The high temp yesterday was 113 F. Like this guinea pig, I didn’t really want to get up. But I had to return library books and get groceries. I got the last book in the Book of the Long Sun, a book about warfare as practiced in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and a book about the worst military disasters of the 20th century. I’m not sure what criteria they used to define “worst” though. I wonder whether Dien Bien Phu and My Lai are in the list of disasters.  The book about ancient Greek and Roman warfare is interesting; I didn’t know that non-Spartan ancient Greek generals didn’t really have the authority to tell their soldiers to do stuff.  The generals could give orders, of course, but the culture and general usage of the time made it so that soldiers could disobey those orders and not suffer any punishment. (That didn’t really change until Alexander the Great.)

I’ve been wondering about my backup plans as well. Burning DVDs and storing them in a safe deposit box is all well and good, but the prices on large-enough USB2 hard disks may be low enough that I could get 2 of those and rotate them every 3 months. That’d also be easier than burning DVDs. What’d be even better is a weekly offsite backup, but I don’t know that I could manage that unless one of my local friends was willing to store one of my disks in their house and swap it out every week. OK, I have softRAID-1 on my desktop box, and the last time I accidentally deleted useful data was 9 years ago, but I have a whole lot of data, and some of it is not easily replaceable.