Grants.gov and the SF424

Four weeks to go, and I'm assembling an SBIR "Competing Continuation" grant, an odd-ball National Institutes of Health grant opportunity which requires an SBIR Phase II as a prerequisite, and basically allows you to continue research and development for "complex" medical devices, drugs, etc, that still have a way to go before commercialization.

NIH converted to an online submission procedure about two years ago. By most accounts it was fairly buggy, and they are continuing to refine it; it looks as if they are going to base the next version on Adobe Forms. As described a few days ago, if you have either a Mac with Leopard, OS-X, or a machine with Windows Vista, the only option that runs the forms is to use a Citrix terminal application which looks like Windows 95, crashes regularly, and logs you off after 20 minutes in any case. After struggling with this for a session last Friday, I'm punting and I've regressed to a Windows XP machine.

Even using the "native" PureEdge viewer, things are fairly kludgy. PureEdge installs as viwer, sort of like Adobe Acrobat, within Internet Explorer. You then navigate to the web page that contains the xfd for the web form. After inputting data, you can save the data. Unfortunatly the saved data from my Citrix session won't seem to run...I have to reenter everything that I put on Friday.
After downloading the form again the form opens.




A couple of extracts from the SF424 instructions.

1. There are odd rules related to the ability to have more than a single Primary Investigator, with NIH, you can.
   
   
2. A budget must be created for each budget period.
   
   A budget peried is considered to be one year or portion of a year if the grant period is less than a year. If you have a multi-year budget, then you must fill out one for each year. The figures will be consolidated on a read-only summary sheet.
   
   
3. If you are working within a consortium, and will be awarding some of the funding to the consortium, they (or you, or somebody) have to prepare a subaward budget that mirrors the award budget. This uses the same form (just with a checkbox for "subaward"). In my case, since this is a three-year grant, there will be six (6) separate "budgets"...one for each year for both myself, and the consortium partner. Woof.



4. For the first budget I created a "simulation" in Numbers (the Mac spreadsheet) on the Mac which has the same format as the budget form. I'm going to try going native on the subsequent budgets, but if the data entry gets too hairy, I expect to create a simulation for the other five budgets too. (Later....didn't end up doing this...now that I've sort of memorized what the form does and how works, I was confident enough to go commando as it were.)
   
   
5. There is a budget justification (budget narrative) section which applies to the main budget, and a separate justification which applies to the subaward.



6. Critical:When editing an attached form, you have to reimport or reattach it! In other words, specifying a file name doesn't specify a pointer to the physical file; the file actually gets imported into to the form file.

If you are working within a consortium, it is helpful to have the consortium budgets entered first. These are done with the form shown in the lower left-hand corner, the R&R subaward budget form, which works similarly to the main budget form. You can even create the file for this and email it to your consortium partner to fill out and and return.

Totals from the consortium budget needs to be entered into the main budget. This is also the time where you can be sure to enforce rules such as the requirement that the maximum amount a subaward can be is 50% of the total amount for an SBIR grant. I sent the subaward budget back twice for revisions for this and similar restrictions.

All this goes considerably better when accompanied by music of your choice. Shawn Colvin was helpful.

Creating Screenshots on the Mac

Why the native Grabber application in OS-X can't save in someting other than a TIFF file format is beyond me, and a whole lot of other people besides. Over at Lifehacker, the fans have it all figured out. Shameless quote:

Check out TInkertool/Onyx. They're both really nice tools for macs, but the nice thing is they include an option to change the Grab filetype.

Also, if you want commands to take screenshots, in PNG, look no further then below:
Command(Apple)-Shift-3 - Whole desktop/menubar/etc.
Command(Apple)-Shift-4 - You drag and define the space it takes the picture.
Command(Apple)-Shift-4-Space - It allows you to take a picture of anything, and just that thing, whether it be a window or something like that.

It saves the files on the desktop as Picture 1.png, Picture 2.png, etc.

