This Friday is Halloween. And it's this year's backup day. At least, according to Maxell. Two years ago, they inaugurated Fall Backup Day to be the Friday before the United States' "fall back" daylight savings time change. So each year it is the Friday before the first Sunday in November. (Assuming no new legislation is passed to change DST dates)

Just yesterday I was thinking there should be a backup day, where everyone is reminded to burn some CDs/DVDs of their important files, or make sure they have an automated backup to a remote computer or external hard drive. Because it's so easy to keep putting it off and never doing it. One of my hard drives died several weeks ago, and even that painful reminder wasn't enough for me to get backups in place right away for all my other files.

So I searched for a backup day, but I didn't find much. A few random declarations of random days as backup day, and Maxell's declaration seemed to be the most prominent (even their day seems weak, nothing but a few news articles about it). But I, at least, will start celebrating it.

So during a lull in the trick-or-treaters this year, start burning a DVD. Or find some software to do automatic backups of your files to a remote location.

I've been using twitter some lately. It's sort of like public asynchronous IM or chatting. And there are many ways to post and read your updates, from IM-like apps, to text messaging, to their website. I don't know if I'll use twitter a ton, but I am some for now.

I've added my "tweets" to show up on my homepage under the heading "Short Thoughts". You can also check out my twitter page to read them there.

At least for now, I'm posting short tweets more often than long blog posts.

Morocco's country code is 'ma', so they own the .ma domain. The site 'brondse' is available within the .ma domain, meaning I could own www.brondse.ma However, Morocco requires a local person to register a .ma domain, so I can't do it myself. Do you know anyone in Morocco?

My homepage now sports an overview of what I've written lately, listened to lately, bookmarked lately, and coded lately. (It used to just redirect to my main blog page). There is also a link to browse all the "feeds" I read (over 200 now). I plan to add latest photos to it eventually (have to do some work on my gallery first), and sometime I will give a whole new theme to the site.

For the technically inclined, I wrote a simple PHP script that uses the SimplePie feed parser to pull & display the various feeds. There are feed icons next to each section if you want to subscribe. For the feed browser ("what I read"), I'm pointing the grazr widget at my OPML file -- which actually is dynamic and pulls the OPML file from my feedreader service (currently newsgator.com) so that I can have an elegant permanent URL for it and also so I can remove one private feed that I wish to keep hidden.

Pam thinks I should blog more. What do you think?