zerosleeps

Balmain Rentals are a bit of an institution in Sydney. They’re known for miles around for their cheap van hire. Most of them are Toyotas, all of them are white, and all of them look like they’ve had a… colourful existence.

Well last weekend I was helping a friend move a washing machine, so I finally had an excuse to experience the mighty Balmain Rentals for myself, and what a hoot it was!

The van we ended up with had half-a-million kilometers on the clock, and you could see and feel every single one of them! This thing had done the equivalent of driving to the moon and half-way back again, all from just pottering around the shores of Sydney. The steering wheel needed a quarter turn before anything happened, the gear stick felt like it was connected to a bowl of semolina, and the exhaust fumes leaked through one of the many holes in the floor straight into the van.

I haven’t laughed as hard for a very long time! I wouldn’t hesitate to rent a van from these guys in the future.

The washing machine was delivered in one piece by the way.

There are two kinds of people: those who backup their data, and those who have never had a hard-drive fail.

That’s an old joke that IT support people like to throw around, but as someone who has had several hard-drives fail over the years, it comes dangerously close to the truth. The hard-drive in your computer will eventually fail. The mechanics in spinning drives don’t last forever, and even SSD drives are known to wear out after a while.

I remember, back in the floppy disk days, telling my Dad that the accounts and invoices for his business were lost for good. Now Dad had been taking regular backups, but he’d never bothered to check that the backups actually worked. So when the inevitable hardware failure happened it was game over.

The folks over at TidBITS have declared that every Friday the 13th, whenever that date rolls around, should be considered International Verify Your Backups Day. Their advice is simple:

Take a few minutes to identify some critical files and see if you can restore them successfully from your backups.

I’ve watched this video a dozen times and I giggle every single time I see her eyes widen ever-so-slightly at the 3 second mark!

I don’t know anything about sport, but I do know quite a bit about trying to deal with dates and times programatically. This video features the Stephensons - a wife and husband team who single-handedly created the major league baseball schedule for 25 years.

In the opening section they talk about the impossible requirements. It’s a beautiful reminder that computers aren’t always the answer, and even when they can do the impossible, you don’t end up with a human story.

Most email clients suck. If you use a Mac and you care about sending standards-compliant emails using a fast and robust native OS X-only application, then I urge you to look at MailMate. I’ve been using it for years, and it never misses a beat.

It’s a one-man-show, and the developer needs help in order to continue working on MailMate. Check out the crowd funding campaign page.