Amazon S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service. At .15 per gigabyte, 50GB will cost me $7.50 a month, versus $20 for Dropbox or UbuntuOne. And odds are those services are planting your data on Amazon servers anyway! It’s a damn good deal for redundant storage. Both of these services give you 2 GB for free, so if you just want to back up some documents and spreadsheets the free options should work well for you. There are a variety of tools that will streamline the process, Jungledisk probably being the most popular. However, Jungledisk does cost an extra $3 a month, and creates a cached copy of what you store, so in effect it’ll eat up a lot of local disk space unnecessarily, as the local data already lives on my media sever.

A GUI just seemed to add overhead I didn’t need to deal with.Then I found s3cmd, an open source command line tool for Linux. Win!!! It can do an Rsync with Amazon, but again, not really necessary. My MP3 library is not dynamic. I add on average 1 album a month, So I’m copying my music and photo library up to Amazon, one directory at a time, in the background as I do other stuff on the laptop. This also gives me an opportunity to decide if some of the music on my server is really worth keeping. Once I get the photos and music up, I probably will set up rsync with my docs directory. I already back up the media server to Breck’s PC, so the Amazon files are triple redundant.

However you do it, make sure you are backing up everything important.

This is meme making the rounds on Facebook. But as long as I wrote it, I might as well use it here too.

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about this. List 15 albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. Tag some friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums my friends choose. To do this, go to your Profile page, then to your Notes tab,paste rules in a new note, list your 15 picks below, and tag people in the note.

Kiss Alive II – The first album I have any memory of caring about. I was 8 or 9.

Van Halen II – The 2nd record I have any memory of caring about.

Michael Jackson – Thriller – What can I say? We played the hell out of it.

Def Leppard – Pyromania – Started me on the road to being a metalhead, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

AC/DC – Black in Black- Ditto

Ozzy – Blizzard of Oz – sealed the deal on metal for me.

Iron Maiden – Number of the Beast

Iron Maiden – Piece of Mind – Both Maiden albums were a big part of the summer I dove into metal all the way.

Dio – Holy Diver

Metallica – Master of Puppets – I actually owned Ride the Lightning when it first came out – but I didn’t “get” Metallica until I heard this.

Queensryche – Operation Mindcrime

Drivin and Cryin – Mystery Road – The first step in broadening my musical horizons beyond metal and getting into the music scene in my first post-college home of Atlanta.

Buddy Guy – Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues – My way too late in life introduction to the Blues.

Butch Walker – Left of Self-Centered – My intro to this amazingly talented artist.

New Pornographers – Electric Version – My introduction to Neko Case.

He is 35 years into his incredible career, and this album absolutely has to go down as one of his best. Armed with only a single mic and a 1950s era reel to reel tape recorder, Mellencamp laid these tracks down live from historic musical sites throughout the south. In this era of auto tuned, over compressed digital music, it is easy to forget what music used to sound like. Listening to this mono recording (yes, I said mono) I’m pulled back to Torrejon, Spain, where my first experiences with music were spinning old Johnny Cash and Beatles records on my father’s quadraphonic stereo system. It helps that Mellencamp channels Sun era Cash, and some Dylan,on these tunes. If this isn’t up for Grammy consideration I’ll be shocked.

Clocking in at over 70 minutes, Iron Maiden certainly doesn’t cheat their fans from lack of effort. The Final Frontier continues the prog-metal direction that Maiden has taken over the last couple of albums. For a lot of fans, I suspect it may be a little too much in that direction. I like it, but I suspect in the long run it’s not going to be one of the more played Iron Maiden albums in my collection. And by “my collection” I mean all of them.

43 BC – Octavian, later known as Augustus, compels the Roman Senate to elect him Consul.
1812 – War of 1812: American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada earning her nickname “Old Ironsides”.
1934 – The first All-American Soap Box Derby is held in Dayton, Ohio.
1944 – World War II: Liberation of Paris – Paris rises against German occupation with the help of Allied troops.
1960 – Sputnik program: Sputnik 5 – the Soviet Union launches the satellite with the dogs Belka and Strelka, 40 mice, 2 rats and a variety of plants.
1991 – Collapse of the Soviet Union, August Coup: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is placed under house arrest while on holiday in the town of Foros, Crimea.

Also in 1991 – I got married. Which of course brings us to the annual anniversary haiku.

August 19, 91
Bad day for Gorbachev
My best day ever.

I’ve played this EP about 5 times this weekend. You can download it for free from their website. I strongly encourage you to do that, because all 4 songs on the EP are terrific. They hail from NC, so hopefully we’ll see them in Richmond or DC soon.

This article at Slate about books sparked a memory about record albums. Yeah, my brain is weird that way. The article makes an interesting point about first impressions. Back in the day, I definately made snap judgments about people based on their record collection. It was the teen / 20 something equivalent of snooping in the medicine cabinet. Likewise, I wonder how many relationships have been sparked by a mutual interest in a book? However, none of that is possible when they are sitting at the park reading a Kindle, or if your new neighbor’s entire music collection is hidden on an iPod. Maybe we need little holographic avatars of the book or album cover that float over your head. Sort of a real life Sims.

About that memory. When I was a clueless freshmen hitting the fraternity rush parties for the free beer, I saw a record collection on a house tour that looked just like mine. As a rebel without a clue recently transplanted to the Midwest from a tropical island, I was having a little trouble adjusting. My graduating class had 26 people in it. My floor on the dorm had 50 guys. My roommate was a new waver from Terre Haute, we didn’t have a lot in common. But the resident of this particular room looked like the kind of person I could drink a beer with. In due course I met Dave and we did indeed drink a few (ahem) beers together during the course of my college career. I ended up joining that fraternity, and about 18 months later another frat brother introduced me to Michelle. But y’all already know that story. So meeting Dave that night, because of his record collection, set off a chain of events that led to me meeting Michelle. That probably would not of happened in the iPod world of today.

Ironically, Michelle hates metal.