Mozy: Reticulating Splines

It made me smile to see this videogame reference in Mozy. Anyone else remember where this comes from? I won’t spoil it.

What the “J” Key is For

When I confessed to Eric Case at SXSW that I worried that my friends (that’s you!) who read my blog or follow my shared items might not care about the nerdy or videogamey things I’m most into now, he made a good point:

That’s what the “J” key is for.

So a fair chance from now on that I might pick up the blogging pace a little bit. Please skip over as desired. I shall be enjoying this delicious dogfood.

Image credit: paulovalde. Note to Dvorak typists: I am not skilled enough to Photoshop a keyboard for us. But you know what I mean. “C” FTW.

Notes from a Sticky Wicket: My Slow Email Movement

Shriram writes Notes from a Sticky Wicket: My Slow Email Movement:

“And here's something amazing. If I wait a day, it takes me about an hour to restore my mailbox. If I wait two days, it takes me about an hour-and-a-half. If I wait three days, it still takes me about an hour-and-a-half.”

Very true. I’ve found that both momentum and having other people pick up mailing list–slack in the interim contribute significantly to making bulk e-mail processing efficient.

I’m somewhat of an e-mail apologist, though I probably get less overall — and more directly-relevant — e-mail than the people who think that it’s outright broken.

I enjoy the two or three hours every morning when Mountain View is asleep because I can plow through the previous day’s mail quickly. As it gets towards the afternoon and they start the firehose I then just try to skim and pick out the important messages.

• Gmail’s “personal level indicators” are great for highlighting messages to take a look at sooner rather than later.
• If you’re not using Gmail then I’m not surprised if you’re having trouble handling lots of e-mail.
• Inbox Zero. Do it. It’s important.

Time Machine Restore: “Connect to Remote Disk” Grayed Out

My MacBook Pro’s drive gave up the ghost. AppleCare covered it, and now I’m restoring from its most recent Time Machine backup.

I backup to a shared volume, so imagine my surprise when, after starting up from the Leopard DVD, the “Connect to Remote Disk” button was grayed out! There appears to be no nice way to restore from a networked drive from the Leopard DVD.

Not to worry though. I found an Apple support thread on the subject, which offered two solutions:

• Mount the networked volume via the Terminal
• Plug the shared drive directly into the laptop

I tried the second option, which seems to be working. It appears that even though shared drives use sparse disk images for Time Machine, while local drives are used directly, Leopard will restore from a local drive with sparse disk images on it.