Google has provided free storage for several years via their Gmail accounts–I now have access to over 7 GB of free Gmail (and Google docs) storage already, but they have recently announced a pretty attractive online storage solution with what seems to me to be very good pricing:

• 20 Gb for $5/year
• 80 GB for $20/year
• 200 GB for $50/year
• 400 GB for $100/year
• 1 TB for $256/year

The last three options in the list also come with a free EyeFi card for uploading photos wirelessly to Picasa from your camera (provided that your camera is SDHC-compatible; my Olympus FE-230 is NOT SDHC-compatible, as it turns out).  If you need more than a terrabyte of storage, Google has additional options, up to 16 TB for a mere $4,096/year.

Granted, you can buy a 1 TB external USB drive these days for less than $200, but if you need online storage that is accessible from any location where you have an Internet connection, the Google storage is a pretty good deal.

I’d hate to think of how long it would take to back up (or restore) my laptop’s drive via the ‘net, but I can imagine a number of possible scenarios in which it could be extremely helpful to have that safety net there, particularly when I’m on the road.

Check it out.

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And maybe, with a little planning and some re-organizing of my professional life, I’ll get back to it sometime soon.  But in the meantime, I wanted to post a shout out to Jon Daley, who hosts this site, who brought my attention to the fact that someone unleashed an “international botnet” to try to take down my site and the whole server–by the time he notified me, he had already taken care of the problem and done the plug-in upgrades I needed to solve the problem.

That’s uncommonly amazing service from an uncommonly conscientious hosting provider, and I am extremely grateful.  In that one act of customer service, he has insured that I will continue to be his customer (not that it was ever in question, because Jon came highly recommended to me by a close friend and fellow blogger, whose judgment I trust implicitly in such things).

So while I’m here, I’ll update you on what’s been happening around the Underpants Office of late:  the new job (now a year old) is going well.  I spend about three or four days a week in my office at the church where I work “part-time,” and the rest of my time I spend working in my home office, usually on things for my church, as it turns out.  Having this job (which I referred to in a previous post) has allowed me to hone several useful skills–I’m learning a lot more about video editing, using Final Cut Express; I’m doing some audio recording now and then, using Logic Express, GarageBand, and Audacity; and I’ve been forced to learn a lot more about Windows XP and Vista (the operating systems in use by several members of our church staff).  And thanks to the acquisition of an Asus eeePC netbook (a freebie I won in a drawing at a worship-leader conference this summer), I’m getting my feet wet with Ubuntu Linux (specifically Xubuntu), since I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping Windows XP on the thing.  (Is my bias showing?)

Perhaps the coolest thing in all of this is that I really like my work these days.  That’s a huge change for me–in my former job in the non-profit corporate technology world, I had begun to dread going to the office almost every day; now I actually look forward to my work–so much so that I have to be careful not to work all the time.

So anyway, I’ll get back to a more regular blogging regimen in time.  Thanks for stopping in.

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It’s a part-time job, theoretically, but the truth is that as I have been ramping up and learning the ropes, it’s actually been more of a full-time job, in terms of my time commitment (if not in terms of my compensation).  I’m still working in my home office about two days a week, but “home office” in this case can mean my actual office at home, a table at a coffee shop, the couch in my living room, or anyplace I can set up and connect to the Internet.

My new job is at my church–my official title is “Director of Media and Communications”–and my primary duties include managing the volunteer teams that provide media-related technical services for church worship gatherings, meetings, conferences, events, etc., such as sound, video projection, video production, still photography, and such.  But my responsibilities also include managing the church local area network, the church’s Internet connectivity, the church Web site, the church newsletter, and the church management system.  I also provide day-to-day workstation support for the church staff.  Oh, and I also lead the contemporary worship team, so I’m playing in the band, planning worship services, rehearsing the band, and running the worship services–pretty much everything except the preaching.

As you can imagine, this keeps me extremely busy, and it’s been difficult these past few months to make time for blogging–most of my various blogs have suffered because of this, but I am holding onto the hope that, in time, I’ll settle into a routine that will allow me to return to a more regular blogging schedule.  (You’d think that after nearly eight months I’d have found that routine by now, but clearly I haven’t.)

The upside of this is that I’m being forced to re-acquire many of the time-management and work-management habits that atrophied somewhat during the year I took off from regular employment.  As that happens, I’ll try to share my experiences and lessons learned here, because I suspect that many of you are in somewhat similar positions, that is, trying to balance a regular job with whatever it is you are doing in your home office.

Thanks for your patience!

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http://alltop.com

AllTop is a site that aggregates the best of the Web–blog articles, Web sites, all sorts of stuff, all categorized and searchable by keyword and topic.  For example, if your interest is Web design, you can click on “W” in the alphabetic index strip and find “Web Design” in the list that appears–click on that and you’ll be taken to a page that lists up to five of the latest articles on more than fifty of the top Web design blogs and sites on the ‘net.

After just a short time of exploring AllTop, I was pretty impressed.  But the site acknowledges that the inspiration for AllTop comes from another similar site called PopURLS, which is also worth checking out.  PopURLS aggregates a whole slew of the most popular stuff on the Web, including the latest and greatest from sites like Digg, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Fark, Lifehacker, and many others.

http://popurls.com

With so much information available each and every day, tools like these can make it a little bit easier to keep abreast with what’s going on, what people are saying, what’s new and interesting–if you need an idea, or some inspiration, or if you’re looking for something specific, or if you’re just wanting to be entertained for a while, check these sites out.

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