the world is your acorn

Lately my macbook has been making funny noises and spinning its little beachball more than usual, so I’ve been trying to stay vigilant with my backups until I can make it to the Apple store. Today, I plugged in my external hard drive to get my Time Machine backup up to date, and it failed after a few minutes with the “Unable to Complete Backup. An Error Occurred While Copying Files to the Backup Volume” message. Very helpful–thank you, Apple. So I poked around online and tried things like repair my disk permissions and deleting the “.inprogress” file from my backup drive and deleting my .plist file for Time Machine. Nothing. I even reset PRAM on a prayer. I tried to do a brand new backup on a different drive. Same thing. I finally noticed that the backup was failing at the same place each time, so I opened up the console, filtered on “backupd,” and figured out that something in the Carbonite Application Support folder was the culprit every time. So I excluded that folder from my backup and all seems to be well. Phew. I hope that folder isn’t something that I really should be backing up locally. Theoretically, Carbonite should be backing it up, right?

I’ve come to a crossroads. I simply can’t keep up with all the feeds in my reader. Sure, I have a folder named “kills” where I keep the feeds I’m happy to sacrifice and “mark as read” when I get really busy, but I just can’t put one of these into it. If I see there are new posts, I won’t be able to stop myself from looking at them. I think there’s about 80% overlap, so I waste all this time flipping through both feeds, but I don’t want to miss anything if something good turns up. So I’ve decided to unsubscribe from one. Which? Tastespotting was the original, and I think the pictures are more reliably food-pornolicious. Food Gawker has more posts a day, which means I’d be missing less, but the point here is to trim down my blog consumption. Do I go with Tastespotting, trusting that the editing there will meet my needs? Or do I stick with Food Gawker, because I’ll get more variety and there’s less chance I’ll miss out on a good post/recipe just because the author isn’t a great food photographer?