Hope this helps.

Thanks pardner.

New Parallels for the Mac

I received a notice that Parallels 4 is available, and since I had recently bought a copy of 3 for the iMac, the upgrade was free. In between a bunch of other stuff, I downloaded and installed it, and I have to say I'm impressed. Version 3 upgraded my existing Windows Vista virtual machine fairly smoothly, and I'm installing an Ubuntu Linux VM right now from CD that I had lying around with 8.04 (Hardy Heron, if memory serves). Now since there is a new version 8.10, I followed the Ubuntu instructions to do an in-place upgrade.

By default Parallels allocates 512K of RAM and 34 megs of disk space for an Ubuntu installation. The Ubuntu installer said the upgrade could take some hours.

Mac Synchronicity

In a moment of weakness, and just before the great upgrade for Mac laptops in October, I bought a 24" IMac for my home workstation and an "old" cinema display to replace the Dell display I was using in our lab for the laptop. If I had to do it all over again... I would have waited two days (!) and possibly gotten an upgraded Mac laptop Pro, and one or two of the "new" cinema displays, and just moved the laptop between the two desks. As it is, I spend a fair amount of time worrying whether the laptop and IMac are synchronized and have to buy two copies of mac applications, IWork and Parallels. The new cinema displays include an iSight camera and are designed to integrate with the new laptops. 

For syncing eMail, I use the Mac Mail client and configure the accounts as IMAP accounts on my mail server.

For syncing files, I've subscribed to the Mac.Me service, ($99/year) and use IDisk. This works as well as an FTP server to my own FTP site; and the .me service will also synchronize ICal and the address book. Calendar entries are put in Google Calendar, which is then synched to the two ICal applications.

It all seems a little complicated and kludgy. But the upshot is by using my mail server, and Google calendar, I can always go to the web to see my eMail and appointments. Despite the uproar when Mac.me was introduced in the summer, so far it seems to work fine for what I need. 

I also took the opportunity to buy Adobe Creative Suite. They sent CS3, and of course, they have just released CS4. I'm not able to figure whether I'll be able to upgrade to CS4 without paying. Lots of problems here, worth another discussion.

Voice Over IP Updates

I haven't focused on VoIP for awhile... but others do.

FierceVoIP announced that Logitech has bought out SightSpeed. Sightspeed was (is) one of my favorite videoconferencing applications, and it will be very interesting to see what becomes of the product.

VoipInsider reports that Polycom has updated the firmware for Soundpoint phones.

VoicePulse has announced a fail-over option for their accounts. They've completely redesigned their web site with a new interface, that looks really classy. This is one VoIP provider who appears to be here to stay. Hooray!

Windows for Devices reports that Motorola will discontinue development of Symbian and MotoMax phones, and concentrate on Windows Mobile, and Google Android. The site emphasizes hardware running embedded versions of Windows, there is a companion site for the Linux crowd at Linux For Devices.

Windows vs. Linux - Open Source vs. Commercial

I got sucked in to a bit of back and forth on our local Linux/Unix list a couple days ago and wrote:

Ten years ago I was consulting for a multi-national education non-profit, and I discussed with the systems manager the notion of using open source...in particular I was talking about replacing their Windows 2000/NT servers, with Linux. This would have been a logistical wrench, not least because they had several client/server applications that used SQL-Server as the back end. His point was that as an educational institution, they got such good discounts on any proprietary software that the amount spent on the software was a miniscule percentage of their IT budget. So, there was no economic benefit, and certainly no performance benefit that justified such a change.

Later that year I was doing an inventory of their machines at one of the european sites and couldn't find the terminal server box. Turns out this was a Linux box running VMC or something and it had been bricked up in a wall during a recent renovation, and been merrily running, unseen, for several months.

So, the moral for me was, use what works. At the time I actually got them to go from running four O/S's in the organization to two, Windows, and the aforementioned Linux. We dumped Macs in one site, and Novell in another, and my advice to subsequent clients was to run one and only one OS in the organization.

