Not having a backup program is a bit worrying. I tried hfspax which is pax for hfs filesystems. But pax is equivalent to tar so it doesn't compress. Then I tried piping the output to zip and I still ran out of space (I have too many movie and MP3 files and they're already compressed). So something that does file synchronization (one way) to a network disk will be good enough for me. I tried a few before but they didn't work for one reason or another, or they were too crippled to really test, or they're way overpriced.

But, now that I'm reading up on AppleScript I think I'll do it in that. It only has to do Finder copies which it should be quite capable of doing. I'm reading AppleScript in a Nutshell, which came out a couple of months ago. Very good book. Better than the AppleScript Guide that Apple has, which is also quite good. But I'm reading the O'Reilly book and I'm finding stuff that the Apple documentation glossed over or that I didn't know. So now I think it's quite possible for me to do it in AppleScript.

So I'm trying to back up my files manually over Apple File Sharing and it's really slow. It has to be Mac OS X since Mac OS 9 worked fine. It's about 80 MB an hour which is about 220 kbits a second. That's good AppleTalk speed... over a serial connection. But over Ethernet it should be twice as fast at least. I don't expect blazing speed out of AppleTalk, but maybe I'm just remembering wrong and it was that slow with Mac OS 9.

So the question is why bother with AppleScript when a scripting tool like Perl or TCL is more "standard". Well, although Perl is great with command line utilities, most Macintosh programs don't support Perl. Some do. Most Macintosh programs support AppleScript. And it's an Apple product. Relatively good and powerful and easy to use, just something that won't work on any other platform. I can live with that...

Once again I've gotten a good Angband character going. Right now she's level 32 and at dungeon level 29. Warrior as usual. 85 AC, +34 to hit, +31 damage, 4 attacks. She has the Chain Mail of Arvedui, a Whip (Holy Avenger), Boots of Free Action, and the Phial of Galadriel (the most useful item in the game). I've learned my lesson and now she always has scrolls of Teleportation for that fast getaway, though she's a better fighter than any other character. She can almost go through a Troll pit at one go (actually, it took three goes, but that's a lot better than 20 goes).

The hardest attribute to raise in this game is Intelligence. There are so few items that raise your Int and Potions of Intelligence are scarce. Actually, Constitution is even harder, but you don't miss it as much as Intelligence (it's nice being able to use those cool rods). Strength, Wisdom, and Dexterity are next hardest, but lots of items give you stat bonuses here. Charisma is really easy. So I'm just tooling around until I can max out my stats...

So I bought the Epson Stylus RIP software. Didn't mean to win that auction but if I do bid on something and win it I'll pay it. At first glance it looks like it will work. You install it the server on Mac OS pre-X and clients print to it like printing to any network Postscript printer. It requires 20 MB RAM and who knows how much processing power. Hopefully it won't drag the whole server down whenever I print. Hopefully it'll work on Mac OS 9.1...

I'm watching Most Wanted Live on CMT. Man, that's one frustrating show. It's basically a top ten countdown where the videos are ranked by fan votes. But there's often a guest and Amber Mogg gives country news throughout the show. The problem is that they only show from 1/2 to 2/3rds of each song. A little more when there are no guests, but rarely the whole video. And that's quite annoying. Weirdly though, the guest doesn't face the audience when they're talking to the host or performing, because the audience is shown on the camera too. Just a bad way to do things...

So some guy blocked I-5 and had a standoff with police for 12 hours, before he shot and killed himself. They shut down I-5 both directions to deal with this problem. Now, when I saw the start of this story in the morning I thought "just shoot him and get it over with". He's holding up traffic. Certainly one man's life is not worth that much. But, I realize that most people would not agree with that sentiment. And shooting him opens you up to way too many lawsuits. I'm thinking stop coddling criminals. Give them a few minutes and if they don't give up use a sniper. Eh, that's just me.