his own personal advancement to worry about collecting proper intelligence: another complacent set of civil servants thinking “it can’t happen to me” like the British in Malaya; or diplomats who could not distinguish good old-fashioned lying and deception to sort out capahilics from intentions, like those duped by Saddam Hussein in the Gulf. Human nature will not change, nor will the relationships between bureaucrats and their masters.

Hopefully he’ll write more to suggest how best to minimise these problems, and to suggest what’s the right balance of funding for intel and conventional operations, given that both will fail some of the time.

Recommended: not just for intelligence buffs, but for those who want to get a quick overview of some of the most pivotal (or at least infamous) military events of the twentieth century.

One of the many archive boxes in the garage held old christian reference books that we were less likely to need in a hurry. Martha wanted some sketches for her placement, so this provided the incentive to dig it out and have a rummage through. We’ve kept half, and most of the rest I’m going to donate to the library at church (and see if I can interest them in using LibraryThing as a usefully public catalogue). But there a difficult few that I can’t imagine anyone being interested in any more, because they are too dated. For example the almost-non-PC title of “Sex and Young People”. It feels sacriligeous to throw a book away, but that’s what I had to with that and a few others. Please forgive me, bibliophiles of the world!

I’m definitely getting more into the philosophy of de-cluttering your life to de-stress. So, despite buying another dozen second-hand books 2 weeks ago, getting rid of this box means the number of books we have is shrinking. If you’re not scared of big numbers, then read on …

Our LibraryThing profile shows we have 823 books catalogued, though this reduces to 750 if you take out the ones we’ve only had recommended or have given away, and add the ones I’ve not yet catalogued.

On a work trip I signed up for Virgin Atlantic’s airmiles club, and I get occasional emails from them. Today’s made me start:

See our beautiful planet from 63 miles up and experience the magic of weightlessness. … Redeem 200,000 miles to receive 10% off the cost of a spaceflight, that’s an incredible $20,000 saving! Join our future astronauts and book your place in history …

Virgin’s marketing folks need to some more work tailoring their messages if they think that I’ve got a spare $200,000 knocking around to spend on a sub-orbital flight. Still, it made me smile

I like doing codewords, and we’ve got a book of them which we’re slowly doing. (If you’re not familiar with them, they contain all 26 letters of the alphabet, and each is given a number. You need to work out what letters represent which numbers.) Some are quite easy to get going with, but others much harder. Particularly when fewer than half the numbers/letters are known, it’s very easy to make false assumptions.

Anyway, here’s one that I thought I’d try a new challenge with. After filling in the given letters, could I do the rest in my head? It was a medium-hard one to get going with, but yes, I did it. I did warn you that this post was a pure show-off.

(Though I must confess that as I post this a few days later, I can’t remember any of it …!)

I’m a fan of Google’s online calendar (GCal), but you need to do some work to get it to be synchronised with OS X’s built-in iCal application. But it’s worth doing, as you can then use the local application without having to have GCal open all the time in a browser, and you keep a local copy when you’re not connected to the internet. GCal’s printing support is OK, but it’s easier and better-looking from iCal.

The main ways of achieving this are:

• Try and then buy Spanning Sync preference pane ($65) which uses their own server to manage the sync between your different sources
• Buy gSync (£10) which needs no third-party server, so could be more secure, and supports Google Apps FYD and multiple iCal accounts
• Try and then buy BusySync preference pane ($20)
• GCalDaemon (free), which is secure, more flexible (supports multiple accounts, GAFYD, some contact sharing), and cross-platform, but needs significant setup which I wouldn’t recommend for people without Unix skills.
• Wait until Google (almost certainly) release GCal that works with Google Gears, and provides its own offline service - albeit still in a browser page.

What have I opted for? Knowing some Unix, I’d like to go with GCalDaemon, but according to this forum thread, Leopard has made significant changes to iCal, and it breaks GCalDaemon at the moment. Having Google add offline support will be good, but no-one knows when that will come. So, I went with gSync.

I was reading in Third Way (Mar 2008) of John Davies who made a modern pilgrimage along the M62, wanting to learn to ‘read the ordinary’:

I have felt for some time that the everyday gets overlooked in society’s constant attentiveness to the new and the exotic, whilst all of us for most of the time are living ordinarily.

More and more I find myself agreeing with this. I can trace a few sources of this feeling:

• I’m annoyed that the news spends ever more time on the lives of celebrities;
• I realise I’m more keen on the newest gizmos, gadgets and software than can be good for my ability to just get things done;
• As I tend to everything slightly early in life, it’s probably about time I started my mid-life crisis. Or, at least, I’m concluding that I’m not going to be able to realise some of my ideas in life;
• I’m unlikely to go far out of my way to collect exotic experiences, and in many ways I’m content with the ordinary.

Unsurprising then, that I found his quote from Georges Perec powerful and provocative:

The daily newspapers talk of everything expect the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? [From Approaches to What?]

I don’t think I’m likely to walk along the M62, but the challenge is there to find the ’subliminal amongst the liminal’ of life in ordinary. Obviously for Christians, this includes noticing God’s hand at work. Greenbelt had this theme once, and that year I was struck by the question of how we can find God in our towns and cities … most of us find him easier to see in what we long have held to be ‘the works of his creation’ - but what about in the local council, or (a real challenge) Tescos?