I'm happy to say that they didn't all run Windows.

Nonprofit Quarterly - All about volunteers

I've always thought that one way to prove the health of a non-profit organization is to take a look at the number and quality of the volunteers who are involved. In some organizations there is a prejudice against volunteers, they take work away from the "professional" staff, they aren't trained to perform the organization's work, etc. But, volunteers should be managed for the asset that they are; a source of enthusiastic contributors, just like members or financial contributors.

The latest Nonprofit Quarterly's theme is "working in a a nonprofit", and it includes an article Volunteering by the Numbers which attempts to quantify the contribution made by volunteers taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• 10% of seniors devote 500 or more hours to volunteering each year


• Married people devote 50 hours, divorced/widowed/separated 54 hours, and those never married 40 hours


• Women volunteer more than men, 29.3% vs. 22.9%


• 61 million people volunteered an average of 52 hours for the year September 2006 to Sept 2007, an average of an hour per week.


• Fundraising, and management assistance were the two top activities. 

There is considerable discussion in the article about the management of volunteers. The article quotes a UK Institute for Volunteer Research:

Though written about extensively, some of the basic elements of good volunteer management are missing from many of the surveyed U.K. charities; 81 percent of volunteers say that they did not have job descriptions, nearly as many say that they never received training for their volunteer work, and despite reports from volunteer coordinators, an almost equal amount claim never to have been interviewed by a member of the organization before beginning volunteer activity.

Listing of all articles in the fall issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly.

Wordle: Make your own text cloud

If you've ever looked at tag clouds, those groups of words that vary in size based on frequency, here is a way to make your own. You can enter your own text, or use an existing text file, or RSS feed. Here's one for this blog.

Grants.gov = Windows Only ?

Grants.gov is the federal government's portal for online submission of federal grant applications. The National Institutes of Health have required applicants to submit their material online for the past two years or so. It has been a fairly rocky transition process, and I had hoped this time around things would go really smoothly.

I'm beginning to feel like Andy Rooney, "Have you ever really thought about the eraser on your pencil?" But the arrangements for completing grant applications for anyone running something other than Windows XP or below (Windows 98 is supported!) are nothing less than bizarre. When downloading the PureEdge viewer for Mac, I got this message.

The IBM Workplace Forms Viewer 2.5.1 Macintosh OS Special Edition cannot be installed on your computer.

There may be good news, however; according to this FAQ, Grants.Gov is transitioning away from the PureEdge viewer (aka IBM Workplace Forms Viewer) and moving toward Adobe forms which are cross-platform. Unfortunately, is looks like the NIH form that I'm using, the SF424, is PureEdge only. This means that that the only option is to use a Citrix client/server arrangement which turns my Mac into a Citrix terminal.

This is not going well. Among the warnings that they give is that you should really only use the Citrix terminal "off peak"... from 10PM to 10 AM, you should save every 20 minutes, and you should log off if you expect to be away for 20 minutes so you can give other users a chance. But, I've frozen up three times already, requiring a forced shutdown, and I just lost almost an hour of work, that for some reason did not get saved even though I deliberately attempted to save in a timely manner. What I think may be happening is that the connection is freezing considerably before the twenty minute limit....and there is no indication that has happened.

Since Windows Vista isn't supported with the PureEdge form software, probably something to do with user rights, and since the SF424 form required by NIH isn't available as an Adobe PDF form, I may resurrect a Windows XP machine, just so I can work on these forms without the added anxiety of technical problems. Its not as if 277 pages of instructions and a dozen separate multipart forms aren't already nerve-racking enough.

Odds and Sods and White Noise

Need some book suggestions? Here is a complete listing of Pournelle's book of the month suggestions going back to 1994.

