Ever lost important files?

I'm sure you've had this happen - you're in the middle of a paper. You're working hard and things are going good. You step away from your computer for some grub and a night away, and by the time you come back - POOF! - your computer it blue screened (I know, I know, Mac users probably don't have this....but until someone buys me a Mac, I'm sticking with the cheap Windows that meets my needs) and you're stuck with the last auto-save that Office did (if it can recover it).

This is why you need to BACK STUFF UP. I personally use SyncToy to back my laptop up to my server. But I've come to the realization lately that it's not enough. What happens if my stuff gets stolen? What if I want to go back to an older revision and I've overwritten it? The solution? Off-site backup.

There are a number of ways to do this, and an even greater number of online places to do this: Amazon's S3, Microsoft's SkyDrive, Carbonite, and Mozy. I'm using Mozy. This is for a number of reasons:

1. Price. It's FREE for 2GB of online storage. Yes, free. No strings attached. Obviously, 2GB isn't enough to store a music collection, or a full set of home videos, etc, but it's PLENTY for me to save all my school work and other important documents. If you really need the extra space, they offer unlimited backup for $4.95/month.
2. Location. I'm a Utahn, born and bred. If I can support a homegrown company versus Amazon or MS, I will.
3. I know employees. The company is solid.
   
4. Encryption. It's safe and secure.
5. Block-level incremental backups. This is cool. This method only backs up the blocks within the file that changed, rather than copying the whole file.

Convinced?
Go to Mozy.com to sign up for an account and download their software. It's free. You can thank me later.

Are you a university student? Want Server 2003/2008 for free?

Two posts in one day? What?

Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
This is available from Microsoft's Dreamspark website. Windows Server 2003 is specifically designed for a server environment, but can easily be configured to use as a workstation. Once configured as a workstation, it is basically Windows XP, but a more secure code revision. Windows XP drivers nearly always work perfectly on Server 2003, with very very few exceptions. Users also report gaming performance is equal to Windows XP, and better than Vista.

Windows Server 2008
Available through Dreamspark (see above), instructions here to configure it to workstation so it looks more like Vista except without the bloat.

Thanks to various people on SlickDeals.net (the best deals site, IMO) for the info. I've gotten a key from Dreamspark for 2008, and will grab one for 2003 here soon.

Carlos Boozer

It's not often that I stray from my geek and Office musings, but I came across something that I think is hilarious and I wanted to share.

Few things in my life are more important than Utah Jazz basketball and BYU athletics. So, it's only natural that these loves of my life (or frustrations, in the case of BYU sports this year, but that's a whole separate post) come into my blog.

The MOST frustrating player on the Jazz by far is Carlos Boozer. His "matador" defense (or lack thereof) is unreal. Whether it's just laziness, inability, stupidity, or something else is the big million dollar question. Added to this lack of 'D' is his, as of late, inability to do much on the offensive end makes this the $12M question.

This flowchart (stolen from this guy) explains what must go through his head some nights.

I'm just not sure it's worth paying a guy $12M for his yelling ability ("And One!"), and lets be honest, you pay me even $1M and I'm going to work my tail off to get better, not work my tail off to sit on the bench.

VBA is....interesting

VBA is powerful. I'm in an intro to VBA class at BYU this semester which has been pretty awesome. There's a bit of stuff you can do in VBA to make Excel and other apps pretty smooth. The IDE sucks though. Pretty bad.

Maybe I'm spoiled, having learned C# in VS2008. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a pretty face, and VS definitely has that. Eiter way, using the built-in IDE and looking at the standard forms, the only thing I can think is "This would look SO much better in C#." Problem is that my final has to be done in VBA. I considered importing a C# project as an activex control and sneaking around it that way, but decided that would probably earn me a great grade for creativity, and a bad grade for everything else.

I mean, who wants a form that looks this bland?

Oh well. This is a screenshot from my final project, a tax client tracking tool for my dad. It can invoice, create/email reports, email reminders, etc.

