Amazon has a pretty good deal on Blu-ray discs. I’d been waiting to see who won the format wars before buying any of these discs, which actually, more or less stopped my DVD buying in its tracks.

Anyway, they are having a buy two get one sale. Follow any link in this post to go to the promotional page.

Previously I’ve written about unethical website registrars, so I found it ironic that a banner ad for the very company I considered to be engaging in these shenanigans popped up on a site I was visiting. My first thought when I saw it was, “Yeah, Dexter is back!” You see, I am a bit of a Dexter fan. It’s so sad to see poor gay David killing people, but also so wonderful. A bad guy you can cheer for, a villain you can love, the man you want to right your wrongs. I just wish he did spec work.

Oh yeah, the banner ad. Well, here it is. Judge for yourself. Does the man not look a bit like Dexter? Why the gloves? If it was really golf, why no clubs? Is that a victim in the background? What evil and heinous deed has she done to earn Dexter’s wrath? It looks like she’s dragging a body. Time for a bloodslide!

I present you with an official Dexter graphic so you can see where I am coming from. I make a lot of stuff up. But this time…

“Heya, Dex! See you around, k?”

Got this in email Tuesday night:

Attention,

I am Mr John Jasper in South Africa, our client died Three years ago
leaving behind Capital amount (US$14.6M with interest) in our bank,
as his account manager, till date nobody has come forward
or put application for the claim.

During the bank private search for the relative recently your name and
email contact was among the findings that matches the same surname as the
deceases who died interstate with no Will or next of kin with our bank
record.

To maintain the level of security required I have intentionally left out
the final details. please, come forward since we can provide you with
the details needed for us to claim this Funds so that I and my colleague can be
gratifed by you.

To affirm your willingness and cooperation, please do so by replying me at
my private email stating your mind and also on how we should share the
funds and also send your private telephone number to us or call me if you
can.

I do expect your prompt response.

Thank you,
Mr. John Jasper
+27 7419 38219

Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

So, I promptly sent this reply:

Was your client’s last name Jorgensen? I am not aware of many  
Jorgensens in South Africa. This isn’t one of those Nigerian scams  
I’ve read about is it? What do you need from me?

I’m not so sure I am willing to gratify anyone at this point. I think  
I would need to meet the person, or at least see pictures. Send me a  
photo of who I am dealing with, and I might send you mine.

My mother told me not to give out my number, and I think yours is long  
distance, so if for now, we could keep this in email that would be  
great.

I hope to hear from you soon. I could really use some extra money, and  
$14.6 million sounds like a lot!

Please write back. I am having trouble paying my bills and this could  
be my salvation! I was just praying about this tonight and then your  
email arrived. Are you the answers to my prayers?

Thanks for getting in contact with me on this important matter. I  
really hope your client is a Jorgensen. Otherwise, once again, my  
prayers will go unmet.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Christopher

I’ve already started to spend the money, so hope this isn’t a scam! John Jasper sounds like an honest name doesn’t it? If he writes back, I’ll be sure to let you know. I’m still not going to gratify anyone from Africa, no matter how much money they offer. Well, maybe for 15 million, but 14.6 million just isn’t enough (especially since it’s him and a “colleague”). I have standards.

I’m told it’s not polite to laugh at your own jokes, which I don’t get at all, so it’s good that I have a dry sense of humor and my jokes are seldom intended to invoke laughter. Seriously, if it’s funny you’re supposed to laugh, right? You don’t laugh if it’s not funny. So by this logic, if you’re not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, then any jokes you tell should be devoid of humor. But I am sorry, I have such a twisted, sarcastic, bitter, dry, cynical (and sometimes mean) view of the world that few people actually amuse me. I’m just lucky I happen to be one of them.

The above probably makes me sound like an asshole, but since my humor is most often directed at myself, I’m not trying to stand on any high ground. I don’t look down on the things I make fun of. In fact, to truly reveal something for what it is, you have to know it throughly, some part of you has to love what you mock (which is why my humor is self deprecating). If I’ve lost you, that’s OK. I don’t know what the hell I am saying either.

Just watch out for my upcoming one man show, “I am Christopher!” Ha! Not even I could be that far over the top (unlike some people). And you for sure won’t see nude photos of any of my private bits on these here interwebs (unlike some people). But I do know the longer I go on with this site the more of a parody it will become.

christopher.jorgensen.name is musings on things that amuse me, but the more I put out there, the crazier I think I will come off. Who has a site dedicated to them done by themselves? Oh, there are fansites aplenty, but as far as I know this is the only one about me. And I run it. I am my own biggest fan! The is an experiment in meta-journaling. It’s a joke no one’s going to get. Yes, it’s like the thousands of other sites out there documenting lives and thoughts, but unlike them, I know this is a really insipid idea. Point me to a journal or blog (if you must use that word) of any substance. Just one. Sure there are people recording valiant fights with disease. There are experts in various industries writing insightful sites and helpful articles. There are even a few journalists with journals that just entertain. But the personal sites, the ones about the person writing them, find me one of those that isn’t it’s own joke, a self-parody. You might be able to, but I doubt it. Another challenge is find me one that knows it is parody. I just may be a beautiful and unique snowflake.

