NateSees(.com)

I’ve never been good about consistently backing up my hard drive. Hence, I have lost a fair amount of files due to crashes. Now that I work at home on my own equipment, I’ve been searching for a reliable backup solution. My first thought was to get a massive external hard drive, specifically a gigabit network attached drive that I could plug into my wireless router and access it from multiple computers. But those proved to be pretty expensive, and external hard drives (in my experience) have proved to be less reliable than internal drives.

I’m really glad I never bought anything because I recently purchased JungleDisk, a utility powered by Amazon S3. First of all, S3 is a fairly new service for storing and serving static content. JungleDisk is a simple tool that lets you access your S3 bucket from your local file system, and shows up as a network drive on your computer. Since all the files are stored on S3, the reliability factor is a googilian times better than an external hard drive. Cost is another plus. Jungle disk costs $20, one time. They also offer an upgraded service for $1/month with some added functionality. S3 has it’s own separate pricing, based on file usage and bandwidth, but it’s dirt cheap, too. I think my bill last month was like $0.44.

So, even if I ended up spending upwards of $3/month, it would still take years to equal the amount I would pay upfront for an external hard drive…which would probably fail in a couple years anyway.

My wife and I were skimming through tonight’s episode of American Idol which we recorded. We really only cared about who got voted off, so we just started skipping past the Idol Gives Back recap, but we were soon caught completely off guard when we saw the contestants start to sing “Shout to the Lord”. (As a sidenote, we discovered that they sang this song last night as well.) As the song was sung, we were left babbling quick utterances such as “wha–?”, “y–!”, “bu–…ahh!” and the like. I’m still trying to figure out why it was so odd to watch them sing the song. Do any or all of them know Jesus to the extent that they would call Him “Savior”? Although we didn’t watch last night’s perfomance, I understand that the opening lyrics were changed from “My Jesus” to “My Shepherd”, but tonight the original lyrics were sung.

It also makes me wonder who made the decision to sing the song in the first place, let alone a second time with Jesus’ name blatantly proclaimed as Savior. Did they take some flack for leaving it out the first time? Or did the producers receive some positive feedback from Dolly Parton’s “Jesus and Gravity”…enough so that the most contraversial name on earth would be safe to put on the most-watched show on television? Very intriguing, to say the least. So much so that I couldn’t go to sleep without writing about it…and I typed all this on my iPhone.

P.S. I’m bummed that the Australian chap was voted off.