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Dear HTML5 Video Element,
Wake me when you support fullscreen. Thanks.

Time for 2009’s Year End sirshannon Says It Rocks Awards!

Movie of the Year: Avatar. This was easily the best CGI in a movie by far and the best 3D in a movie so far. Unless these 2 things become passé in a year, Avatar could end up being the Citizen Kane of CGI (a so-so movie that set a standard for all movies from that point on).
Honorable Mention: Moon.

Worst Movie of the Year: I didn’t bother seeing many shitty movies this year but the worst I saw was Terminator: Salvation.

Song of the Year: According to iTunes, my most played song of 2009 (that was released in 2009) was Mastodon – Oblivion.
Honorable Mention: The Mars Volta – Teflon

Album of the Year: Dangermouse and Sparklehorse – Dark Night of the Soul.
Honorable Mention: The Mars Volta – Octahedron, Kid Cudi – Man on the Moon: The End of The Day

Live Concert of the Year: Leonard Cohen at The Academy of Music in Philadelphia, PA. 3rd row center seats may have colored my opinion but this was a show I never thought I’d have a chance to see.
Honorable Mention: tie: NIN|JA 2009 in that big shed in Charlotte, NC and The Butthole Surfers at the Masquerade in Atlanta, GA. Again, these were shows I thought I’d never get to see (again, in the case of Jane’s Addiction): Jane’s Addiction and The Butthole Surfers toured (separately) this year with their original lineups.

Word of the Year: “heh”hv
Honorable Mention: “tweetup”

Software of the Year: Windows 7 – for being so good that people who pretend to hate Vista for no real reason aren’t able to hate Windows 7 for the same non-existent reason.
Honorable Mention: Android 2.0 – for giving at&t haters a little hope for a good phone. If Google would fix their contacts, I’d switch.

Hardware of the Year: iPhone 3Gs
Honorable Mention: Motorola Droid

MMA Fight of the Year: Fedor vs Brett Rogers. Fedor’s return and MMA on CBS, all in one night. Fedor, for the first time since Fujita clocked him in 2003, looked like he might lose the fight for a while. I think Fedor may have passed his prime but that just means that we can finally see him fight without knowing he won before it even begins.
Honorable Mention: Pretty much any fight with BJ Penn or Scott Smith in it.

TV Drama of the Year: Mad Men. Season 3 of Mad Men continued the trend of allowing me to call it “the best show on television” without hesitation.
Honorable Mention: Sons of Anarchy. I really liked the first season of this show but the 2nd season made the first look weak in comparison. There were more “oh shit” moments in this show than I could try to remember. It reminds me of back when The Sopranos was good.

TV Comedy of the Year: Curb Your Enthusiasm. Another great season of Curb plus the Seinfeld reunion I didn’t know I wanted.
Honorable Mention: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. SuperNews.

There was a ton of snow on the ground when we arrived in Galax for Christmas and a full day of rain didn’t change that. Click the image above to see more photos from the trip.

Dune
Dances With Wolves
Gears of War
Blade Runner
Alice in Wonderland
Apocalypto
Aliens
The Matrix
The Incredible Hulk
Pocahontas

Eric Parks told me about his grandparents’ beach house a few months ago and I immediately wanted to schedule a trip to take photos there. It took a while before we got a group together with the right props but we were finally able to spend a few days on Oak Island and get some pics while there.
Click any of the photos to see them larger and/or view the entire gallery (23 photos) here: That 70s Beach House.

I bought this cloth at a fabric store in Gastonia

and was glad to see someone else putting it to good use… It is the same cloth used on this sofa, as seen in the window of Neiman Marcus Last Call at Discovery Mills in Georgia.

