See also Rocky IV

[jere7my]

After the heady successes of my last two soda experiments—Sprecher's Cream Soda and Hannah's (not Sarah's) Maple Cream Soda—I pushed my luck a little too far tonight. I got cocky, I admit it. And I paid the price.

I'm not sure exactly what it's called, since the label is mostly in Cyrillic, but I believe it is "Kvass: Russian-style carbonated beverage."

There is, apparently, a beer-like drink called Kvass; this does not appear to be it, as it contains no alcohol. I can imagine, however, that sad Russian children are forced to drink this Kvass substitute until they are old enough to drink the real thing, which explains all that experimentation with Communism and gulags.

Despite it being non-alcoholic, the clerk asked me for my ID when I brought it to the counter. The list of ingredients includes "bacterial culture" and "bread crumbs." And it tasted like old beer with bacterial culture and bread crumbs in it.

Key planning point for the future: avoid Kvass.

I had a serious scare tonight. I was (am) using Kendra's iBook for my internetting, and the hard drive suddenly began spasming, grinding, knocking against the case. The speaker began chirping in some eldritch tongue. I could feel the drive thrashing about in there. (None of this, I should point out, I am making up.) My first thought was, obviously, "Poltergeist!" but hot on the heels of that one was "Kendra's dissertation is being chewed to bits!" Which scared the daylights out of me.

Obviously, her computer is fine, as I'm continuing to use it, and her dissertation is undamaged. I found the hard reset button, and, after rebooting, Norton Utilities could find nothing wrong. But I think it might just be time for a backup; the last one was more than a month ago. The icy dread that clutched at my heart when I thought she'd lost all that work has convinced me that weekly backups are wise.

(Anybody have any experiences like this one? It sounded like the reader arm in the drive was literally banging against the walls of the hard drive. Very freaky.)

Comments

[ortsorfragments.livejournal.com]

When I was at Middlebury studying Russian for the summer, we took a field trip to the Russian Orthodox monastery randomly located in upstate New York. They served us a meal with their home-brewed kvass -- in 2-liter Sprite bottles.

Not sure what happened to the Sprite.

[emsariel.livejournal.com]

I've been to that monastery as well... to say that it's a "Russian Orthodox monastery randomly located in upstate New York" is to understate the surprise one will get cresting a rolling hill in a farm field to find onion domes and monks that barely speak English.

The kvass they make there is the real deal, and it is, in fact, basically bread and apples and a few herbs thrown into a barrel to ferment, as best I could tell from what I saw there, both in and out of the two-liter soda bottles. I really liked kvass, though my roommates back at school most certainly did not. Their bread is nonpareil, though.

[franzeska]

Ok, check which model it is. I had one that died right before (2 weeks before, in fact) I came to Japan. I love Macs, I really do, but they had a recent model that likes to suffer multiple organ failure at an early age. When did she buy it?

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

For theses, dissertations, etc., I prefer daily backups. It's only or mostly text (I assume), so it shouldn't be too difficult to just upload it to some offsite server (which protects against things like fires and natural disasters). I don't have my own server at the moment, but there are several folks on chat who do, many of whom would probably be happy to give you an account.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

In addition to tirerim's excellent suggestion of online backups, there's the USB-keychain drive method -- get one of those little 16- or 32-MB USB flash drives (the small ones are pretty cheap at Staples, etc), and then she can carry her thesis around on her keychain. (Or leave it in the sock drawer, which may or may not be safer.)

[metasilk.livejournal.com]

Not so much with hardware, just software, and that was my own fault anyway...

Backups rule. Must back up this system I'm on too.

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

Total agreement that daily backups are the way to go for really important work.

If nothing else, if it's only a few files, once a day she could email the current version to someone for archival purposes.

There's also the option, if you have a CD burner, of burning a CD every few days.

Frequent backups, at least some of which are offsite, are essential.

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

A couple more backup suggestions that people haven't mentioned yet:

1) Do you still have a .Mac account? Or did you cancel yours when it stopped being free? If you do, you have access to their Backup software, and space on their servers to back up important files. I haven't used Backup myself, but I've heard that for backing up documents, it's pretty easy.

2) Do you have an iPod? I have a recollection that you said you were going to get one. If it's good enough for the human genome, it should suffice for Kendra's dissertation.

Of course, the biggest problem with backups is sometimes just remembering to do them, rather than having the necessary components. In a case like that, some sort of scheduled job or reminder would probably help. A lot of backup software will allow you to schedule periodic backups (less helpful on a laptop, though, which may or may not be on a network/connected to a backup device at the scheduled time), and I'm sure there are lots of tools out there you could use to set up a reminder.