I went to Patagonia for my vacation this year, cleverly timed for SXSW.

It was harder than I expected to unplug. For the first week, I had iPhone twitch (I'd left the phone deliberately). The second week it got easier as we got into longer and tougher hikes.

The food was good. The hiking was gorgeous, and I lucked out on my hiking companions, Lois and Kent (yes, really), who were and are charming people and an incredibly cute couple.

Photos are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/will.sargent/Patagonia

Check out the La Bomba Del Tiempo videos especially; 16 drummers all working together, beating up the crowd into a frenzy.

I'd tell you the blow by blow, but honestly going through holiday snaps is something best done on demand. If you're interested in anything, send me an email and I'll fill you in.

I've been going through an inordinate number of machines lately. I'm down one Seasonic power supply, two motherboards (one Megabyte, one MSI) and the Thinkpad came back from lenovo with the original problem solved, but with half the screen on the fritz.

This isn't new or unusual; most of the machines I've put together have only lasted a couple of years or so. Consumer hardware just isn't built for reliability; hard drives being the worst offenders. As a result, most of the information I really care about is based off-site. The two biggest exceptions are the iTunes library, and my financial data.

The standard solution is to have a backup hard drive. The problem here is that backup hard drives also go bad. I've run into this a couple of times with the Linkstation and the Western Digital External. There's not much you can to do test this except restore from backup every once in a while and see if it actually worked (which is about as fun as it sounds).

Another possible solution is to use offsite backup such as Mozy or Amazon S3. I read Zawodny's experiment with it and started using s3sync. But.

1) Uploading 30GB of music took a week.
2) Most, if not all, of that data was corrupted to the point of unintelligibility.

I only found this out when I thought I was missing some data, of course. Downloading 30GB of data is also a pain (and frankly, I didn't expect so many errors -- every single track sounded like it was playing underwater at half speed.

So. It turns out the best solution is to make sure you have an inordinate number of machines, and have them synced off the master. I may not be able to rely on one machine, or on a backup hard drive, but I can have music (or any encrypted data) put onto available laptops -- and I know that data is good, because I play it from there. This is a looser implementation of jwz's backup strategy, but it's good enough for me.

Thinking about this a bit more, it's surprising that backup technology is as limited as it is. Creating an encrypted bittorrent and sharing it amongst a pool would be an excellent way of ensuring redundancy and error correction (is this what Tor does?), but you may not even need to go that far; every time you do a backup, encrypt it, chop it up into yenc blocks, and dump it onto Usenet. A thousand servers will pass it around and make your data retrievable for all time.

The new company blog is up, and I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been doing for months. Stealth mode, you can keep.

It is out of character for me to gush. But seriously, Topspin is the first company I've ever been in where I look forward to the meetings. Things just keep getting better every sprint. Our customers are literally rock stars. I've been a huge NIN fan since I was 18, and just getting the opportunity to help out was beyond awesome. It's in Potero Hill right next to the Whole Foods, I bike to work every day, and every day there's some DJing tunes through the Airport Express.

Oh, and the Billboard cover was nice.

Okay, I understand why Evernote is so cool now.

Take your digital camera and take photos of all your handwritten notes. Import them to the PC. Rotate them so that they're the right way up. Drag them into Evernote. Wait for it to finish indexing. Presto. You now have all your notes in digital format no matter which computer you're on, and you have them indexed and searchable.

Today, my brother and I found a man lying in the street on Van Ness and Market. His eyes were open but he wasn't moving, and he was clearly unconscious. I checked he had a pulse and was breathing, phoned 911, and tried to figure out what the hell happened.

Pupils weren't dilated. He had blood in his mouth, and it looked like he'd bitten his tongue. The back of his head was bloody. His heart rate was elevated, and his breathing was ragged -- it sounded like his tongue was rattling in the back of his throat every time he breathed. It looked like he'd just been walking down the street, bit his tongue really hard and then fell straight back onto the pavement.

He started to move around a little bit after four minutes, and after five could say 'police' and 'wanna get up'. I didn't think it was a good idea for him to move until the paramedics came by, but I wasn't going to hold him down either. It turned out he couldn't really get up by himself, so we supported him until the paramedics came by.

I'm very glad he didn't stop breathing. I was not looking forward to giving him the breath of life.

An hour later, we successfully contested a parking ticket before a hearing officer.