The Ohio Farm Bureau announced that the USDA Rural Development grant awards have gone to six recipients, in the following states: Arkansas, Iowa (two awards), Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Center for Disease Control reports that Type 2 diabetes has increased 90% in the U.S. since 1997. Data was complete for 33 states. Vermont is 28th in the list with a reported 6.6 new cases per one thousand residents. This is an increase of 43%.

Gasoline prices are in free fall; we're paying about $2.89 a gallon. Maybe this accounts for the fact that people are idling their cars again at the post office. Now that the weather has turned colder (we've gotten the first snow that stuck), my old Prius' mpg has gone down to 49-50, down from 52-56.

I've been experimenting with a white noise generator called Noisy as a way to mask distracting sounds. It is rather like working next to a waterfall, or under a tin roof while raining. Here's a Wiki article, with all the math. An online flash version is located at simplynoise.com The online generator includes "red noise" which seems to increase the low frequency component. They also have audio files which can be downloaded and played through iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Statistics - Newbie Resources

Having left the statistics to my science partners, I now find myself wanting to at least conceptually understand what they are talking about when discussing t-tests, chi squares and power. A quick google search reveals a ton of information.

John C. Pezzullo's Statpages.org provides an index to 600+ (!) of statistics tools and online textbooks. His home page has dozens of links to other scientific information. Wonderful stuff.

Linked from Dr. Pezzullo's page, Russ Length's Java Applets for Power and Sample Size allow you to compute power and needed sample sizes before performing a study. Lots of useful information here to help design a study so that you'll receive reliable data for analysis.

I've also picked up a couple books.

Head First Statistics by Dawn Griffiths. This is part of the Head First series from O'Reilly which attempts to take relatively advanced concepts (Object Oriented Design, for example) and reduce it into entertaining chunks.

Statistics for Dummies by Deborah Rumsey. There is also a companion workbook, and an Intermediate Statistics for Dummies. This book is more descriptive and less interactive than the Head First book above, but may be better for my purposes; to simply learn the lingo.

Statistics Hacks by Bruce Fey is part of the O'Reilly Hacks series. Subtitled "Measuring the World and Beating the Odds", this book is the only one of the three I had on hand which discussed power analysis, the statistics tool of my immediate interest when we are designing a study.

Still on my bookshelf:
Microsoft Access Data Analysis This book, now updated for Access 2007 doesn't have hard-core statistics, but it does have lots of ideas of how to take samples and turn these into useful information with charts and reports.

Data Analysis for Politics and Policy by Edward Tufte This is an older book quite technical, but with lots of interesting examples. I believe he wrote this book before he got started with the graphics series...but of course that his is forte now.

Visualizing Data by Ben Fry. Subtitled Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment. Processing is an open-source programming environment developed by Fry.

All of these books don't solve my immediate problem, which is trying to learn about power calculations. Instead they deal with data after it has already been gathered.

Don't forget that you may already have considerable statistical firepower at your fingertips if you have a copy of Microsoft Excel. On the Mac, Numbers has a few functions as well, but in comparison to Excel, Numbers is pretty light.

Chron Taken Over By Space Aliens!

Chronicle of Philanthropy Offices Taken Over By Space Aliens!
Editor's Neurons Replaced by Sponge-like Substance!

The major theme this week in the Chronicle of Philanthropy addresses the economic crisis and how it will affect non-profits and fundraising.

Also a profile and interview with, um, Newt Gingrich, who appears to be fully rehabilitated, at least among conservatives. His opinion on AmeriCorps:

I think it's [AmeriCorps] is part of the banality of the bureaucracy. If you go and interview the AmeriCorps people, they're all well-meaning, they all love what they're doing, and you say to yourself, explain to me why the government is paying for this? Because it's not volunteerism. If you get paid for it, it's a job. It may be a low-paying job, but it's a job

.
The banality of the bureaucracy. Good one. How about this?

