DRIVING: that's what it's ALL ABOUT! A blog and website for automotive driving enthusiasts, featuring my interests as I see them: news and opinion about manufacturers of interest, significant enthusiast cars, and driving them hard and well.
The "Honda S2000 Performance Portfolio 1999-2008" covers the car thru 2008. It will be available in the fall, but can be pre-ordered thru Amazon.com at the link below.
This looks to be a worthwhile addition to your S200 library.
A question for your consideration: do Driving Enthusiasts also have to be computer geeks?
Why do I ask? As we proceed in this hobby, we come across thousands of images and videos, hundreds of URLs, documents describing technical details of your favorite cars, downloaded videos of WRC events and Top Gear, and much more. On top of that we're taking photos and making videos at our own events. How can we possibly organize and protect all of these files? Even if we didn't begin this hobby as a computer geek, we could be forced to become one just to keep track of all the cool stuff that we accumulate in this hobby.
If disaster strikes the majority of these files would be irreplaceable: photos and videos of events can't be recreated, many others can't be downloaded again. Having them sitting on a disk drive or two spinning under our desk inevitably makes for a disaster: disk drives wear out (a realistically safe lifespan seems to be about 5 years, after that you are taking a big risk), your computer could be damaged (even a lightning strike is possible), dust and animal fur accelerate wear, or there could be a file corruption. And chances are there is more than 1 computer in your home which also have masses of files on them.
I've got about 40,000 files related to this hobby which I've accumulated over the years. And on top of that I've got the network of websites and blogs under the banner of DrivingEnthusiast.net: this is another 20,000 files of various types. And then there is my Outlook file, with every single personal email I've written since 1997.
What can you do to backup all these files? In my case, they are spread across many different folders on my main PC, and there are also several other PCs in the house. And some of the files are enormous - especially the videos (of which there are often 2 or more copies as they are edited). I've got one video of an open road race event that is over 150 gig in size. Backup is a serious issue for me. I used to backup to an externally connected 500gig drive, but that very quickly ran out of space. Something much larger was needed, and something much better was needed to organize and manage this enormous mass of data.
And how easy can the backup process be made? The extent of the "geekiness" we have to develop is the big question. We don't have time in our lives to develop or maintain a large degree of geekiness.
So we need smart and easy-to-use tools. As an example, I've said all along that the only way I could possibly create and manage these enormous websites with my limited time is to leverage powerful but easy to use tools such as Microsoft FrontPage (now Expression Web). And now, thanks to the HP MediaSmart Server, there is an easy and infallible way to backup any number of files.
Here's what the industry experts have to say:
And as you see in the video, there's even more here that can be done beyond just backing up files (although that's well worth the cost by itself). If you've got several computers, and/or need to access them from other places in your house such as your media room, you can use the HP MediaSmart Server as a central repository of your files - a "home server". You can even access them while you are on the road (great for business travel), and you can setup access for friends and relatives to access selected files from their own homes. The HP MediaSmart Server will do all of this for you via an easy to use and highly graphical user interface. In my experience with this product, it's an extraordinarily easy thing to do.
I've had my HP MediaSmart Server for 8 months and it's been flawless. When I bought it, I followed the simple picture-type instructions that came in the box to set it up and it worked the first time.
But there is even more that it can do. Lets say you bought an HDTV and would like to use it to view your videos and photos. Thanks to functionality built into Microsoft Windows, and to HP with it's new HP MediaSmart Connect product, you easily can do that. The HP MediaSmart Connect comes out at the end of July, and it's highly anticipated. You can use it to connect your HDTV to your HP MediaSmart Server, or to any Windows computer (see HP site for specs and requirements). I'll be blogging about my experiences with this new device when I mine arrives at the end of this month.
For your convenience, I've provided a graphical link below to Amazon.com for safe shopping. You don't need the books if you're a typical user: HP has written very clear instructions and the user interface is terrifically easy to use. If you are a full time geek (or worse, a nerd!) and want to use these devices to their max, the books will be helpful. For the Home Server, you need to choose between the 500gb and 1 terabyte model depending on how many files you already have. The Server has 4 disk bays (1 used by the standard 500gig drive), so given currently available off-the-shelf SATA drives (which don't have to be bought from HP) you could put up to 3.5 terabytes of disk into the machine. I have 2.5tb, and I have only filled 13% of it with my backups and other files.
