Over 1.2 million files on my computer are being backed up to prevent possible digital devastation.

I’ve written about this before, but need to say it again (mostly to myself). If you have not backed up your computer files, do it now.

The money* you’ll spend on a hard drive is worth not having the sickening feeling that you’d have if:

1. You just lost all of your pictures of your wife, kids, and experiences from the past year.
2. You lost all of your work files and were in the middle of a big project.
3. You lost thousands of dollars in music files.

Costco, Wall-Mart, Target, Best Buy all sell external drives. About 6 months ago I bought a 500gb hard drive for around 80 dollars. If I had just lost all of the stuff on my computer: music, pictures, thoughts recorded, ministry ideas, movies created, etc…and someone said, “Would you spend $80 to have all of this back?” My answer would be an easy ‘Yes’*

*If I had $80 dollars available at the time. This is not condoning debt or financial irresponsibility!

I know you’ve all been waiting eagerly for this news….there you have it. Both me and my blog will continue to grow and change…that’s good news for us all.

Another cool deal is that they give 25% of this bundle’s sales to charity. So you can get geeky and generous at the same time! They’ve already raised $293,983 to give away!

And please bookmark this new address for Jen’s blog: http://allmyish.com/blog/

It will look like this if you get to the right place:

See, I’m the nerd in the family. I like technology. I like hacking my way through some code and messing things up and then fixing them. This is mostly fun, until I get in too deep. Which happens more than I’d like to admit. 

Today I set sail into dangerous waters…I started messing with Jen’s blog. I’m trying to migrate her blog from typepad to wordpress. I think that wordpress is superior and I’ve been using it for the past year. I think that it’s getting better and better and it’s…free software. Between the two of us we were spending close to $200 per year on our blogs. Not anymore. 

But I got going too fast today and did some dumb techie thing (rerouted the domain name from the old blog to the new) before Jen had a chance to do what she needed to do…update her pictures on the new blog. So, because of this, I lived a few moments in fear of my life as all of Jen’s pictures on both blogs went missing. Oops. She was not pleased. I was frightened. Frightened that I’d be alone in a house with her if this didn’t get fixed and even more frightened that I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to undo what I had done…

Thankfully, I did. Jen smiled. My pulse went down to a normal level. And we’re harmoniously trying to do this in the right order. I think…

So if you’ve subscribed to the old feed..all 2 of you…could you update to the feedburner one? It would really help me keep better track of you and ultimately try to market myself out to you more effectively. 

If you’ve never seen a feed, and I don’t mean like when a guy feeds like a 1,000 hunting dogs at the same time, then click the little orange icon next to the words “Urban Idealist Posts” and see what happens. Your guess is as good as mine.  

Thanks!

20 gigs

Four buttons

A high-contrast screen…no color.

A big scroll wheel…no buttons.

The size of a brick…a small brick that could fit into my pocket though…I mean, it is an Apple still.

About a year ago I was out on a jog (that may have been the last time I was out on a jog) and my beloved 3rd Gen iPod froze up. None of the four precious buttons were working and the ‘lock’ was stuck on. So I did what any intelligent man/beast would do; I hit it. Hard. Lots of times. So many times in fact that shattered the two-tone LCD screen. Jen was not pleased. Neither was I.

The good news? It still worked as an external hard drive…20 gigs of external hard drive might I add. It was renamed ‘The Transporter’ because my little white, four buttoned friend was only good for carrying around my digital data.

A few weeks ago I was hanging out with my friend Jeremy, somebody had told me that he used to fix old iPods so I asked him about it. He said it was easy and that if you were patient then you could maybe fix it…I was surprised that he didn’t say that if you hit it real hard, over and over, it might work.

I went on a sight called eBay…you may have heard about it. The last time I bought something on eBay was 1999 or 2000…Dave Matthews Storytellers full recording, it was such an old school recording that it sounded like there was a bunch of robots shouting at the dog track in the background…I digress.

Anyway, I found a new LCD screen on eBay and bought it. Well, I won it…16 dollars including shipping. I watched a video tutorial on the internet (thank ifixipodsfast.com guy) and took ‘The Transporter’ apart. I love this stuff…I love technology…even old school technology. That’s how much I love it. I put in the new screen. Popped some logic boards and batteries back into place (well one of each) and put the cover back on. I have to admit…the iPod wasn’t the only thing turned on when the Apple logo appeared and the hard disk fired up…joking…partly. I was giddy.

I then proceeded to do the ‘guess who fixed their iPod dance’. Maisie watched in wonder as I danced with my little white brick of music in hand. Jen was annoyed…but then excited that I wouldn’t be bugging her about buying a new iPod.

I gave ‘The Transporter’ a new name…’RePod’…to celebrate the life, the second coming, of my iPod. Join with me in celebrating. RePod is full of music and podcasts…ready to go out on another sweaty, overweight, out of shape, stumble-of-a-jog.

However, I have my fears that facebook will become the same worthless ‘tool’ as myspace. I don’t know what to do about this…