Category: Damn Cardinals

Continued on backup strategies at home

This is what my weekends have come to now that football is almost over and the Cardinals are on the off season….

OK so here is the scenario, on December 22nd 2017 I was curious about some network traffic that had been reported on my router as coming from my laptop. I couldn’t find anything or remember installing anything that would have caused the traffic so I was a touch concerned. I installed a application called “little snitch” or something to that effect and my Mac summarily refused to boot.

Well shit…

Some googling later I found that I could disable the KEXT file (Mac equivalent to a driver) and I would be good to go. I was less then thrilled with this revelation as I was getting ready to take a road trip to visit family. OK I’ll just restore to the last good backup this morning from Time Machine, it will take a hour tops.

I kicked off the Time Machine recovery from the rescue console, finished packing and did some other stuff. When I came back to collect my laptop it said “16 hours remaining”. Needless to say I didn’t hang around, I took off and let the Mac do it’s thing. I long ago figured out that I could survive a couple of days on a iPad and hijack my mom’s Mac if I really needed a laptop.

I come home a few days later, my Mac is restored and waiting for me to log in. I log in, everything is where it’s supposed to be the most dramatic thing I have to do is sign into Office365 for home and school again. Up until this point I had been running Time Machine strictly off a network share on my home server I keep in a closet. So yeah… that’s great for seamless backups but it’s not what I would describe as “quick”. I ended up partitioning the external disk I use on my Mac and have a partition dedicated to Time Machine, that took care of the speed and backup problem.

This also pretty much asserted once again that between Office365 and iCloud my personal files were safe and I could get to them. This also once again proved that I really didn’t need to be paying for offsite backup as the most I would have to do is download Office and VMWare again and I would be back in business.

Then I had a thought….

Crypto viruses are a thing…. would a crypto virus also lock down my cloud information. I’m sure someone out there has already researched this and has a answer, and a quick googling says yes a crypto virus will also crypto your connected cloud services. So this brought me back to well I guess I need a segregated offsite backup… I don’t need to do the whole system as I can restore that easy enough, but I do need to have a portioned setup for personal files. Crashplan fills that niche quite nicely….

So there you have it…. backup strategies circa 2018 for one random dude who is already missing football.

I can’t see in between, but I can see when the sun goes down and the lights go out.

In the last 5 days I have been to more sporting events then I care to shake a stick at…. Sunday Cardinals – Giants game, follow on Tuesday/Wednesday with playoff Baseball with the Diamondbacks -Brewers.

I’m not gonna lie it’s been kinda awesome.

The part that was more awesome then winning two out of three of those games though is this little thought.

At Sunday’s Cardinals game, the crowd was in Cardinal Red (and Black) and while yes it was only the Giants they are a old rival from the days back in the NFC East.  And lets face it there are a fair number of New York transplants and people who while seemingly normal love the Giants.   After the Cowboys game two years ago and the Raiders game last year I had come to the opinion that Arizona sports fans would not measure up to these two “storied” franchises.  What I forgot about the Cowboys and the Raiders is that they have endured allot of losing in their time, not Cardinal levels of futility, but bad stretches and to a lesser extent the Giants have had the same issues in the past and I’m sure they will in the future that is just how these things work. While it’s easy to love a team when they are winning and going to the playoffs it takes a real fan to stick with them when the chips are down.  And after 5-11 last and off to a 1-3 start this year the Cards are defiantly in the “chips” are down category.  Things are looking up, but not that up, they are looking up though.  So what did I see on Sunday that inspired me to write this…. well I saw a “Red Sea” that stayed with their team the whole time, I saw parents and kids in supporting the Cards even if the dad (not Cody) was supporting the Giants just a little bit more.  And it made me realize, that while Arizona is a transient state and everyone is from somewhere else on home game Sundays we are all from Arizona at a Cardinals games.  Except for Raiders fans… those people are just mean.

 

Now while football is religion baseball is a lifestyle.

 

The last time I went to a playoff baseball game it was in 2001 and the Diamondbacks may or may not have won the championship that year.  It was a bought championship and honestly no one in tow cared we just wanted the championship.   Flash forward ten years and the only guy left on the field from the 2001 team is the third base coach and in the playoff hunt we are once again.  I don’t remember alot from the 2001 playoffs but I don’t remember the Diamondbacks ragging on the Yankees as much as the Diamondbacks were ragging on the Brewers the last night.  My favorite parts were the the “Will it sink or Float” and the sinking wedge of Cheese in the pool with the announcer coming on over the PA system and going something to the effect of “And the cheese sinks just like the brewers tonight” which I thought was very cool, the home team antagonizing the other team which for me as a Arizona sports fan is kinda of cool.  Also the Diamondbacks Legends race where the D’Backs mascot came out and beat up on the “german sausages” to clear a path for the legends was kinda cool.

Outside of the Suns Arizona has never really had this much pride in it’s pro-sports teams.  And well honestly the Suns are just pissing away what ever good will they had left, and I’m more then happy to see the Cardinals and the Diamondbacks move in for the local pride factor even if most of the support comes from people who already have a another team.

Hell there is even room for those stick wielding Canadians that are in town and are trying like hell to stay here.

 

 

4 months…

It’s 4 months till football… and already the trash talk is starting. I don’t know about trash talk, but motivation is being provided….

This is taken from the official… Darnell Docket talking about twitter and a player on the 49ers…

– On Vernon Davis and having Adrian Wilson’s back: “Vernon, you see the trash he is talking, he and Adrian, they have their own vendetta against each other. But me? I’m cool with Vernon. I see him all the time. We’re from the same area (in Maryland), I just saw him this weekend. But I’m going to ride-or-die for my teammates too. I am as loyal as they come. I’m going to have my boy’s back, because he’s not on Twitter and I know if Adrian had been on Twitter he would have spoken up. Adrian was in the weight room the other day and I told him what Vernon said and all of a sudden, he’s got 525 pounds on the squat with no hesitation.” Arizona Cardinals Blog..

The rivalry according to Dockett

Need to start working on the trash talking skills… maybe twitter has a place in my world after all.