My disbelief in something good and constructive coming out of Washington bureaucracy and Capitol Hill is so deep right now that, until they get their own act together and figure out how to reform their own systems, I don't think they should look very much at anybody else. This city is a disaster and it's getting worse every year.

Of course, Gingrich and his friends are the architects of the Washington mess. Personally, I couldn't bear it, but there is an online audio version of the interview. If you don't like that one there is an interview with Ashley Judd on the same page.

Change.org is looking for bloggers

Is this too good to be true?

Change.org is looking for bloggers.

Change.org is currently hiring part-time blogger/editors to create the premier online space for some of the most important issues of our time. Each blogger will lead an online community focusing on a single issue, maintain a daily blog covering news and offering commentary, convene leading nonprofits and activists working on the issue, and help people translate their interests and passions into concrete action.

Go for it!

Online Meetings Replace Travel? Desktop Video...again

An article on the Laptop magazine site discusses "telepresence", i.e. holding meetings over the web. What I'm not sure is, whether the hosted solutions discussed in the article are the way to go. At least with one-on-one and small groups, a plain old videoconference works fine. Today I held hour-long meetings with a group in San Francisco, a possible collaborator in Seattle, and my partner in our on-campus office, all from Microdesign World Headquarters (i.e. my spare bedroom).

Fire up an H.323 client, like Polycom PVX ($120US, qty. 1) on a PC (which is supposed to also work on a Macbook using Parallels), or XMeeting (open source) on the Mac, or Ekiga (open source) on a Linux or Windows box.

On a PC, the secret is using a decent camera with a decent microphone. The Logitech Orbit AF is my choice...it includes excellent echo cancellation; so you don't necessarily have to use a headset. You have to have broadband, of course, and a hard-wired connection works better than a wireless connection.

Ekiga, by the way, has released its version 3.0 as source. I'm trying to get up the courage to attempt to configure, make, and install. It requires two additional libraries which are also not on my current Suse 10.3 box. Either I'm looking forward to some hours of amusement, or I may wait for the O/S specific binaries.  I'm psyched about version 3.0, because it supports up to 30 frame per second video.  

Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Career Jam II

It's Back! View all the particulars at the Career Jam web site.

Odds and Sods: Grantsmanship, Municipal Telecom and more

Grantsmanship Training Program coming to Oriskany, NY November 3-7, 2008.

Lessons Learned about setting up a city-owned telecom company.

The New York Times' The New Old Age blog discusses recent census data about the aging of the U.S. population.

Today, about 13 percent of Americans are over age 65. By 2030, more than 20 percent of Americans will be in that group. By 2050, about 89 million Americans will be over age 65, more than double the number today.

By 2025, the number of centenarians will more than double to 175,000, from fewer than 80,000 now.

By 2035, the number of people ages 85 and over will double to 11.5 million, from about 5 million now.

Wall Street - Just Asking...

Regarding Wall Street:

1. Why is there no provision for restitution of the obscene salaries taken by officers of the failed banks and brokerage firms?

2. These securities, CDOs, etc. were deemed "risky". Why is that now that they have failed, the consequences of the risk does not fall on those who engineered these bogus instruments...instead it is falling on the taxpayers? The firms should pay...the officers should pay, the traders should pay, and the bankers should pay before the government (taxpayer) should pay. And why hasn't a single bank or brokerage firm offered its own assets, the limos, the executive dining rooms, the corporate jets, the office tower and other real-estate, as a partial miniscule down payment in mitigating this disaster?

3. Why, in the plans outlined today (Tues 9/23) there appears to be no provision for the taxpayers who are assuming these worthless securities, to participate in the REWARD that will presumably (well, maybe) accrue when the stock market goes back up? Again why is the RISK socialized while the reward has heretofore been privatized?

4. Why, throughout the discussion of the past couple of days, has there been no provision for those who were stupid or gullible enough to apply for and receive things like 'no documentation mortgages". Shouldn't these people who were ruthlessly exploited by the banks get bailed out *before* the predatory lenders?

