Paul Hammond's Blog

I had the pleasure of watching my twins Dylan and Niamh play the steel pans (you might know them as steel drums) in their school's summer concert this evening.  They have only been learning for 10 weeks, but they have come on enormously.  You can see them playing in the Soapbox video below.

(BTW, I misheard the name of the second song and captioned it wrong in the video; it should be "Janey Girl".  I didn't notice until after the edits had finished processing, and I didn't want to wait while it encoded it again!)

At the end of the concert, the head teacher came on stage to thank all the staff.  He thanked the recorder teacher, adding that she had also helped out the brass teacher this term; trumpets and tenor horns and the like.  She acted very modestly as if she had done nothing special, and then tried to validate her coyness by shouting out to the audience "I'm very good at fingering, I just can't blow".

I thought my head would explode from the pressure of keeping the laughter inside!

Most people know that you should probably shop around for insurance when your renewal is due.  It doesn’t matter what type of insurance – car, house, pet, life – you should always do the due diligence around renewal time to ensure you are getting the best deal for the right kind of cover.  Now, normally I am not so good at taking my own advice, since I have tendencies towards procrastination when it comes to that kind of thing.  This year was different.

The house insurance renewal quote came in the post (building and contents under the same policy) and I was quite surprised at how expensive it was.  It was up 10% from the previous year, and was in the £800+ range.  I asked my wife to check out some of the comparison sites on the Internet to see what other companies might charge.  She managed to find some quotes of £250-£300, which was obviously quite a difference!  I presumed this was because the cover was different, and that these quotes were somehow inferior.  To check, I asked her to get a quote from our current company.  Once she’d selected all the same options we currently have, the website told her it would cost us £310 to insure our home.

Wait a second.  Let’s review those numbers again.

Renewal quote: £825.  New customer quote: £310.  That’s a saving of around 62% on the initial quote.

I called the retention department to complain.  I was told that there were large discounts for getting a quote online, and that there were numerous “free” portions of the insurance right now for new customers.  In fact, the whole insurance industry in the UK right now seems to be geared towards customer acquisition and not customer retention.  Even so, no-one could explain where such a huge difference came from.  What was worse was that the retention team could not match the online quote – their software simply wouldn’t allow an adjustment of that much.

Then the helpful lady told me that I should simply cancel my current policy and take out the new, cheaper one.  Which is what I did.  So, I have exactly the same insurance with exactly the same company (that I am very happy with, by the way), at 38% of the cost.  Scary.

Ladies and gentlemen, check your policy renewal prices!

I am going on holiday with my family in August, and the last part of our trip will see us in Boston.  Being a big Red Sox fan, I wanted to take my family along to a Red Sox vs Toronto Blue Jays game.  A few weeks ago I searched on Ebay for tickets (since all home games at Fenway Park are sold out for the season), and through that stumbled across a link to StubHub.com.

StubHub has loads of tickets available for the game I want to attend.  The site has some great security features for the wary ticket purchaser, including guarantees that you will get the tickets you pay for etc.  It all seems very professional.  With tickets hovering around $250 each, I wanted to feel confident that it was going to be a genuine purchase, and I was very pleased to have found a great looking solution to my ticket-purchasing desires.

Well, I finalised my travel details today, so decided to choose and buy some seats while there was still a good choice.  I found some excellent seats in the right price range, and proceeded to the checkout.  Now, as part of the checkout screen, there is an option to select your country of residence (and billing address) that includes the following items:

Naturally, I selected “United Kingdom”, entered the rest of my address details and pressed “Next”.  At this point, the page reloaded with the following error:

Just in case, I tried re-entering the post code without a space; this sometimes works.  Same error.  I was pretty much blocked completely!

I called the helpline to ask what I should do next.  The helpful lady on the phone informed me that I cannot order anything off the StubHub.com site unless I use a credit card that has a US billing address, and I have a US address to ship the tickets to!  I asked her why there were options for other countries, but she didn’t know.  All she could do was repeat that I needed US-based shipping and billing details in order to proceed.  So that is it.  The end of the road for me and StubHub.

