But there is a cheaper alternative if all you want to do is back up your pictures and documents: Mozy. http://www.mozy.com. You can sign up for a free account and get 2gigs of backup for free. It’s a little program that runs in the background and pays attention to folders you’ve told it to back up. When you put something new there, it automatically backs it up to your online account. It works on both Mac and PC. You can just tell it to back up your documents folder and leave it alone. I also keep a backup of my keychain which is where all my passwords and serial numbers for software goes. If anything bad happens, it’s a piece of cake to restore. 

I still recommend a thorough backup strategy. I have my itunes library backed up to DVD. A bootable backup of my entire hard drive. And you should also have an offsite backup. I’ve heard of someone who backs up to DVD and mails it to his Mom. Or like me, you could get a a paid account to Mozy that is unlimited, so my applications, music library, documents and pictures are backed up there. That way if your house catches fire and your DVD’s and hard drive are destroyed, you still have your files. 

Like I keep saying to my friends, there are two types of people in the world: those whose hard drives have failed and those whose hard drives w-i-l-l fail. Don’t be like my friend who just lost her invaluable photos. Get a mozy account and get to backing up. 

So… windows users who should be jealous. Colbri is a program for windows that begins to fill the gap by using the keyboard launcher. You can read more about it at this article including comments on the Lifehacker site. Give it a try and send me your review. I’d love to be able to recommend this to windows users as a productivity enhancer.

Technorati Tags: quicksilver

Silence: I have at times practiced silence as a spiritual discipline. This isn’t exactly prayer because I am not praying, nor even directing myself at God. I am simply letting my mind clear of all the cruft that accumulates. Today while doing it, I noticed that I gradually placed myself sitting in the presence of God.

What was helpful about this is that often in prayer I am trying to shut my mind up of all the voices that are pouring into it. What happened today was that I shut the voices up at the front end. I think that this may be a good practice. To silence ourselves before prayer. To not try and do the two things at the same time.

Notecards: The other thing to do to silence the voices is to write them down. David Allen says “You should never have to think the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” Writing it down gets it into a safe place where my brain doesn’t have to think about it. By carrying a few stickies or notecards into my prayer time, I am able to jot things down as they come to mind, and get back to prayer. The end result is that I am able to focus more on God, and less on my agenda.

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MacOSXHints has posted a tip for using a keyboard shortcut to outline in textedit. By pushing <option> <Tab> the text will automatically scoot over a half an inch and change the formating so that if the text wraps it stays inside the formatting.

I wonder if there is a similar feature in Wordpad for the PC. Please comment if there is.

Technorati Tags: text, mac, textedit, wordpad