Back It All Up

I once lost nearly all my data in a catastrophic hard disk failure. I was young and cocky and stupid and I did not have a backup routine. All digital artefacts of my life before law school were wiped out. And it was such a way cooler life! There were pictures of misty mountains from my SLR. There were raw audio tracks of indie bands. Then there was source code for all sorts of interesting side projects. 

Those who know me after The Disaster will remember that I was always burning DVD-R's, backing up important directories every week or whenever I reach major project milestones. What they don't know is that I was also cobbling together a poor man's cloud backup through shell scripts and an FTP server. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption that failed half of the time,  and its actual value is derived from myself learning that I should have never built in the first place. 

 

Fast forward to today. Terabyte drives are smaller and cheaper. There are plenty of cloud based storage options. I also have the good sense to buy an online backup solution rather than cobbling together my own. I've finally got a backup system I can live with, one that I can set-and-forget so that it doesn't take up too much of my time. Best of all, it's finally 3-2-1 rule compliant. Here's what I have:

Three copies: All my working files are in Dropbox's cloud and replicated across all my computers. Dropbox, however, really shouldn't be considered a backup solution. So it counts as one copy (the original). My system ensures that I have four copies in the cloud and spread through various storage media.

Two types of media: In addition to the external hard disks that Dropbox synchronizes to, I have:

  • A network accessible storage that automatically backs up my files via TimeMachine.
  • Crashplan - a cloud based backup system.
  • A couple of portable drives with TimeMachine backups, that I plug in for onsite and offsite archival

One offsite copy: Keeping a copy offsite makes sense. If your house burns down with your fancy computer and external hard disk drive - what's the use of a backup routine? Crashplan, since it hosts my files in a network far away, is my primary offsite backup. Whenever an external hard drive fills up, rather than letting TimeMachine delete the oldest backup, I'll just swap in a new drive and put the old one in an offsite storage facility. 

 

This is all probably too much for a personal backup system. Eventually, I'll scale it back and simplify it to use just one network drive instead of swapping in USB drives, so that the entire process will be fully automated.

 

 

You Can't Go Home Again

I've been back in the Philippines for more than a month now,  and I'm still feeling nostalgia for Japan. Not in the marketing retro sense of the word, but in its original Greek meaning - a painful aching to return. 

 

Cities just make sense to me. I start with the information overlay - the maps and guides, the websites and travel forums, drilling down to the street level until I get a feel for the pattern language of a city. A mentor of mine taught me about how each city is an organism with a unique heartbeat. Travel from city to city often enough and you become sensitive to the variations in these heartbeats: In Tokyo that beat was always fast, always frantic. In Kyoto it was more ponderous, like a temple bell.

So much of our selves are linked to the background radiation of our cities, and we don't realize it until we start living in another - and the change in context jars us to realization. In Fukuoka, where there are fewer cars (and most of them far more well-maintained), I discovered that my nasal issues were due to the heavy air pollution of Manila, and that my constant stress headache was linked to the hellish gridlock of my home city.

Ruby once asked me why some fashion just seemed to work in Japan but would seem crazy in Manila, where the same set of clothes are available (and still weather appropriate). The best answer I could come up with is this - the difference lies in the city itself. You can have Instagram-worthy fashion in Japan (and the US, and Europe) because the cities provide a clean background - solid lines, great lighting, interesting textures. 

But that is all gone now. The first weeks back, I felt reverse culture shock even though I knew full well what to expect: the filthy streets, the mind-numbing traffic, the lack of basic organization and service standards. Those things I can get past through. What really shook me was that, after the elections, it turns out that I never really knew my people. Even as I served them and fought for them, I had always assumed that they shared fundamental values - like human rights and the rule of law. Turns out that's not the case. I also taught I knew my family and friends. Seeing them sublimating to the mob was painful.

I thought I was going home. Everyday it feels like I ended up in enemy territory. 

 

I Wrote a Master's Thesis in Law

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." -William Blake

First, the finished product:

It's not much to look at, but I bound it myself, just like everyone else. 

It's not much to look at, but I bound it myself, just like everyone else. 

 

After 11 months, 53 versions (including five revisions prompted by my adviser's comments), it's done. Here's how I went about writing my thesis.

 

Research

Most of the resources I used for this thesis are available online. The articles were taken from the university's Westlaw and Lexis subscriptions, while the books were from Cambridge Books Online and Springer. Whenever I use an "offline" source, I took pictures of the relevant pages and converted them into a PDF. Having everything in soft copy enabled me to put all resources in Mendeley, 

107 sources were relevant enough to make it into the reference manager.

107 sources were relevant enough to make it into the reference manager.

 

Using a reference manager had the following advantages:

1. Whenever I wanted to go back to a work that I need to cite, I just looked in one place that's indexed and searchable.

2. It can generate formatted footnotes and bibliographies with a few clicks. This made it easy to cite early and cite often, which helped prevent the slippery slide to plagiarism.

 

Writing

This is going to look comically inefficient - but every paragraph in the thesis (except minor edits and footnotes) started out as ink on paper. I wrote down the text, quoted passages, did meta stuff like questions and notes regarding the subject - all on unruled notebooks. Only when I've churned the text enough times on paper did I type it into Scrivener, adding formatting and citations (courtesy of Mendeley). As soon as I transferred the text into the computer (or decided that it shouldn't be in the draft), I'd cross it out from the notebook. 