These notes were taken as I started having trouble with Acronis True Image Home 2009 (and later ATI 2010). They were taken as the problems happened and solutions were tried, so it isn’t formatted as a nice and pretty story. It also doesn’t include new problems, like “why doesn’t consolidation actually consolidate the backups?”. I don’t really know if this software is worth my time anymore. I have blown far too many hours only to arrive at the same place I was at the beginning. And knowing how buggy the backup process is, I don’t see how I am supposed to be confident that the backups are even valid or would work if I needed them.

here are my notes, starting around September 12, 2009. What a nightmare:

I have 2 backups: my system volume backup and a file backup. The first thing I did was create a system volume backup but then it never ran after the first time, though it said it was scheduled to run every day. It wasn’t listed in the scheduled tasks if I click on a date in the calendar (only the file backup is shown) but if I click the “show all scheduled tasks, it would show up. There was no indication of any reason why the task doesn’t show up in the list when I click a date but does show up when I click “show all”… it says “At 12:04:00 AM every day” as the “schedule”.

So after a week of trying to figure out why that wasn’t running, I gave up and recreated the task.

When I look at the “Manage Backups” page, the file backup was no listed, I had to browse for it.

I activated “Acronis Startup Recovery Manager” but, after reboot, it was no longer activated. I activated it again.

The emails I get from my backups list the location of the backup as “”.

========
a new version was released 2 days after I bought the other version so, a week later, I found this out and downloaded the new version.

a week after that, I installed it. While installed, I got a message to close the following programs: Windows Explorer. Not IE… explore.exe. Not a good sign.

rebooted after installation. “Acronis Home has encountered a problem and must close” error is the first thing I see.

I try to run Acronis from the start menu, get the User Account dialog box and allow it, then get an Acronis error: Acronis True Image Home is not installed. So I unstalled it via the windows control panel, but that didn’t work at all. It did not unistall the program.

So I ran the installation program again and chose “repair”. That appeared to have worked after rebooting.

Acronis now makes a “My Backups” folder for some reason. Eventually (after 2 or 3 failed backup task attempts in ATI 2010) I gave up and let ATI use that folder instead of the folder I had created and used for my backups.

But then I tried to set up and run a full system backup, scheduled for midnight, and it shows up as Status = “Queued” instead of “Idle” and did not run at the scheduled time. Rightclicking the task and choosing “start” does not start the task.

I had to download and run a commandline utility to delete all schedule tasks to attempt to fix this (see http://forum.acronis.com/forum/4214 )

I did this, deleted my old backups (thus wasting the last 2 weeks of labor trying to get ATI 2009 and now ATI2010 to work correctly) and recreated my 2 backups: a system backup that runs at Midnight and a file backup that runs a couple hours later. I used the “run now” checkbox to make the system backup run immediately but did not do that for the file backup. The system backup ran immediately and ran again on schedule. The file backup still said “Queued” the next morning when I got up. It did not run at scheduled time.

I deleted the “queued” task and recreated it, backtracking to make sure the “run immediately” box was checked (it is checked by default but unchecked when you change any of the real options, such as making it a scheduled task. Checking that box caused the task to run immediately and it also ran on schedule later.

So, finally, after slightly over 3 weeks, 2 versions, 3 installs, and way over a dozen attempts, I now have both of my backups running correctly.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have much faith in them. How can I really be confident that my backups will actually work if needed when I know how buggy this software is?

I have now rebooted and seemingly confirmed that finally, after all of the problems I had with ATI 2010, now that I have it running correctly, it appears to have solved the initial problems I had with ATI 2009.

Also, the bootable Acronis Rescue Disk does work for me. The System Report didn’t work by itself (failed to save the report) but does work from within the rescue software. That isn’t a big deal but is yet another bug in the software.

Hopefully I’ll never need these backups in an emergency. If it do or if something else pops up, I’ll update this list. Otherwise, I think I’m through.

And then, on October 13, 6 days after I thought I was finished, one of the original problems popped up again: On the home screen of ATI 2010, there is once again a warning that says “Your system is not fully protected. Perform the following operations: Back Up My System”.
So now I am creating a new system backup by clicking on the “Back Up My System” link and creating a new system backup (AGAIN) and scheduling it to run daily, being sure to backtrack and check the “run now” checkbox.

