Not-so-embarrassing admission: my computers are named after Space Shuttle Orbiters. Currently, I have Discovery [my 24" iMac], Atlantis [my Mac mini media server], and Endeavour [my Macbook]. [Ignore, for a moment, that I have other, non-working Macs in the house. Okay? Okay.]

Well, to the two desktops, I slave hard drives. And, well, I’m a bit of a geek, so …

Discovery has:

• HAL 9000, the internal drive for the iMac.
• Discovery II, the every-night-cloned-by-SuperDuper! backup drive that ensures I’ll keep running if HAL 9000 goes, well, insane. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true …”
• TMA-1, which used to be my Time Machine drive until it became full and unwieldy. I recommend a TM drive be 2-2.5x of the base HDD, and I had only 1.5x with TMA-1. So she became the Moon, and now I have …
• TMA-2, TMA-1’s bigger cousin, a 1.5TB miniStack v3.

I also have a Drobo, which, if you’ve followed me on Twitter lately, has been giving me all sorts of hell. Something is amiss, and I’m sure that we’ll fix it. Anyhow, the drives used to be named lame names, until I came up with the following naming system:

• Io, for audio.
• Ganymede, for storage I let anyone use. [Well, not just anyone ... just the people I give a CrashPlan backup code to.]
• Europa, which doesn’t have any cool pun to it, but is used for storing my Aperture libraries.

It would be cool, you know, if that worked right now. But I’m not bitter.

What about Atlantis, you ask?

• Atlantis’s internal HDD is Plato.
• Atlantis’s backup HDD is Cave.
• Atlantis’s Drobo, which is working just fine right now, is “Drobo”. I should rename it Timaeus.

Endeavour gets backed up to an unnamed Time Machine. Lame, I know. I’m actually preparing to sell it to fund an iPad purchase, and also to prepare for the day when I can utilize corporate’s interest-free loan plan to buy a 27″ iMac, which will get the Endeavour name. I’m trying to keep myself to three main machines, because otherwise, this house would be full of computers and all my money would go to Cupertino.

[Shut up, all of you.]

2010-02-27: Harvest Hands, Nashville, TN, USA

2010-02-25: The Rutledge, Nashville, TN, USA

In case you’ve been wondering how I’ve been doing with my bipolar depression, here’s an update.

1. Starting Monday, I’ll be at the therapeutic dose of my mood stabilizer. Right now, I’m at 75% of that, and I feel great.
2. Do I still have good days and bad days? Sure, we all have them. But my bad days aren’t so bad, and my good days aren’t so good that I want to quit the drugs and go back to the highs of hypomania.
3. Speaking of those highs: what I’ve come to understand is that a lot of my negative self-image stems from the fact that the only times I’ve felt right the past few years have been when I’ve been hypomanic. Let’s be honest: I’m a high-functioning overachiever. My hypomania maximized my potential for awesome, which is why I liked it so much. But I’ll also be honest in that the highs are not worth the lows that I have. Not in the slightest. Further expanding on this point: I’m aware that people really value me, but I don’t feel that way. There are some roots to this problem, and I’m exploring them. It’s hard work, but it’s so necessary to getting my head straightened out.
4. Therapy continues to be good, if hard. [See above.] A lot of my actions in the last 20 years have been to insulate myself from pain. Fixing this is not unlike debriding a burn: painful, but necessary. I’m just starting to unlock things inside my head, and it’s so good.
5. I had to get biochemically balanced to make therapy be fully efficacious. This isn’t to say that the last eight months have been a waste, because they haven’t, but I’m feeling like I’m just now starting to get somewhere. We’ve been laying the foundation, and now it’s time to raise the walls. [Or, well, lower them, as it were.]

And if you didn’t care, well, you read this far anyway, eh?

In case you’ve been wondering how I’ve been doing with my bipolar depression, here’s an update.

1. Starting Monday, I’ll be at the therapeutic dose of my mood stabilizer. Right now, I’m at 75% of that, and I feel great.
2. Do I still have good days and bad days? Sure, we all have them. But my bad days aren’t so bad, and my good days aren’t so good that I want to quit the drugs and go back to the highs of hypomania.
3. Speaking of those highs: what I’ve come to understand is that a lot of my negative self-image stems from the fact that the only times I’ve felt right the past few years have been when I’ve been hypomanic. Let’s be honest: I’m a high-functioning overachiever. My hypomania maximized my potential for awesome, which is why I liked it so much. But I’ll also be honest in that the highs are not worth the lows that I have. Not in the slightest. Further expanding on this point: I’m aware that people really value me, but I don’t feel that way. There are some roots to this problem, and I’m exploring them. It’s hard work, but it’s so necessary to getting my head straightened out.
4. Therapy continues to be good, if hard. [See above.] A lot of my actions in the last 20 years have been to insulate myself from pain. Fixing this is not unlike debriding a burn: painful, but necessary. I’m just starting to unlock things inside my head, and it’s so good.
5. I had to get biochemically balanced to make therapy be fully efficacious. This isn’t to say that the last eight months have been a waste, because they haven’t, but I’m feeling like I’m just now starting to get somewhere. We’ve been laying the foundation, and now it’s time to raise the walls. [Or, well, lower them, as it were.]

And if you didn’t care, well, you read this far anyway, eh?

The Golden Archipelago

Got the Deluxe edition, which is why I’m just now getting to this…

Roseland NYC Live

2006-04-22: The Legends, Kansas City, KS, USA