Only slightly bent

If you don’t care about backups, you can stop reading here. And good luck with that approach!

I have, along with many others I’m sure, long been wondering what to do about backups. Naturally I want a secure backup with as little hassle as possible.

Having photography as a hobby means copious gigabytes of data to back up, a task that is really laborious to do by burning DVDs. Also, when you get to the point of having dozens of backup-DVDs they take up surprisingly much space. So a second hard disk is called for, but they have a couple of problems: first, they fill up and you need to buy another one. Second, even external hard disks are typically in the same physical location as the main computer, thus on the line of fire should there be, well, a fire or some other localized disaster.

So what to do? I’ve long been pondering doing network-based backups. Most services offered for that purpose suffer from ridiculously small quotas or absurdly high prices or both. Like Welho, offering a whopping 5GB for 5eur/month. Saunalahti at least improves tenfold upon that offer, but 50GB is still far too little.

To get around that, I’ve been using my US virtual host that has a generous – unlimited is pretty generous, don’t you think? – amount of space for my backup needs. The trouble with that is that being cheap, it’s not the worlds most reliable virtual host. Honestly though I haven’t had any problems with them, but the lack of 100% trust is reason enough to not rely solely on them.

So I ended up in the unenviable position of having backups on two separate hard disks and on DVDs and on the unreliable server. However, my latest trip produced about 30GB worth of stuff to back up in under two weeks and that pushed me over the edge. I’m quitting the DVD-burning business and the second hard disk (actually a fourth but who’s counting..) that is now bursting at its seams can partly go, too. I’ll still keep the unreliable US-host as a backup backup.

Instead, my primary backup is now Amazon S3. While the service does cost money and has even been known to experience data loss in rare cases (not a pretty prospect), I consider it a good deal. Having my important data now stored in three different countries on two continents, with one service actually having an SLA, makes it highly unlikely that they will all be destroyed within the same day. Right?

So getting to the actual topic, how do we get to the 200 GB per month? Well, this is where JungleDisk comes in – a great little piece of software built on top of Amazon S3 that does automagic backups to it and lots of other cool stuff. So while I don’t yet produce 200GB worth of data each month, the initial backup process does consume quite a bit of bandwidth – and for that, the 200GB this month is just the beginning.

This is also where we get to the annoyingly slow uplink speeds. I know I’m exceptionally lucky in that regards with an uplink speed of 10Mbps – though real throughput to Amazon S3 servers over HTTPS seems to be around 4.5Mbps. That’s pretty fast but the initial process still takes many days. I can only imagine how frustrating (or rather impossible) this would be over standard DSL uplink speeds of 256Kbps, 512Kbps or even at 1Mbps. In this case, additional bandwidth does enable new services.

Business-wise, I am fully aware that at this usage rate, I am probably generating losses for my broadband operator. Fortunately that’s a SEP

Finns have long thought and many continue to think – delusionally, I might add – that this is a safe country with little or no violence. This is true even in the face of all statistics which have consistently said otherwise. One would think this belief was shattered a year ago when a gunman killed eight + self in Jokela but no; whenever there is discussion about violence and shootings etc, USA is still considered far more dangerous.

Today another school shooting tragedy hit the country in Kauhajoki; see any major news media or even Wikipedia for further info.

My heart goes out to all the victims and those affected by this tragedy. But I also wish that at least one issue could be laid to rest. Before anyone still dares to complain about the dangerous schools in United States, look at the figure below. The usual unscientific-approach-disclaimers apply, but it does give you an idea of the scale differences. The graph depicts school shooting victims per million people over the past 50 years in Finland and United States:

With Finland having over six times as many fatalities per million inhabitants in school shootings as USA, remind me again why and how Finns can consider the United States a more dangerous country in this respect. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this latest tragedy makes Finnish schools the most dangerous in the world.

I thought it was about time I tried Nokia’s Ovi-service which supposedly does many cool things. After all, having your contacts backed up on the network is a very good thing and this is one of the services I was looking forward to Ovi providing.

Let’s see what happened. After a relatively painless setup and initial synchronization, the calendar, to-do lists and notes seemed to have synchronized fine. And even the contacts, all 723 of them, were there.

Or were they?

Because something seems to be missing on the Ovi-side. Here’s a screenshot of one contact entry. On the left is what I see on my phone, on the right is Ovi’s interpretation of it:

Where the hell is the phone number?! This is the situation with roughly 85% of my contacts.

What is a synchronization service that manages to miss a minor irrelevant detail of a contact item – like the contact detail itself – good for? Let me answer that rhetorical question: it’s good for nothing.