Just asking ...

Can This Grant Be Saved? Ideas for Rescue

We recently had a rejection for a federal grant application. This was the first time we had applied to this agency. We received five reviews from the peer reviewers, and there were some definite commonalities among the five reviewers. Naturally, we'd like to resubmit our application. Here are some of the objections to the first application, and some possible remedies.

1. Problem: There was some definite jargon that we didn't properly address. One word was transformation. How were we going to transform the field? Our plan lacks detail which supports the feasibility of our ability to transform when implemented. Remedy: Be more explicit about what the transformation is, and how we believe can effect that transformation.

2. Problem: Little description on how our target population (in our case students) would be recruited, targeted, and kept engaged in the project. Remedy: Actually, we thought we had addressed this somewhat, but clearly not to the extent that the reviewers expected. They also requested how we would target minority and disadvantaged students.

3. Problem: Target population not involved in the development of intervention. Remedy: Reconfigure project to include opportunities for students and teachers to have input on how the project progresses. Have one or more serve on the advisory board or implementation team?

4. Problem: Applicant doesn't reply evidence that the program is either project or inquiry-based. Remedy: Need to include this discussion

5. Problem: Applicant doesn't provide a clear list of project goals and objectives

6. Inconsistencies found between the budget and the narrative. For example there are different numbers of personnel on the spreadsheet budget, with different titles, than are described in the narrative. Remedy: After the committee works on all the bits and pieces of the application, a single person needs to pull everything together and reconcile all the pieces. Then, send it back out to readers before submitting.

7. Problem: No clear evaluation plan. Remedy: This was indeed what I considered to be the weakest part of our application, and I assumed it would have to be fixed even if our application was accepted as it just wasn't strong enough. For example we didn't have:

• Pre and Post test objectives
  
• A qualified third-party evaluator
  
• Samples of test instruments which illustrate how we would conduct the evaluation.

Chron This Week: Hiring and Firing

Hiring and Firing are major themes in the Chronicle of Philanthropy this week as a story starting on page 11 discusses the tightening market for senior fund-raisers. Seems counterintuitive.

Also a nice article about recruiting younger workers. This points to an online report from the Project Roundtable on Nonprofit Recruitment and Retention.


Not in the paper this week, but of interest in our local news are the problems that Fort Ticonderoga is having with the abrupt departure of a major funder. Here's a link at the Plattsburgh NY Press-Republican.

Odds and Sods

Open source video security application:

http://www.zoneminder.com/ via VoIP Insider

Preston Loves Chrome. Larry, less so... not least because every time I attempt to read a .pdf file the Adobe browser hangs up. Oh, yeah, its a beta, and if it is like almost every other Google application, it will stay a beta for months if not years. Also, there are reports of odd licensing terms, however, according to PC-World that has been fixed. Meanwhile, the latest FireFox, version 3.0 seems to be fine...and I've stuck with Safari on the Mac.

Smashing Magazine has their desktop wallpapers out for September, both with and without a calendar.

How to demo your startup. Great hints for doing demo over the phone or using web-based demo tools.

The Windows XPe chat, has a number of items about the new version Windows Embedded.

NAT with videoconferencing etc. etc.

The wiki documentation for Ekiga has a nice discussion of how to deal with routers when using SIP and H.323. 

Browsing with Google Chrome does indeed seem a little more rapid. I'm not sure I'll migrate from Firefox, but I like the clean look, and so far it seems to work flawlessly.   

Tech Friday: Bento database - First Look

Well, although I've managed to not worry about a database for several months, it finally happened and I need to keep track of my "opportunity matrix", that is, a list of grants, their deadlines and status, the responsible contact person, partners, and whether I've created all the necessary collateral: prospectus, project summary, grant application, etc.

Typically this would be done in Access on a Windows machine, and I've got Access 2007 installed in my copy of Parallels so that I could run this up pretty quickly.