The Office Quote of the Day

It seems I unintentionally took a break from blogging. I'll be back soon, I promise. I'm working on a VBA app right now for my dad (it won't be pretty, but it should be functional), and finishing up MyLibrary (both are projects for school).

While I do that, one of my most favorite quotes from the Office came up on my calendar:
"I am taking responsibility. It is up to me to get rid of the curse that hit Meredith with my car. I'm not superstitious. But I am a little stitious."

-Michael

"MyLibrary" in C#

Last semester I sat working at my desk and I looked at my bookshelf and realized that I had no idea which books I owned and which ones I didn't. I also had been wanting to learn a new programming language, and decided to write a program to keep track of my books (and later, DVD's). Since I get Visual Studio 2008 for free from school, I picked C# as the language, and MyLibrary was born.

This semester I was able to completely overhaul the broken, not well written program for a new class at BYU, the "unclass", where the topic is picked by the student. Mine is C#, obviously.

MyLibrary is completely light-weight, and at this point fully-functional. It stores the entire library in an XML file anywhere on the users machine. Many other implementations store these types of libraries in SQL, but I wanted it to be a standalone executable that the user doesn't have to install.

It also allows the user the option to automatically search the Amazon website using the UPC/ISBN (through the Amazon Web-services API) based on one row or the entire database.

In addition, the user can scan the barcodes in from a barcode scanner or a Cuecat scanner (we had to use one for my VBA class, and I thought it'd be fun to implement it here) and have the software find the information for them, limiting user-input.

There are still bugs of course, and I don't claim it to be the best written software, but it's been fun to write. I'll post the executable when it's more complete then it is now.

It also has a really basic stats page:

*sidenote - the stats page has a pie chart that the screen print doesn't pick up for some reason. Odd.

Media Center Update

A lot has changed since my last post on my media center. At that time, I had the media center up and running, and then it unexpectedly crashed on me. After much troubleshooting (the worst part about DIY projects) I realized it was most likely (note I never officially figured it out) that the video card I was using was PCI Express 2.0, and my mobo was an older one, that likely didn't support 2.0 on the Express slot.

Although that sucked, I was okay, because I wasn't quite ready to make the transition to HDMI in my living room. So, I yanked the vid card, put the media center in my office, and used my XBox 360 as a media extender to play my recorded shows from the office.

Did it work? Yeah. Was it the best solution? No way. I found the XBox to be somewhat slow and at times unresponsive. In addition, it required another remote (because I didn't want to take the time to program my Remote Commander for a temporary solution).

Anyway, I soon found a great deal at Buy.com for a 3-to-1 HDMI switch (only $12 with free shipping), and then picked up some HDMI cables, and I realized it was time to move the HTPC into the living room. But it was an unsightly thing in its' mid-tower case. Until my brother offered his "old" media case because he'd purchased a bigger and better one. The downside to this was it only accepts half-height cards, meaning my TV tuner wouldn't fit.

After thinking about this, I ended up being okay with getting rid of the card. I'm quickly becoming an HD snob anyway, and unless I wanted to upgrade my HTPC to Vista and run the TV Pack hack to get QAM on my tuner, I wasn't going to get OTA HD on my tuner anyway, and the new case looked great compared to the old one.

So I made the switch - and still couldn't use my HDMI card. Thankfully, I got an older Radeon X300 low-profile card with DVI out, which will work until I either upgrade my mobo or my video card.

Add to that using Handbrake to rip my DVD's, coupled with AnyDvd to strip the encoding, I've now got all my DVD's stored on my HTPC.

I also was looking for a good, easy to use visual piece to navigate the media when my brother recommended XBMC which is pretty, easy to use and develop on, and best of all, is free.

The last thing that I haven't done yet is to install VNC or Synergy to allow me to control the media center from my laptop. Once that's done, it will be fully functional. I'll post a pic of what the computer looks like sometime here soon.