Today in geekery

One of these days I’m going to figure out why my nightly/hourly[1] rsync backup does something strange when the clocks change. But the problem is that I have to wait 6 months or a year to see if the change I made made any difference, and then I think “nah, I’ll just fix it manually next time it happens just like I did this time”. I think it’s getting confused by the double hour when the clocks go back and thinking it has to do the nightly backup again. Come to think of it, the nightly does happen at 1:15, and when the clocks go back we get two 1:15s, don’t we? I don’t want to make it 2:15, because when the clocks go forward we don’t have one of those. Maybe I’ll make that 4:15 and avoid the whole problem.

[1] Every hour it backs up my home Linux box to an external hard drive. Once a night, it backs up my colo box to my home box, and then backs up that to the external hard drive as well.

Today’s realization

I was trying to explain to somebody how much cooler you are if you just type a big long pipeline with a bunch of unix commands rather than putting the results of one command into a file, then processing that file into another one, and so on. And how for full geek points, that pipeline really needs to include at least one awk command. And then it hit me:

Unix is an Extreme Sport(tm). Just look how much Mountain Dew the average Unix geek drinks.