Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and My 15
I've been spending a lot of time recently going through my relatively massive music collection and thought it was nice (around 17,000 songs, all in .mp3 format now) until I saw Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums List.
Their top 5:
1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys
3. Revolver, The Beatles
4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan
5. Rubber Soul, The Beatles
No real surprises there (ok, maybe # 2), but I was surpised how few modern albums made the cut. Nirvan'a Nevermind came in at #17 and U2's Joshua Tree landed at #26 but the rest are pretty far down the list. Of course this is just a subjective list but nevertheless will get me interested in some stuff I may have over looked.
So what are my top 15 all time favorite albums?
1. Ten, Pearl Jam
2. Automatic For The People, R.E.M.
3. Nevermind, Nirvana
4. Star, Belly
5. Pablo Honey, Radiohead
6. Fear, Toad the Wet Sprocket
7. Plans, Death Cab For Cutie
8. Some Devil, Dave Matthews
9. Ritual De Lo Habitual, Jane's Addition
10. Jar of Flies, Alice In Chains
11. Above, Mad Season
12. So Tonight That I Might See, Mazzy Star
13. Medusa, Annie Lennox
14. Final Straw, Snow Patrol (Thanks Anne!)
15. The Joshua Tree, U2
The list above was pretty difficult to make; my criteria was that I had to love the ENTIRE album and hearing it never gets old, ever. Some of the albums changed my life and some of them saved it. Some bring back strong thoughts of nostalgia and love gained/lost/never realized. Some just rocked. A few are just a just a few years old and a couple would be old enough to get a driver's license. I'd be pretty interested in hearing your top 5,10, 15, whatever list of all time favorite albums.
Fall Is Here
I missed you so...
The longest, hottest and driest summer in recent Seattle history is over. I hope. Please. Seriously.
9-6= 3
Bentley is going to give me a heart attack soon and I think my time will be up before his. After all of his crazy ass adventures, he did it once more today though it was arguably my fault this time. Everyday I come home, he's standing on top of the washer in the mud room to greet me with big MEOW MEOWs but not today. I got home a little later than usual and thought maybe he was just taking a nap. Grace was there though. Hmm. Odd. I'll just update my I-Tunes to version 7 and then go see him and let Ellie out of her room.
10 minutes later, No Beebs. Grace is acting really funny though talking up a storm (instead of laying all over my arms and keyboard) and pacing. Then I just had a panic. What if he had gotten out this morning? I'm running all over the house calling his name. Nothing except Grace yelling back at me to shut the hell up. Looked in the other bedrooms, under the beds and in the closets. Nothing. Run outside. Back first then front. Heart rate= 190. Calling him like crazy. Just as I was about to dial Amy, I thought I heard a faint meow. Great, he's under the damn deck again. I run in and grab the flashlight seriously thinking about calling the fire dept. Nothing under the deck but I could hear him better now. Looked in the trees because it sort of seemed like he was above me. Nope. On the roof? I walked all around the house and couldn't see him but noticed I couldn't hear him when I was in the front yard.
What the hell? I recognized his meow but it seemed so faint and distant. He could obviously hear me though and possibly even see me. I actually became naseous. Then he let out a big one and I looked up into the bedroom window from the deck. He had to be inside. Sure enough, he was in the walk in closet. Somehow, even though I'd (very) quickly opened the door, I managed to miss him and probably scared him enough that he didn't meow. Poor guy. Lots of tuna flakes and grooming from Grace should make him forget and eventually my blood pressure will return to normal. I miss the days when they were babies and laid around all day in piles of big blankets. I don't know how my parents dealt with me when I got old enough to get myself in trouble. Constantly.
Insurance For Your Data
About a month ago, I had a terrible dream that there had been a fire in my house and though I'd managed to save the kids and Amy, I felt as if I'd lost something irreplaceable. I didn't actually solve that in the dream (from what I can remember) but on the way into work the next day, I realized that I would have lost all my digital pictures and thousands of digital documents I had created over the past 10 years. Sure, I'd been smart to back everything up multiple times on RAID 5 disk arrays (I've had many hard disks fail) but the problem was that all of this data was stored in one physical place. A fire, flood or major earthquake would mean losing them forever.
Offsite storage isn't new to me (I back up all of my client's websites in two different locations (one East Coast and the other on the West Coast) which has saved my ass on a few occasions. Also, at the time, I managed an Engineering group for a major ISP where we took data backup extrememely seriously.
My were requirements weren't simple:
1) At least RAID 5 (preferably RAID 6 and NO SOFTWARE RAID)
2) Secure datacenter in a geologically and politically stable part of the world
3) Good, redundant connectivity
4) Support for rsync, sftp, ssh, Webdavs, smb and fuse (specifically sshfs so I can mount it locally on my Linux box)
5) A decent TOS (terms of service)
A week's worth of searching led me to rsync.net. They're a little pricey ($1.80 per gig per month) but these guys know what they're doing and only doing this one thing (most other providers also did shared web hosting). They have a TOS that really favors the privacy of the customer and secure file transfer is their priority. They support all the protocols I required above and just yesterday added Dupliclity which is basically rsync + gpg. Kick ass.
I've been using them for a little over 3 weeks now and they get 5 stars. SSHFS mounting has worked flawlessly and they even helped me with some really crazy stuff I was trying to do with rsync. It took me only a few hours to write a shell script that rounded up all the changed data on my machines and NAS arrays and automatically upload them to my rsync share.
If you are serious about protecting your data, sign up with rsync, they're really the only game in town.