2009-10-14 7:30am That backup ran correctly and ran again when scheduled that night and now the home screen says “Your system is fully protected”. But when I go to the Recovery tab, the backup is not listed under “disk backups” like it should be. I clicked “browse for backup” and added the backup manually. This problem is the 2nd of the 3 original problems I was having with ATI 2009.

I left for the beach and returned Sunday 2009-10-18. Again, had the same message: On the home screen of ATI 2010, there is once again a warning that says “Your system is not fully protected. Perform the following operations: Back Up My System”.

2009-10-21 : I have uninstalled ATI 2010. I give up. I have spent far too much time on this, it would have been less work to just manually recreate a windows backup every day than to jump through all of these hoops only to end up without a stable dependable automatic backup.

I will now go back to using Windows backup automatically and will manually create a new backup from time to time in order to deal with the size issues Windows Backup has. Wasting $50 is bad but I wasted much more than that in labor.

Maybe I’ll try again when an update to ATI is released.

I posted a couple Circus photos of 2 of the La Petite Mort Burlesque girls:

And some photos of and near the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta:

At some point around 2000/2001 I finally bought my personal domain name sirshannon.com and started playing around on it. I was already working as a web developer but was mostly working locally and on other people’s domains. Sirshannon.com has been through many incarnations but I realized early on that I would need a “business” domain in order to have a site that I could direct potential clients or employers to because I had no plans on making sure sirshannon.com was “work safe”.

I eventually came up with sirsha.com as my “business” domain. I basically separated my online identity into 2 personalities: a work-safe, technology-oriented side (”Sirsha”) and the NSFW “personal” side (”sirshannon”). There was a blog on each site, among various other things that would come and go as interest and time varied. This separation worked for me because, theoretically, I could drop f-bombs all day on sirshannon.com but still have sirsha.com to show off my geek credentials to anyone who might need my professional services. It was a bit of a pain sometimes because things like music software sat firmly between both business and personal. I had to stick to the plan, however, because I was working as a freelance developer and consultant and there is no way I would direct a potential client to sirshannon.com, which contained such gems as “The Hooker With The Heart of Gold” (spoiler alert: I killed her and sold the heart for crack). Sirsha and sirsha.com were vehicles that allowed me to meet many great developers, learn a lot, and share a little knowledge. If it was an experiment, then it succeeded completely.

And then, in late 2004, I took a full-time job. This drastically cut down on the amount of tech blogging I would do on sirsha.com because my free time was reduced and because I refuse to blog about code I write at work. So my interest and investment in sirsha.com because less and less. In addition to that, my job is in an adult-oriented industry so there is no reason to refrain from dropping f-bombs these days Perhaps in the future I’ll have to try to pretend this job didn’t happen but for now, there is almost no reason to “hide” behind sirsha.com.

And then, several months ago, my web server harddrive failed. I have old backups but not a current one, so setting everything up again would be a lot of work for incomplete results. So I decided to cancel that web server contract and outsource my hosting for the most part. One day I’ll either have all my domains set back up on hosted web app services or canceled completely. Wordpress and other platforms are so easy to set up, I don’t see much of a reason to write my own platforms anymore, or use one that is too much trouble for too little benefit (like sirsha.com’s last platform, Community Server). I’m never going to write the next great blogging platform or CMS so why not use the currect greatest ones? Maybe I’m just getting old, but I think I’m getting wiser

One day I may have sirsha.com’s content available again, either on wordpress or some other platform, archived for the ages, but for now, sirsha.com will direct to this page. Consider it a tombstone. Or a plaque outside a cryogenic chamber.

For those of you that don’t mind non-tech posts and opinions, along with some f-bombs on occasion, please stick around. For those who do mind such things, thanks for reading sirsha.com in the past, I hope we learned a little from each other along the way.