As is nearly always the case, my to-read list is progressing slower than I would hope. But at least it’s getting somewhere, this time with James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few being the topic of today. My very first feeling when I started reading it was along the lines of “yeah, right, wisdom of crowds my…” as I had the tendency to think of the kind of crowds that act in exceedingly stupid ways. So while acknowledging the awesome achievements of the likes of Wikipedia, it’s safe say that I was skeptical of the overall concept.

I’ll admit outright that Wisdom of Crowds did increase my appreciation of several things, not least of which is the value a crowd can have. However, it also turns out that merely having a crowd is far from guaranteeing good results. Surowiecki clearly lays out the prerequisites for successful decision making in groups: diversity, independence and decentralization. These three aspects are really the core of the book, but even without getting into any detail of those here, it’s clear that they matter a great deal – just think how susceptible a uniform, interdependent group is to groupthink.

There are some very sobering lessons in the book. For one, often when it comes to decision making, experts are useless in the long run. In fact, they’re often worse than useless, they provide misleading advice. Ever wonder why most funds underperform the market in the long term? Because they’re being managed by an “expert” or at most by an interconnected group of experts. And yet we rely on the advice of experts on many walks of life – and especially when it comes to the financial experts, pay them ridiculously much for their assumed expertise that, it turns out, often doesn’t stand any closer scrutiny when you look at the performance over time.

Does this mean any group of random people can, say, diagnose any illness as well or better than your doctor? Of course not. But it does mean you should not assume that one expert can consistently perform better than average in many kinds of decision-making tasks.

Other fascinating topics covered in the book included defending the recently much-disparaged short-selling activity as a crucial part of a working market, advocating decision markets as a way of making intelligent decisions and emphasizing the importance of having a devil’s advocate in a group. Markets in general are discussed quite a bit, and one deceptively simple but powerful point there is to realize that the measure of a working stock market is NOT rising prices.

The book is not perfect, far from it – for one, there’s a huge blunder of claiming Linus Torvalds as being Norwegian! Oh the humanity! Other than that, the book also ended more with a whimper than a bang, with the last chapter IMO attempting to take a bit too big of a bite by trying to quickly cover some fundamental things about democracy.

Perfect or not, this is a must-read book, especially if you continue to believe in the hero-myth that a single individual – say an expert, a CEO or your fund manager etc – can continually make better-than-average decisions, singlehandedly save a company from ruin or consistently outperform the market. Plus the advice will certainly help you build better-performing teams and understand why some group efforts work very well while others fail miserably.

You glance at the Finviz World Heat Map for the day. If it’s reddish, they’re having a bad day. Let’s take a look at it from today:

And as you have by now noticed (unless you live under a rock – and if you do, it better not be a northern rock, ah hah) investment bankers in particular along with a lot of the financial sector have been having a very, very bad day today.

As is always in a crisis, experts and “experts” are of course having a field day with this. There are the we-told-you-sos and the it’ll-only-get-worses, neither exactly a stellar performance in prediction. There’s the mandatory piece of (as such sound) advice that you shouldn’t sell your funds now – conveniently neglecting to mention that if everyone did that, then we’d really be in trouble. Losses are being counted all over the world. And every other country rushes to explain that all that bad stuff will mostly stay in the US, that our banks could never face a crisis like that – ironically including Finland, where we had our very own banking crisis less than two decades ago.

My day, on the other hand, was just fine. Maybe a bit more interesting than average due to these events.

I recently had the opportunity to do a conference presentation in Auckland for work and take a vacation stopover in Sydney on the way back. On the way there a looong plane change in Hong Kong allowed me to do some sightseeing there, too.

Spending 9+11hrs in economy class – and then repeating the drill 10 days later – is never exactly a lot of fun. But when the destination is New Zealand and Australia, you can somehow accept that it takes a small sacrifice to get there And it’s always worth it.

In other news, it again dawned on me the other day that I should focus more in this blog. Too often I give in to the temptation to write about a bunch of stuff in a single post – and as we know, when you say everything, you say nothing. So from now on, I’ll try to have a single – seriously like one (or two. Three max.) – point in any one blog post. That may mean shorter posts but that’s probably good.

In that spirit, the point of this post is to advertise the photos from the aforementioned trip. The photos are in their separate galleries, so click on the below images to see the gallery for the city in question:

As far as the trip itself is concerned, it was a lot of fun. So am I glad to be back?

To my family? Yes.

To Finland? Hell no. More on that later.