Takumi's Blog

My mom sent me a link about a conference that’s taking place in Portland this September. It’s called Invergence;

Interactive convergence –when two previously separate areas converge and then integrate user interaction and participation.

It seems pretty interesting so far, too bad I wont be able to make it.

Anyways, it had an interesting page listing all the cool things about Portland, here’s a few of them:

• A Top 12 travel destination in the world for 2007 (Frommer’s Travel Guide)
• Best U.S. airport for business travelers (Conde Nast Traveler) 2006
• Best place to live in the U.S. (Men’s Journal magazine) 2006
• No. 1, America’s most sustainable big cities (SustainLane.com) 2006
• A Fast 30 City – Green Leader (Fast Company magazine) 2007
• America’s Best Eating Destination (The Food Network) 2007
• Cleanest U.S. city (Reader’s Digest) 2005
• Best U.S. city for walkers (Prevention magazine) 2006
• Best U.S. city for cyclists (Bicycling magazine) 2006
• Best U.S. city for seniors (Bankers Life and Casualty Co.) 2005
• Best U.S. city for dogs (Dog Fancy magazine) 2006
• Most courteous drivers in the U.S. (AutoVantage Club Members) 2007
• No. 2, Greenest Cities in the World (Grist Magazine: Environmental News & Commentary) 2007
• No. 2, 10 Greenest Cities in America (MSN.com City Guides) 2007
• No. 2, Healthiest U.S. cities (Cooking Light magazine) 2007
• No. 3 Top City in the U.S. (Cities Ranked & Rated, Wiley Publishing) 2007
• No. 3, Top 10 Cities for Independent Moviemakers (MovieMaker Magazine) 2006
• No. 8, Top 10 underrated cities in U.S. and Canada (MSNBC) 2007
• No. 9, Top 25 Fittest Cities in the U.S. (Men’s Fitness magazine) 2007
• No. 10, Best Arts City in America (American Style magazine) 2006
• One of the world’s nine most successful cities (European Institute for Urban Affairs) 2006
• One of the 20 most inventive U.S. cities (The Wall Street Journal) 2006
• One of the 10 New American Dream Towns (Outside magazine) 2005
• America’s 10 Best Places to Live and Work for Those Under 40 (Monster.com) 2005
• Top 10 Best Walking Cities (American Podiatric Medical Association) 2005

(Sorry, I couldn’t take off any… they were all just too good )

I’ve got 6 external hard drives totaling 2.7TB of storage, and I have about 1.2TB free. My music only takes up 67GB and I use two of the hard drives for backup, and one dedicated to my work (and since I never delete anything, a few of them are just filled with junk that I need to clean out).

Even with two drives dedicated to backup, there’s no real way to sync my iTunes music across the two computers I have. I’ve multiple ways to do it, but they all just never seem to work right. (Slow response, pauses while playing, etc.)

Thanks to a DreamHost blog post, I got to find out about Bandwagon. It’s essentially an iTunes backup and sync service that allows you to backup to Amazon’s S3 or an FTP server.

They’re doing a promotion now where Dreamhost customers get a free year of Bandwagon, and since I had nothing to loose, and 500GB on my Dreamhost account to spare, I signed up for it.

Bandwagon is as of right now in the process of uploading my whole iTunes library (8672 items) to my Dreamhost account. I think that’s pretty neat. I’ve used my Dreamhost account in the past and still use it now to backup my iPhoto library, so I think it’s going to be pretty neat to have my iTunes library backed up there as well.