Jason Colby’s Blog

Yes it is true I don’t make frequent updates to my blog.  Part of this stems from my subject matter limitations. You may be asking yourself why are there limitations on the subjects you blog about?  The fact is that I don’t blog anonymously and therefore have to be aware that employers, both current and potentially future, can read these posts.  With work consuming at least half of my waking day it stands to reason that much of my thoughts center around that subject.  I hesitate to write anything more than a generic mention of anything related to my position and therefore make updates when there is something else that is compelling enough to mention.  Perhaps someday I will feel the desire to be an evangelist of the products or services I work with, for now I will stick with the odds and ends that I feel worth mentioning.

There are two unrelated items I feel compelled to mention in this post.

Recently Mac unveiled the iPad and the web has been abuzz with everyone’s opinions.  My view is not different from the many other voices out there which state that the iPad is really just an overgrown iPod touch.  The pricing is too high for what you get even at the entry level model.  I was surprised to hear that the iPad does not even have a camera.  The concept is great and perhaps after a couple generations of the iPad have been released there will be enough improvements that they are worth considering.

I also wanted to mention Heritage Dr Pepper which I tried this last week.  Heritage Dr Pepper is a throwback product which is made with real sugar and not the usual high fructose corn syrup.  To me the taste was slightly less sweet and the other flavors were more noticeable.  As my sister said it brings back memories of drinking Dr Pepper with my grandfather.  Like my grandfather I like to add some salted peanuts to my Dr Pepper (not all the time just as a treat).  The product is hard to find in Northwest Washington and is said to be a limited time offering (I hope they reconsider and make this a regular offering).

Like I said two unrelated topics.

It’s a sad day as the hard drive in my Macbook has died. Replacing the hard drive is not a problem and in fact could be a good thing as I could use more space. The bad part of this all is that I only recently upgraded to Leopard and have not yet implemented time machine. I will be investigating data recovery services in hopes that I can save some of the hard drives contents, especially family photos.

I am usually good about backups and will admit that I was complacent in this case. After the hard drive is replaced I will be getting an external hard drive and setting up time machine.

For anyone reading this I would urge you to backup your data regularly, seriously don’t wait do it now!

If anyone out there can recommend a reputable and fair data recovery service let me know. One I looked at has a flat rate of $279 for a single hard drive.

Next up is snow leopard with a release date of September and while it doesn’t snow here in September (a very bad snow leopard joke) I do plan on being an early adopter this time around.