Update Time

I've had a busy time of things lately with my youngest daughter now reaching the grand old age of two, so I thought this would be an interesting time to review a few prior posts.

A Few Personal Lifehacks
Ah, backups... I've changed again! Remember how I started with weekly backups stored locally, and then advanced to daily backups? Well now I've gone a step further, and have finally started backing up some items online with Amazon Web Services. This is because I've had failures with both internal and external drives, and so therefore I opted for a third level of backup. Some photos - especially those of the kids - are too valuable not to be kept elsewhere.

Backups as a whole are an area I tend to think about a lot and consider a great deal. I know I consider my data too valuable not to back it up and keep those backups up to date.

The Problem With Joan Harris
We've now had five series of Mad Men, and I'm still not overly keen on the character as a person. Great series to show the acting talents of Christina Hendricks though. I have a new respect for her as an actress, although I still think no actress matches Elisabeth Moss on the show (Kiernan Shipka might get there one day, but not just yet).

I found season five of Mad Men quite odd. Brilliant at times, frustrating at others. I've seen some reviews which felt the whole series was brilliant, and yet I felt a little bit disappointed by it. And yet I'm still wondering where it ends up going in season six, and who'll feature, how they'll feature and even what year it will begin in. If it is 1968 that augurs well in my book.

vBulletin's Venture Into Blogging
Seems a bit odd to me that this continues to be the most popular post I've written, and by some distance. I haven't written about vBulletin for a while but I think as a whole the vBulletin team have lost their way. What was a simple forum software is now a massively bloated content management system. The overall package, which used to weigh in at a manageable 10Mb, now hovers at the 30Mb mark (which does matter for some of us). Where products like Wordpress will update quickly and simply through a wizard that even downloads the software package for you, the vBulletin upgrade is somewhat more laborious in comparison.

I still don't trust it as a stand-alone blogging platform (duh, I'm blogging here after all) but I can see how it makes sense when used with a forum (as I've tested myself over at Braves-Nation.com). Unfortunately the implementation isn't great, there is no uniformity in regard to tags that might see more linking between posts written by separate users, and once again, there's a mammoth amount of bloat there. Pity, it could be so much better and leaner. Unfortunately the way vBulletin has been going recently I can't say I'm hopeful of improvement, and I've even been considering switching to Xenforo.

My Top Three Twitter Peeves
Can I add one to this? People asking celebrities to retweet their causes, all... the... time. But you know what's great? Whereas another site (that won't be mentioned by name) consistently does things to annoy their users Twitter seems to find ways to make things better. However it wasn't until recently that I discovered that you can turn off retweets by anyone you're following. It's a game-changer, something else which enables you to get Twitter working the way you want it to.