The Arizona Rifleman

So…bloody…close.
When Arizona scored its last touchdown, I thought we had it. I thought we managed to pull things around from the Steelers’ epic just-before-halftime surprise interception, run, and touchdown. (I’m not a Steelers fan, but hot damn was that an awesome play. I never thought I’d see a big dude run that fast or that far.) I thought we managed to pull victory from the jaws of personal fouls, flag-happy refs, receivers who can’t catch worth a damn, and terrible defense.
But alas, it was not to be. The Steelers managed to squeak by and win. My hearty congratulations to them.
My congratulations also to my friend Louis for making his own from-scratch tomato sauce, which is exceedingly delicious, and to my beautiful fianc?e Sarah, who gave me her recipe for lasagna. Granted, I modified it slightly by adding even more ground beef than originally called for, so as to increase the awesomeness (Note: Success!). Alas, Sarah wasn’t in town this weekend, so Louis and I went to the Dog House[1] for the Super Bowl and prepared the sauce and lasagna there.
During halftime, we ignited (with rather prodigious amounts of lighter fluid and the resulting huge flames — direct quote: “Is the bottom part of the grill supposed to be on fire?”) the charcoal grill and grilling bratwursts and hot dogs. Of course, the normal assortment of chips, dip, and other snacky foods were available.
My voice is a bit hoarse from cheering and yelling throughout the game.
Even though Arizona lost, it was a damned good game and much fun was had today.
[1] The house that my friends Rita, Teresa, Alex, and Colin rent. So named as they wanted a faux-fraternity name, and so used the Greek letters “Delta Omega Gamma”, or “Dog”. As it has a large living room, TV, and couches, it is often a scene of social gathering, drinking, etc.

Congratulations! By reading this post, you have demonstrated that you are among one of the better-informed people on earth. Not only do you have a computer and access to the internet, but you are aware of blogs and evidently subscribe to or read at least one. Good job.
Granted, my humble scratchings are certainly not the most best around — if you want timely, witty, and funny writings, you’d best find those elsewhere.
That said, you — like myself — clearly use a computer for various purposes. Perhaps you have a blog of your own? Almost certainly some music, digital photographs, and important documents? Do you keep your financial and tax records on your computer? What about an inventory of your guns? Health information and medical records?
What would you do if your computer was damaged or destroyed and that data was lost? Whether it’s something “ordinary” like a computer virus, dropping the computer, theft, a house fire, storm, or flood, or something less common like the ATF raiding CavArms and confiscating every computer, disk, CD, and piece of paper in their offices, the risk of data loss is very real. Hard disks are delicate pieces of precision machinery and can fail for any number of trivial reasons — I’ve had one work just fine, and five minutes later be dead as a doornail with no warning.
What if your email provider suddenly locked you out of your mail, or mistakenly deleted your mail or account? It’s rare, but Google Mail (among others) have done this on occasion.
What, then, can one do? Easy: backup your stuff.
It doesn’t need to be fancy, but you should seriously consider the frequency and type of backups based on the importance of each item. Since your tax documents aren’t updated frequency, it might be prudent to just copy them once a year to an external drive and put the drive in your bank safe deposit box. It might be also be a good idea to print out the documents and include them with the drive, in case the drive fails somehow. You might want to back up your business records, scientific research, or Ph.D. dissertation once (or more) a day to somewhere off-site. At the worst, you’d only have to re-do one day of work. Burning a DVD or CD with your family photos and mailing them to your sister in Omaha might be good, so long as your sister doesn’t lose or break the disk. Making a copy of a WordPress MySQL database isn’t that hard, and one could keep it at home, ready to restore if things go wrong.
Of course, having to manually do backups is a pain and external hard disks can be expensive. After the first month or two, you might just say “to hell with it” and just not bother anymore, defeating the purpose of keeping backups.
Fortunately, some smart people have come up with a good solution: online backup services. You simply sign up for an account, install a small program, and for a nominal monthly fee they’ll store all your files off-site. Everything is done automatically over the internet, with your data being transmitted and stored securely using strong encryption. I use Mozy and pay $4.95/month for unlimited storage. If you need to backup 2GB or less, there’s no charge. Other services include Carbonite and JungleDisk, the latter being a client for Amazon’s S3 enterprise-grade storage service.
The first backup with Mozy can take several hours or days depending on how much stuff you have and how fast your internet connection is. After the first large backup, only new or updated files are copied, making future backups very fast. My first backup took about 12 hours, and subsequent ones only take a minute or two. The backups take place in the background, so you likely won’t notice any slowdown of your computer or internet connection.
Restorations are easy: you can restore a file or folder by right-clicking on it and choosing the suitable menu option. You can access your files securely on their website using a different computer if your main one was damage or lost. If downloading the files from Mozy would take too long due to their great size or a slow internet connection, you can even pay them a nominal fee and they’ll FedEx you DVDs of your data.
I have Mozy set to backup files on my laptop twice a day when my computer is idle, and will often execute a manual backup immediately after saving an important document, just to make sure that it’s securely stored offsite. Sometimes I’ll email a copy to myself as well.
All this talk about backups may seem silly and very Chicken Little-esque, but after losing critical, irreplaceable data for the first time (several years ago), I developed a “never again” mindset. Since then, regular backups have saved my hide (and two years of digital photos, in one case) on several occasions. Very well worth it indeed.

Nine days ago, I made a post where I cursed my foolishness when I ended up washing (and thus destroying) a Bookmans credit slip, thus being out $45. All that was left were a few small scrappy pieces of orange paper.
Of course, this was completely my fault, and I completely understand when one of the staff at the local store said “Well, without the amount actually printed on the small bits of papercredit slip, we can’t replace it.” If I were in their position, I’d probably do the same — I’d be concerned about frauds and liars.
Imagine my surprise when a few days later, the self-described Web Monkey at Bookmans posts a comment asking for my address, and saying she has something to send me. After doing some basic checking to ensure she was, in fact, a Bookmans employee, I provided my address. Today, I received her envelope: it contained a $50 (!) credit slip (with a handwritten note on it saying “Warning: not laundry proof!”) and a few bumper stickers.
Now, over the years, I’ve dealt with good and bad customer service. Some have offered what I would consider to be excellent customer service, while others have offered customer “service” in much the same way that a bull “services” a cow. Bookmans just blew them all out of the water. Not only did they proactively seek out my issue (when I called to ask, I had done so without giving my name or number, the only record of the question was here on the blog), but they took my word on the amount I had accidentally destroyed, and even gave me $5 more. They did all this even though I was completely to blame, and I didn’t expect even the slightest bit of reimbursement for my own foolishness.
Never have I seen customer service quite so incredible. Truly, my hat is off to them.
They even have a highly competent Web Monkey, who evidently regularly reviews her server logs. Always a good thing. (Hey Heather, if you’re reading this, there’s a new version of Google Analytics code that you should replace the existing urchin.js with. Just FYI.)
If I wasn’t already a loyal Bookmans customer (both for their excellent prices, selection, locations, and people, but also for their unwavering support and defense of the First Amendment), I would certainly have been converted as of today.
At the risk of sounding like some sort of commercial shill (which I most certainly am not), if you’re in an area with a nearby Bookmans, I strongly encourage you to check them out.