But, since I want to stay native on the Mac, I poked around at an old favorite, Filemaker Pro. One thing I've always thought about FMP is that is relatively expensive, even in an academic edition, especially if you want to share the data using a server. But FileMaker now offers a "home" version called Bento for about $50.00, and this looks promising for my app.

I've downloaded the 30 day trial, and installed without fuss. Installation consists of dragging the the file to the applications folder. I started playing with one of the templates, and after ten minutes or so, I've ended up with the following data entry screen:



Points of Interest:

• Bento integrates with iCal, Mail and the Address book. You can eMail from a field which is designated an email field.
  
• One to many relationships are supported. For example, you can have a task list for a project, with multiple tasks displayed for a single project. Some relations are already connected; for example the tasks list from iCal can be embedded into a Bento form
  
• What one would consider to be a "database" in Access, or, loosely, a "group of tables" in another database program is called a "library" in Bento.
  
• What might be called a "recordset" in Access, or a "cursor" in an SQL database is called a "collection" in Bento. Collections are much like playlists in iTunes, they are a subset of records from the entire library.
  

You can create your own drop down list, so I've attempted to capture the workflow in a "status" field which currently contains the following:

Seeking Partner: Since virtually all my projects are with others, this is the first step in any application project.

Developing Project

Application Submitted

Awaiting Feedback from Funder (may be redundant with the previous step)

Under Revision

Revised Submitted

Awarded

Rejected

I was curious about the name, but I think it refers to a Japanese bento box, which are the compartmented dishes for serving Japanese food.

Here's a review of Bento in MacWorld. They point out a couple of limitations. For one thing, there is no way to export data in anything other than a comma delimited ASCII format. 

Another limitation is that the Bento data libraries are strictly single-user data files for a single machine. Anything larger needs to go into something like Filemaker. So, is is inadvisable to think that we could run a multi-user grant flow application using Bento. That's OK. For $50.00 we can play with Bento for awhile and work out the data that we need to keep track of. We'll be that much farther ahead when we're looking to move up.

Marketing is Really Like This

http://view.break.com/542649 - Watch more free videos

Over Lunch: Fortune Cookie

I never look at Fortune Magazine....but then, I did over lunch, and it looks as if I've been missing Stanley Bing. And he is very funny.

Look. Throughout the course of human history, life on earth has been a struggle, a disappointment to most, a tragedy to some, a triumph to a few. But for most of us, the small things in life make it worthwhile, not the megatrends that make us nuts and take place around us. People managed to live through the plague years in Europe 500 years ago. Aren’t things better than that now? We have IPods.

Backing Up Is (not) Hard To Do

It sounds like a country music song title. After reading maybe the fourth post somewhere about somebody's MacBook hard drive had crashed, I thought I really really truly this time must take another look at the native backup program that comes with the Macbook called Time Machine. Previous efforts to coax TM to back up to a network drive hadn't worked. This time I went to Staples and bought a Maxtor One-Touch4 Mini drive of 250 gigabytes in size for all of $149.00. This is a USB drive, powered from the computer's USB ports. I say "ports", because the cable includes two plugs for connecting to the computer and both of them must be plugged in to power the drive. So, this wouldn't be the ideal solution, unless you have a USB hub or docking station.

Once plugged in, the Time Machine program came right up without me even starting it, with a dialog box asking "Do you want to use the OneTouch 4Mini as a back-up drive for Time Machine?" I said yes, of course, and then it told me that it needed to reformat the drive as a Macintosh Drive. Off it went and then the program automatically proceeded to perform a full hard drive backup. With the first backup complete, Time Machine will continue to back up changes every 15 minutes.

I expect to leave the hard drive permanently attached to the docking station, as it doesn't make a lot of sense to have the backup media with the computer when I'm traveling. Still, if I wanted to, the drive is small and lightweight enough to easily fit into my briefcase along with all the other computer paraphernalia.