 

The draft texts were written down in three notebooks

The draft texts were written down in three notebooks

For a lot of people it would probably make sense to go all-digital and draft everything from a computer. It doesn't help my tech cred, but I stick to pen and paper because:

1. I write faster than I type. Sometimes I luck into a writing flow state, and when that happens I need to fix my thoughts as fast and as friction-free as possible. With a good pen and nice paper, there is lower impedance mismatch between my writing and my thinking.

2. Fewer distractions. Pen and paper does not have Facebook and email and YouTube. The medium allows me to keep writing for hours - no electricity or Wi-Fi required. I only use the computer when it's time to type or edit the text - something I can manage while listening to music or watching Netflix.  

 

Encoding/Editing

I typed and edited the text using Scrivener a favorite among screenwriters and novelists, but also pretty good for legal and academic work. What I love about it is that it helps you treat the writing project as manageable modules of text. Rather than imposing a mental model of THE DOCUMENT (which could be hundreds of pages long), the metaphor it presents is that of an index card. I just need to fill in a couple of paragraphs per session, and worry about how it all fits together later. 

 

Scrivener forces you to deal with your writing project as manageable chunks

Scrivener forces you to deal with your writing project as manageable chunks

Whenever I've encoded enough to save as an internal milestone (or to present to my adviser), I can "compile" the text (just like code) into a Word document or PDF file. I can specify document-wide formats  at compile time, which means I'm not fussing with fonts and spacing while writing. With some AppleScript, you can automate the  process so that you have the latest version of your work stored and emailed at the end of every work day.

 

Change Management

"I want to delete these paragraphs because they're irrelevant - but what if it turns out I need them later?" "What if I try this line of inquiry, and integrate it to my main draft later on if my adviser approves?" "I think I raised that point in an earlier draft, and now I think I have to emphasize that after all." The costs of change management can weigh down the creative process. Most of the writers I know try to impose order through their file system, putting date and edit information into the file names (i.e. Document - SuperFinalFinalVersion-Aprroved-July_26_2016.docx). That's good enough when you have one guy working on the canonical version of the document and you only need to coordinate one thread of edits. What if you need to branch and merge? In my case, my adviser needed at least a weekend to look over my draft and then put in his suggested revisions and comments (Prof. Pejovic worked on the document itself with track changes - which is ideal for my system). Meanwhile, I may have already made my own revisions to the document, and I need to reconcile his version with mine by Monday - and still preserve both lines of edits so I have a reliable narrative (and a backup to refer to). This problem has been solved by programmers for decades - version control systems have been developed to maintain a coherence for large complex projects. The one I used for my thesis is the same I use for programming projects - git/GitHub.

GitHub for Mac showing my daily revision check-ins and my two main "branches" - the original line ("main"), and the one where I focused on fraud ("refactored-fraud").

GitHub for Mac showing my daily revision check-ins and my two main "branches" - the original line ("main"), and the one where I focused on fraud ("refactored-fraud").

 

Printing

This one should have been fuss-free - I mean, you open your file and then you print it, right? We have two laser printers in the LLM Student's study room, both connected to public terminals through a LAN. The problem was, I finished my draft pretty much the same time everyone else did - and everyone was using those two printers. These were always overheating and resulted in warped/curled pages. Thankfully, since that time I learned that the Philippine Consulate can't afford to extend printing privileges to citizens and officials, I was forced to learn how to print from pretty much every conbini in Japan. After giving up on the study room printers, I went to the nearest convenience store, and printed copies of my thesis. From the cloud. In a convenience store. 

 

Pretty much every convenience store in Japan has a network printer/scanner/copier.

Pretty much every convenience store in Japan has a network printer/scanner/copier.

 

And there you have it - all the tools and practices I needed to write and finish my thesis - on spec and on schedule this time. 

 

 

Fountain Pen Patents

Think I finally found how I can contribute to the conversation at fountain pen groups, as well as layout some rationale for my collection strategy. 

Fountain pens are interesting from an IP law perspective because most of the core technological components are outside of patent protection. In a way, it gives you a preview of how technologies can mature and stay on as classics - by becoming fashion or art objects, or by appealing to nostalgia. The technological frontier, however, has more or less plateaued.

Every now and then, though, you'll be pleasantly surprised by something new. For me, one of those moments came with Pilot's invention of the retractable fountain pen in 1964. There was a real efficiency problem (those darn caps - gotta remove them, post them, return them, not lose them in the meantime) that needed to be solved. Sure, retractable pens existed before, but the retraction mechanism alone couldn't solve that efficiency problem. It isn't enough to retract the nib - because the water-based inks that have the capillary flow fountain pens rely on would dry out. So the non-obvious part - the real inventive step - was the mechanism that closes to create that airtight chamber once the nib is retracted: 

So that's why the Vanishing Point will always have a place in my collection -  it's one of the rare technical/design innovations in a field that has reached its technological apex. Now, for the next phase - I think TWBI's are a cost-effective way of getting pens that use off-patent technology, such as the the plunger type filling mechanism (VAC 700 and Mini) and the telescoping screw piston (Diamond and ECO).