I’ve looked everywhere on the site, and unless I am being useless (which is, of course, completely possible!) I cannot find a single reference to the fact that you can only purchase from the US.  Not even deep in the help files or the FAQ is it mentioned.  Why didn’t the error just say “I am sorry, you cannot purchase from this site unless you are in the US”.

Sites that restrict sales to “US only” generally frustrate me to a point, but I do recognise that there are often reasons for doing so – perhaps licensing laws (in the case of iTunes or radio services), or shipping difficulties for bulky items etc.  What annoyed me about this situation was the fact that the website lists the UK (and other countries) both during account registration and purchase, with the direct implication that I am perfectly fine to go ahead and spend a large amount of money with them.  I spent probably an hour in total checking out tickets, looking up the view from the seats on various other websites etc.  That is a wasted hour.  To get to the last hurdle and be presented with a particularly cryptic error message that required me to make an international phone call to address is completely unacceptable to me as a user.  To have wasted an hour on a site that could have told me up front that I was not able to ultimately use its features is doubly unacceptable.

Oh, and it means I don’t really have any options for buying Red Sox tickets either.  Which is going to upset my kids more than this experience has upset me!  Any ideas on where I *can* buy tickets from the UK, blogosphere?

I am wondering if it is only me that was confused by this, so I thought I'd post a picture and ask everyone out there what they think.

My satellite TV DVR has been playing up the last few weeks, often marking a programme as "not recorded due to no signal".  I went in to the settings of the system, and check the signal strength.  The screen is shown below, click for a larger version of the image.

Without thinking too much about it, what do you think my "Input 1 Signal Strength" is?  Is it high or low?  Please leave me a comment with what you thought.

Apparently, the very light gray is the "positive" colour, and it turns out that I have a very high signal strength for input 1.  However, for days I was fiddling around with the dish and the cables, because I believed I had a really *low* signal strength as indicated by the small dark blue portion of the box.  The dark blue colour was a much more obvious "positive" colour to me.  The predominantly dark blue areas for the Lock Indicator, Network ID and Transport Stream drew my eye to the dark blue of the strength and quality scales.  Without any cues as to the correct way to read this, I got confused.

My wife tells me I am being pretty daft, that reading the bars "left to right" is totally obvious, and that the light gray is obviously the "content" colour (see the 07d4 on the Transport Stream for example - the background is blue, the content gray).  I've asked two other people, and they also said the gray was the measure colour.

Even knowing the correct way to view this, I *still* see the dark blue of the indicators first.

So what did you think?  Is this easy, and I am just nuts?  Or is this a confusing UI?  Leave me a comment, let me know!

Microsoft's new financial year is just around the corner (July 1) and with it comes many new challenges for MSN International.  We have a couple of open positions in the PM and test disciplines, and will likely open up developer positions as demand for work increases over the year.

If you are interested in finding out more about working in a dynamic and fun environment while delivering fantastic interactive experiences to millions of Internet users around the world, please take a look at our site at http://london-msn-jobs.com/.

Niamh had a friend stay over last night.  At one point during the evening, in between computer games and movies and popcorn, the three of them disappeared upstairs for a while.  They were very quiet.

The next thing I know they burst into my office growling and hissing and looking like this:

I thought it was quite an impressive job!

If you prefer your conclusions as a mathematical equation:
unattended_8_years_olds + make_up = zombies for all known values of unattended_8_year_olds.

I have a question for you all.

I am in the HAVE LOST bucket.  The few times I have lost data in the past have certainly contributed to my current backup strategy.  More recently though, the shear amount of important data I have has shaped my backup strategy even more.

I have a single 500Gb disk that holds my entire "My Documents" directory.  When I look at it in detail, the drive contains:

• 23,665 photos, stretching over 9 years; this includes ALL the photos and videos of my kids first 8 years of life (75.4Gb).
• 2,090 video files from my DV camera and my HD camera, also going back 9 years (172Gb).
• 15,062 MP3 and M4A audio files from my iTunes catalog (65.7Gb).
• Many MIDI and Audio files from my music composition and production.
• Documents, Financial files etc.

As you can see, "My Documents" = "Almost My Entire Digital Life".  Losing any of this data would have been depressing.  Losing all of it would be completely heart-breaking.

