Fishing Derby at Mile Square Park

Although we skunked out like most on that day (in spite of 1,600 lbs of rainbow trout being stocked a couple days before), we had a great time. We met Phil Friedman and everybody around us was friendly. The kid fishing next to us picked up his sister’s pole when it bent over late in the day (his sister had gotten bored and wandered off somewhere) and he pulled in the biggest fish of the day. All in all, it was a good day.

First three days back

Day 1: Indoor rock climbing with my little sister

Day 2: First snow for Mina and Max, up at Wrightwood

Day 3: Storytime at the Main St. Branch of the Huntington Beach Public Library. First beach visit – we parked in the state beach lot and started walking to the water, but MAx and Mina got distracted by the sand so we headed back. Still too cold anyway. Got a SIM for my phone (more on this later) at At&T and went indoor climbing again. Pho dac biet for late dinner.

I accidentally deleted all of my Gmail contacts with my Android phone…

…but this is why I use Gmail instead of, say, Hmail or Ymail. I restored all 1,000+ of my contacts by logging into Gmail on a PC and doing the following:

  1. Click Contacts.
  2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
  3. Choose the time you’d like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you’d like to return to where you started.
  4. Click Restore. You’ll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

You can perform a restore from up to 30 days ago.

This info plus more can be found on the relevant Google support page.

USB 3.0 in full matzofrackin effect!

We’re leaving for the US tomorrow night, so I’m preparing a full data backup of our most important work plus digital photos that now number in the hundreds of thousands and date back 14 years or so. It all adds up to less than a terabyte because I store the big files like RAW format photos and midget elephant tentacle pr0n elsewhere. So the backup method I started from our last trip back home is to copy everything to an external HD and store it at our home in the states – it’s a pretty ideal offsite storage solution.

I went to buy a 2.5″ USB hard drive at the computer store and found that last year’s flood has driven the price on HDs up at least 20% even here in Thailand. The one major difference in spec on external HDs from two years ago is that most of them feature USB 3 now. Eager to see if it really makes a difference or not, I got home and promptly dumped my photo archives on it… It really is super fast! It feels like the transfer speed is limited by the speed of the drive now instead of bottlenecking at the controller. The transfer rate holds steady over 40 MB/second and peaks at over 50, which is a hell of a lot faster than I remember the USB 2 drives being.