Creating Losing Designs – great ideas on using low stakes losing to motivate learners.

“The Smart Worker Needs Job Aids Rather than Courses” – this is a great series. Read ‘em all.

Learning is Social. Training is Irrelevent? – Yes.

The Death of the Traditional Enterprise

Review: DesignJot – the first iPad app for learning development? Great review.

Spanning Sync’s 1 Year Anniversary – congratulations, guys! Great product.

Book Review: ‘Game Frame’ by Aaron Dignan

Off-Site Backups

Over the holiday weekend I plan to start the series of backup profiles. Most of you will fall under the first — the family geek. I’ve got a great way for you to secure your own data, as well as your family members, wherever they may live.

If you are nodding your head and thinking, “Of course I do, who doesn’t?”, then you have my respect. I still think you might find this series of posts beneficial as I’ll be introducing some new services and ideas, so stick around.

The rest of you, the ones who think hard drives aren’t made of tiny moving parts just waiting for something to go wrong, you need to wake up. You have data that you will lose.

Hard drives fail. Frequently. Period.

If you’ve never suffered from data loss, it’s a matter of when, not if.

Notice that I have yet to mention user error, viruses, cat incidents, spills or other destructive methods of data loss. Pick your poison.

Now that I have your attention, relax. I have your antidote. But you need to act swiftly, because you don’t want to be the one who waited a day too long and lost little Sally’s Kindergarten graduation pictures forever.

In the olden days (read: just a few years ago), backing up was a pain in the ass. External hard drives were expensive, massive and loud; and automated backup tools were mediocre unless you knew how to work the command line. This is no longer the case. We have amazing tools at our disposal now that make backing up simple and inexpensive.

Because I understand that everyone is not like me, I will be offering up several recommended backup plans in the coming days. Pick one that fits your needs, or head over to this wonderful form right now and I’ll build you a custom plan.

If you’re in a hurry, here are some online services you can use immediately:

• Backblaze: super simple online backup
• CrashPlan: more options, more features, more expensive
• Dropbox: all your files, on any device. Free service is great. Extra storage is a little pricey.

I plan to post a profile each day, at a minimum, for the next few days, so check back (or use the form to get your custom profile).

I had started a post a few months back outlining all of the things I use daily: my desk, software, hardware, backup plan, music library, etc.

Then I realized that it would be a gigantic post and my setup would probably change by the time I finished writing it! So, instead, I’m making it a series. I hope I get some feedback about what I use and how I use it so I can become more efficient and hopefully save some money. A series will also make it easier to update in the future.

Just as a disclaimer, there might be affiliate links on a few items I profile specifically (to help raise money for charity and keep this site running).

Here’s the order I plan to post:

1. Hardware
2. Software
3. Backup Plan
4. Network
5. Desk & Office
6. Music & Fun

BTW – my absence was due to my Macbook hard drive CRASH a little over a week ago – I’ve been catching up on a backlog of work and trying to figure out my backup strategy moving forward.