While I was away on business, at some point this data drive died.  Completely.  No hope of connecting it to copy off whatever I could salvage.  It was simply unreadable.  Dead.

At this point, think about how you would feel, given the above data.  Would you be a little sad?  Sobbing?  Suicidal?  Or mildly annoyed?  Thankfully, I was simply "mildly annoyed".

Restoring My Data

Twenty four hours after arriving home, I am now back up and running with very little pain (apart from the cost of a new drive to replace the dead one).  My attention to a backup strategy completely saved my backside on this occasion.  However, this failure has also made me aware of another round of tweaking that I need to do to ensure total and flawless recovery the next time this happens.  AND REST ASSURED, IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

So, what is my current approach?  I have a single drive that holds all of my data, as you have seen.  You could have multiple drives, this works just the same.

• I use the online backup service Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/) to backup most of my data.  This guarantees that I have off-site copies of my files.  An alternative service I have also used in the past is Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/).  Both have good features, and are reasonably priced.
• I use FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com/) to create multiple copies of my most important files, or files that I use daily on my multiple home and work machines.
• I have a nightly backup that runs, which copies all of the files from the system and data drives to an external 1Tb drive.  I use a product called Retrospect that came with one of my external drives.  There is a great alternative called SyncBack that is either freeware (v3) or a very cheap option (v4).

In this particular case, it was from the 1Tb backup drive that I was able to salvage my data.  If that had failed, I would have resorted to a combination of Mozy.com data and FolderShare'd data on my other machines.  I attached both my 1Tb backup drive and the new drive to my laptop, and copied the data back to the new drive to create an identical version of what was there before.  Then I reattached the drive back to my desktop and booted up.  Once logged in, I simply reset the ownership and permissions of the "My Documents" directories to the correct settings.

Potential Flaws

There are a couple of possible issues with the above that I have been considering since the failure occurred.  Luckily they didn't occur this time, but I will be altering my approach to cater for these.

1. When the drive died, it disappeared from Windows.  The Mozy client then decided the files had been deleted, and proceeded to remove them from the current online backup set.  Luckily I can go back to older backup sets, but "deleted" files are only kept for 30 days.  If I had been away for a longer period of time, they may have been purged.
2. My nightly backup currently does a "mirror" of my filesystems, with no history.  Files that are added are added to the backup, and files that are deleted are removed.  Luckily, in this case, the software recognized that the drive was missing and skipped the backup.  If it had seen the drive and decided the files were no longer there (as Mozy did), it would have proceeded to wipe the data off the backup too.  I need to look at the options I have for my backup software to keep historical versions of files.

I mitigated the possible issues above by simply powering down the machine remotely to ensure no further damage could occur until I could be back at home there to figure things out!

Side Note 1: Windows Home Server

This incident has also made me think more seriously about buying a Windows Home Server.  One of the great features about this solution is the backup software.  It can backup complete machines, and has historical backups so you can get at older versions of your files if you need to.  Scott Hanselman did a review of Home Server that you can find here: Review - HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server

Side Note 2: FolderShare and Off-Site Backups For Family

One other thing I use FolderShare for is to backup data from various family machines.  I set FolderShare up on their machines and then invited my own FolderShare account to share their key folders.  The files get copied to my machine here.  That way, they benefit from having an off-site backup as well as duplicate data via my nightly backup.

Go And Do It.  Now.

Let me finish by saying this.  WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHATEVER YOU DO WITH YOUR COMPUTER, WHATEVER FILES YOU HAVE, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP STRATEGY THAT SAFEGUARDS *ALL* OF YOUR DATA.  Do it now.  Turn the TV off, and get working.  Don't stop until you have everything backed up, preferably in more than one place.  Your data drive could fail tonight.  It won't give you any helpful warnings before it does.  Make data loss an event of "mild annoyance", not complete despair.

If any of you checked out Sara Bareilles from one of my earlier posts and enjoyed what you heard, you should also take a listen to Colbie Caillat.  More great song-writing, great lyrics, and a fabulous voice.

Once again, Walmart has a Soundcheck session that you can watch.