I was surprised to find that my notepad generator has been featured on Lifehacker for the second time. Last December Lifehacker posted the first version of the notepad generator and traffic to it spiked for several days. I got a serious amount of excellent comments from people around the world, and today I show that roughly 450 web sites link to it.

I’m surprised by the fact that even months after it was posted I was still getting about fifty unique visitors a day using it. If you google for “notepaper” you’ll find this tool in third place – that’s not bad.

Later on I developed the tomorrows tasks tool, which honestly was more useful to me. However, it never really caught on like the notepad generator did as it was designed for a narrower range of uses.

Awesome!

The replacement power supply from HP showed today, so I performed some PC-surgery and the pc is in recovery now. Now, I need to find a way to sync all of the stuff I temporarily placed on the laptop back with the stuff left on the old PC. Maybe a good time for a reformat?

Nah, like I have that kind of time.

I’ve found that development is beginning to remind me of middle school science. Every once in a while something comes across my plate that I don’t see any way to accomplish. But before saying no right way (and before saying yes), I sit down and think about what needs to be done. To repeat an over-used cliche, I need to think outside of the box.

Recently at work, I’ve come up with a few hypotheses as to how something could be accomplished. I setup a small test folder and come up with the code for what I think it will take. Like middle school, I begin an experiment to find out if my educated guess was good or not – exposing the unknown attributes and exploring the interactions of elements (like chemicals). The result are tested in several control environments, i.e. various web browsers, different situations, etc. Then, I document the results.

The only thing my science teacher did that my coworkers do not do is make me write up a paper. I simply show them my results and they get excited, no grading necessary. If it works it works, if not I either did it wrong or I tell them it’s impossible.

It isn’t entirely the math in math class that you need when you get older (you need to know how to do your taxes, but you don’t need the quadratic equation on a daily basis). It was the fact that you had to learn about patterns, and how structure can affect the results. Numbers appear to be so simple yet they are used to explain everything around us, so you need to know how they relate to each other. It’s the same with programming – you cannot write a program without an understanding of order and logic.

As I was trying to install some RAM into our main gaming/media computer, something happened. I’ve installed RAM enough to know how to do it right, but now the computer won’t turn on and the power LED is flashing. Long story short, everything points to a bad power-supply. The fact that this started when I put in new RAM may be a coincidence, who knows.

All of our important files are stored below a single directory with a very clean hierarchical structure, and a perfect naming convention. From our taxes to Collin photos, everything I’ve ever had to keep is in this directory. Merlyn’s kitten records? It’s under
Documents/Animals/Merlyn/Records. Need that javascript I wrote in 2000 for the Mayors Office? It’s under Documents/Apache/Clients/OMVK/Javascripts. You get the idea. This folder is organized to the point of border-line OCD for two reasons:

• It makes it easy to find what you’re looking for.
• It makes it super-easy to backup.

Luckily, this directory was backed up the night before the crash, so I knew that everything that had been archived before that day was safe and sound on my linux server, here in the office. However, there were some Collin pictures, scanned documents, and various files that had not yet been archived. In case the hard drive of the gaming machine is damaged when we replace the power supply or even the motherboard (unlikely, but possible), I had to get those items back asap.

I took out the hard drive and stuck it into my linux machine as a secondary drive. I booted linux, mounted that windows partition, and used the terminal to copy over those files.

I downloaded those extra files to my laptop (my main Windows machine used for everything except gaming/media stuff). Tonight I’ll download all of my previous archives and music.

This means that just one full day after I lost the ability the boot my main PC, I will have everything available on my laptop. Not a single Collin picture lost. All it took was about two hours of moving the hard drive back and forth.

If it had been a total failure and that hard drive was destroyed, the only thing we would have lost was a days-worth of Boo pics. Everything else we hadn’t shredded yet, so I could simply scan them again. Whew!

Trust me, you need to backup your stuff!