Interesting times.. While the big disasters are ongoing, little ones have been spicing up my life lately.

A pleasant week by the beach ended with a tropical storm passing over the beach house. I've never experienced this before, and though Andrea was diminished by passing over land, it was still more wind than I've ever seen. I love wind, and this was thrilling, right on the edge of danger but not quite there. At least, if you have sense to stay out of the water. Leaving the beach, I heard of someone who tried to go surfing that day, and drowned.

The night before last, I was startled to find nearly an inch of water seeping up from underneath the tile floor of the kitchen. Probably it has something to do with the pressure tank pumping system, which was repaired while I was away, and means I actually have indoor running water here. (Overrated.) This saw me scrambling to close every water valve, and out with a flashlight at 2 am closing the cutoff at the 1000 gallon water reservoir before it all drained into the house. While sopping up dozens of gallons of water from the floor at 3 am probably doesn't sound like fun, I found myself going through the motions elatedly.. Because this means I finally am coming to understand the source of the damp that infests the most earth-sheltered corner of this house. It's not condensation. It's bad plumbing!

Then yesterday, I went out to try a dip in the river, stopped by the neighborhood eatery and bait shop, and ended up sitting out on the back deck eating ribs and listening to a band with "possum playboys" in their name (which makes the full name fairly irrelevant), while looking out over the river and the old-timey green metal bridge. Which was unexpected fun, and the kind of thing you have to take in when it happens, but getting stuck in a newly installed hole in my driveway was not. My car was spinning, and I gave up and called it a night.

Here's the thing. I could feel my brain working on this stupid "underpowered car is stuck in a small rut" issue all night long. Same mental pathways activating that chew over bugs and design issues. Got up this morning with a set of plans and contingency plans all ready to go. The first one, of jacking it up and putting something under the tire was stymied; it seems I am missing a jack. But the second, of digging out all around the tire, and then filling in with gravel and cat litter (a tip from some offroading website I blearily surfed last night), and then riding the gas while releasing the bake, worked great.

All of which is to say, bring em on! But I still prefer my disasters in the form of software bugs.

[I'm encouraging git-annex users to post their success stories, and this one is my own.]

I set up git-annex on my mom's and sisters' computers a couple of months ago. I noticed this was the first software I've written that I didn't have to really explain how to use. All I told them was, put files in this folder, and the rest of us will be able to see them. Don't put anything too big in there, or anything you don't want others to see.

I paired the computers using XMPP, and set up an encrypted transfer repository using a free account rsync.net gave me for beta testing. I also added a repository on my server, which made things more robust. (XMPP has since improved, but it's still a good idea to have a git repository to suppliment XMPP.) I also have two removable drives that are used to back up our files.

This was all set up using the webapp. And adding a computer takes just a couple of minutes that way. I set it up at my sister's in a spare moment during a visit, and it all just worked.

Our shared git annex contains a couple of hundred files, and is a couple of gigabytes in size. And growing pretty fast as we find things we want to share. Mostly photos and videos so far but I won't be surprised to find poems and books pop up in there from the family's poets and authors. And it'll grow further as I add people who've so far been left out.

Coming home from a week at the beach with my grand nephew and niece, was the first time I really used git-annex without thinking about it. Collapsed on a hotel bed, I plugged in my camera and loaded in the trip's photos. Only to see the hotel wifi cost extra. Urk, no! Later, in the lobby, I found an open wifi network, and watched it automatically sync up.

By the time I was home, the video of cute kids playing weathermen and reporting on our near miss by a tropical storm had been enjoyed by the folks who didn't make that family gathering.