I have just finished spending this weekend completely replacing my backup process. Seeing as a few people have asked and it's all fresh in my head I'll try and write down some key lessons/decisions I came across along the way... OK, OK, I want to show off a bit too :-p

I have a lot of very old boxes at home so the brief was to build a system that I could use as a web & mail server at home (I have pro hosting out on the internet for big projects), a file server (NAS) for home machines, a music server for home entertainment and a backup server to back up *all* my machines. I decided on an AMD 64 with 4 x 400GB SATA drives and an Adaptec hardware RAID controller set up as RAID 5. I chose CentOS for the OS and the now opensource cobalt GUI for mail & web (for those of you that don't know there is a very nice combined installer). A combination of Ampache and mt-daapd work brilliantly as music servers.

But anyway, back to the backups!

Shortly after the Halloween Sk8Jam event I was contacted by a local paper that wanted to do an interview with me!  How cool is that?  Anyway, long story short here it is...

Definitely one of the most fun of the Pagan festivals and a great excuse to get dressed up!

I had three fancy dress Halloween parties this year over two days and all of them skating.  Two roller disco's at Camberley Arena and a Halloween street skate in London.  I had been subtly growing the stubble/beard for the last three weeks and had decided to shock everyone by shaving my head and cutting a goatee!  I think it worked :-)

There are some breaches in security you can't help but laugh at! Even better that only two people reported it...

I would love to know the percentage of cars in the UK that have these things!?  The scary thing to me isn't that cars have them but that people are driving around in cars and don't know they have them.  I may be wrong but I would imagine that it would help prevent accidents if you knew that your car could prove your driving... saying that, I can see that that may not be a selling point!

This was my first Berlin marathon and as such I don't have much to compare it to.  I have previously done two marathons but they were 2 and 3 years ago at Goodwood, I actually got a faster time three years ago than two!! For the people trying to imagine the Berlin marathon (especially those that have only every done races on circuits) it is just like the London marathon... only in Berlin... and on skates! It is through the streets of Berlin and crowds line the streets shouting encouragement.  Unlike the London marathon it is also very smooth and a very nice surface to skate.  The Berlin marathon is both a skate race (on the Saturday) which draws around 9000 skaters and a running race (on the Sunday) which draws over 40000 runners.

It was only a matter of time...

Digital channel FX premieres a new ad format tomorrow, one that it claims to be the first television advert preventing PVR users from skipping through commercial breaks.

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