This time next week, I will be entirely done with this semester, for good or for ill.

[rax]

• Of three classes being taken, one class is completely done, one class just needs a couple of hours of revision on the paper and I should be able to submit it this weekend, and the other one (the paper is due in six days) is at 12/25 pages with an outline as well as an outline for an extra section in case I need more text. Which I doubt I will. But just in case. The class I was teaching-assisting for has 38/70 exams graded and then maybe an hour of administrivia and that should also be done this weekend. So that will leave me with just the one paper to finish. I really, really, really want to be done with it by Tuesday so I can send it in and spend Wednesday through Friday relaxing, spending time with my friends, doing a small amount of job work, and playing the growing pile of unopened JRPGs on the bedside table. ^^;; I would looooooooooooove to finish it this weekend... but I probably won't. And even if I do I will want to revise it on Monday or Tuesday because I doubt I could write 15 pages in the next two days at a quality level I am comfortable with. Ugh.
• As part of my plot to do every productive thing I can think of that isn't the paper I am brain-blocked on, and because of something that happened to one of my colleagues, I really want to get automated backups running for my colo machine. (My laptop uses Time Machine, which I need to leave running again sometime soon, but that's not a huge deal in the same way honestly.) I have a Debian machine in colo and a Debian machine in my house. Both have DNS. I'm sure there's some obvious solution. Please help? (And if the solution is "rsync" can you explain what I actually have to do? I have no brain left. The inside of my head is full of gender.)
• Because it is Final Paper Time here at... our house still doesn't have a name [0]... the table is covered in books, one pile per person. It's entertaining how obvious our sub-disciplines are from our respective piles of books; it's awesome how many of my pile have animals on the front cover. (Oddly, my pile also includes a burly 10" wrench and a pair of black cat ears. It's finals time. These things happen.)
• Seriously my brain has turned to mush. I'm trying to think thinky thoughts because I'm supposed to be writing a brilliant paper. I wanna just hand in "foxes are pretty! I like to look at them gambol in the snow. Also, trampolines! Here are twenty-five pages of pictures of foxes I found on Google Image Search!" However I will not do this. Probably.
• The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is an even more amazing book if you stir it up with Deleuze and Guattari and see what happens. I am just sayin'. A new reading of this book may be the most useful thing I get out of Deleuze and Guattari, but even if it is it will not have been a waste of my time. We will see.
• Making these posts a weekly tasklist item was a brilliant plan.

[0] Gender Haüs? The Pokemon Center? Tailechery? Radical Plane of Immanence? I still have nothing I like. I love my house, but I still miss Cathedral.

Comments

[picklish]

Re: backups. Are you backing up from house <-> colo, or are you asking how to back up both your house and your colo to some third location? How much data do you have?

[rax]

I mostly want to back up my colo files to my house machine. I have 67G although I only really care about 5G of it. (/home, /var/www/)

[picklish]

rsync isn't a bad solution if you just want to push one folder from one computer to another. Add something like this to your crontab, with the bolded values filled in appropriately:

rsync -a -e "ssh" --delete source/ user@remote:destination/

(The -a flag says do it recursively and preserve links and permissions. The -e "ssh" bit ssh says to transfer it securely. The --delete flag syncs deletions, so if you delete a file in source/ it will get deleted in destination/. You may or may not want this.)

Another option might be to turn them into source control repositories with something like git and then do a periodic commit and push from one computer to the other. I'd probably do this, because it makes it easier to recreate the state of the world at points in the past and allows you to more easily sync in both directions, but it might not be for everybody.

[jld]

I think -e ssh has been the default since almost forever at this point, FWIW. Also, -H for preserving hard links might be desirable. (And I tend to have -v (verbose) and -P (progress) in my finger macros to see what's going on, but if this is in a cron job then not that.)

backup

[bergey]

This is my backup script (yes, I should change it to use ssh). I make no claims of it being a particularly good way, and I'm not backing up nearly as much data. I've been thinking about moving more of my conf files to git, but that would require filtering out things that change a lot (eg, my maildir). I haven't set this to run as a cronjob, but I assume you'll want to do that.

#!/bin/bash
TARGET=bergey@athena.dialup.mit.edu:backup # backup to here
EXCLUDES=~/.backup/excludes # not actually used
OPTS="--delete-excluded --delete -az --bwlimit=50 -v"
dpkg --get-selections > ~/.dpkg_selections
ls ~|rsync --exclude-from=- --exclude=.cabal --exclude=.mozilla --exclude=.canto/feeds --exclude=.config/transmission/blocklist.tmp $OPTS ~/./ $TARGET/dotfiles
rsync $OPTS /etc/ $TARGET/etc
rsync $OPTS ~/Maildir $TARGET/Maildir
rsync $OPTS /data/lists $TARGET/lists
~

[tixen.livejournal.com]

Our house is called "Wobblehaus." If you want to know how that came to be, bug us when you get here. :D

[inaki.livejournal.com]

For offsite backups, we're using a Debian/Ubuntu package called rdiff-backups. It needs to be installed on both hosts, and the user that initiates the backup needs to have SSH keys set up for passwordless login to the offsite server. I can help you set this up while you're out here if you like. =D

[rax.livejournal.com]

...actually that would be amazing, I would love to have someone talk me through it! Thank you <3

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna bug you about that too, I just told cron to back up my whole home folder every night, and that's not gonna scale up at all.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I'm down in San Jose and will be through... Sunday or Monday probably? We should totally hang out aside from you showing me how to set up backups, but getting that in as well would be a bonus. ;)

[inaki.livejournal.com]

Okay! I'm gonna at least try to stop by tomorrow during the day =D

[sovay]

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is an even more amazing book if you stir it up with Deleuze and Guattari and see what happens. I am just sayin'.

Paper?

[rax.livejournal.com]

I'm working on it! right now in fact!

Well, right now I am writing a LiveJournal comment, but you know.

I cannot promise this paper will make any fucking sense to anyone except me though. It is... it has... it has attributes. I'm at 15 or 16 pages now, anyway, with the realization that I need to go back to the introduction and change a bunch of the groundwork so that the moves I'm about to make are even parseable. Let alone correct. Why am I trying to write about furries again? What made me think this was a reasonable idea for a term paper? All the texts I've found to try to draw from are more apologia than anything else and so I am just thought-rambling for pages at a time seeded by random works of speculative fiction. I don't care why a furry is, I want to know what a furry can do. Arrrrrrrgh.

[sovay]

I cannot promise this paper will make any fucking sense to anyone except me though.

Is entirely possible, but I still want to read it.

I don't care why a furry is, I want to know what a furry can do. Arrrrrrrgh.

Someday that will be the epigraph at the head of someone else's term paper, and the literature will be awesome by then.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Is entirely possible, but I still want to read it.

Sent! Hopefully you will enjoy it!

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Hooray Rax! Productive Rax!



Foxes in snow: did you know that fox tracks in snow look more like kitty tracks than dog tracks? Most canine tracks are two parallel rows of pawprints. Most kitty tracks are closer to a single line of pawprints. This parallels heteronormative walking modes in American culture for men and women and o hai gender theory didn't see you come in, have a cup of tea.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Oddly, my pile also includes a burly 10" wrench and a pair of black cat ears.

<3, <3, <3.

That is all.

Oh, except that I totally want to read a 25-page paper which is entirely pictures of foxes gamboling in snow.

[greyooze.livejournal.com]

Maybe you can call it "A House Without Rooms".