never let them see you're scared

at some point in the next few days, perlmonger and I are likely to be hurtling across the country. And so it’s particularly vital that my PDA and my backup (to removable firewire drive) both work.

first off, my Palm Treo refused to sync. It’s been temperamental over USB for a while, but I just plugged in a bluetooth module and did it that way. I use an Artpad on my machine, although it has a mouse plugged in, but yesterday perlmonger was complaining about the Macbook trackpad while he was configuring up Ubuntu, and I gave him the mouse. And, although it didn’t dawn on me till a bit later, that’s when the bluetooth started going peculiar.

I absolutely must have up to date info when I’m away, and so this morning I painfully pulled out every bit of Palm Desktop and Missing Sync, and reinstalled them, with several reboots in between, and it worked! And now it doesn’t again, but I think another reboot will sort that. [glare]

backup: all my very important data is backed up to an external web server, but we also use removable drives for other stuff, which we take with us when we go away. Mine was sat in the server room, hooked on to a Linux box, and has behaved beautifully with Silverkeeper for *ages*. But recently, it’s been giving reporting errors at the end of the backup.

I bought a copy of Super Duper, and that seemed ok, but I got an odd message this morning too. So we crawled under desks and fiddled with cables, and now Goat¹ (the drive) is installed on Weatherwax (my Mac desktop machine) and backing away like a goodun. I very much hope² this works out as it should.

¹ the internal drives are cottage and privy – if you’re a Discworld fan, you’ll understand. [changes icon for post].

² this is an understatement.