Lost you again? Sorry, Fightclub reference. I can’t talk about it.

Seems like you always have the data crash right before you were going to do a backup. Always.

A friend of mine says, “Data that doesn’t exist in two places, doesn’t exist.” I used to add to this rule, “And floppies or Zip discs don’t count as a ‘place,’” but no sane people still use those. I’d say monthly I’ve had to tell people they are screwed.

I’ve wanted to get business cards made up that say, “Data Loss Therapist,” and hand them to anyone who asks, “Well, what do I do now?” But generally, after a drive crash, the last thing people want to deal with is a smart ass. But I read online once (so it must be true) that Drivesavers keeps a therapist on staff that used to be a police negotiator that talked potential suicides down off the ledge. I’m too lazy to look up if they actually do, but even if not, I like the story. But they charge $1,200 to get data back (if they succeed), so a great service for us wealthy types, the rest of you should make you do backups.

A few months back I decided it would be easier for me to take my backup drive into work rather than transferring the data some other way. Sometimes sneakernet is faster than any other method when you’re talking gigs of info. I set the drive on my desk, was looking for some cable or another or taking my coat off or something, when I knocked the drive to the floor. It heard a metallic “ping!” and knew I was screwed. I plugged the drive in, and nothing. Just click click click, like it was taunting me with the data it had just eaten, and reminding you need a backup of your backup, and in some other place than your primary one. One at home, one at work is a good idea,

Now, ostensibly, this was my backup drive, so I should have been mad at the loss of the $100 drive, not the data on it. And while, for the most part, I am sure this was true, I had no real idea what was on the drive. I’d back up multiple computers to this thing over years. Some of the computers didn’t even exist anymore and I had no way of knowing if I’d migrated all those files to a new one. I also know for sure they was some stuff on there I thought too large to make back ups of, like my music collection, since I have the original discs in this case it was only a matter of the time involved with reripping them (can you create a backup of time?). This is still an act of labour I have yet to recreate. Even at today’s ripping speeds, I have too many discs to want to do this in bulk.

I felt sick. I mean, actually sit down and try to move backward through time sick. Every drive eventually fails. It’s a law of entropy that all moving parts eventually break, whether a disc drive or a human heart. Eventually all things must die. It’s not a cheery thought, but a lot of truths are not pleasant.

A month or so back my girlfriend had the drive on her new Macbook go *poof*. Nobody expects a new machine to do this. It happened the weekend before she was going to do a full back up. We’d gotten her a drive just for this purpose, and she’d been using it fairly regularly for another machine, but for various reasons I won’t go into here, the one that failed hadn’t been backed up in some time. She said she was planning on doing it that weekend and I believe her, since that’s probably why her drive failed. That law of data consumption that detects when you are going to do a backup, and makes sure you wished you’d done it a day earlier than planned!

At a previous job, I had a secretary with a dead drive look at me and say, “Well, last time this happened you guys were able to get everything back, so I didn’t see a need for backups.” To me this is like saying, “Well, the last time I was shot I survived, so I’m not really afraid of bullets anymore.” This is the kind of person Darwin is calling home. After this woman’s first drive failure we’d hooked up and additional external drive, made sure she had a functioning floppy (and Zip drive), and had server sharepoints automounting on her desktop. She started crying and said she’d lose a year’s worth of data, everything she’d done on her job over the last year, if we weren’t able to help. I wanted to say, “Well, you’re fired then,” and take joy in this statement and mean it, but less than a smart ass, no one wants to deal with pure evil after data loss. So instead, I pulled that second bullet out of her, and was once again able to save her files. I’m pretty sure the only lesson she learned, once again, is backups aren’t really important.

Thankfully, most people aren’t this stupid. Catastrophic data loss happens to the best of us. Sometimes even more than once. We’ve all overwritten a full folder with an empty one named the same thing, accidently trashed files we weren’t done with, quit out of a program after hours of work without saving first, and trashed our favorite directory of porn because we were sure we had in burned to a DVD. The best of us learn from the mistakes of others, which is why I am writing this. Yes, to encourage you to do a backup today. In fact, there’s nothing else worth reading in this post or this site, so quit reading and go do it now!

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while, but held off, since I didn’t want it to sound like an “I told you so” to the girlfriend, the wound being fresh and all. I hadn’t really told her so, but I know it would have felt like I was pretending I had. And, like I said, I knew exactly how she felt since it’d happened to me. So why am I writing this now? Well, I finally replaced my backup drive, and got a card to connect it with, and as soon as I am done writing this, I am going to make sure I finally get at least one