The guys from spout have a post out at techcrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/24/6379/

Take a look

Here is a great article on how to setup and configure compression in IIS 6.0

http://www.iisinformation.com/

I have used IIS compression many times to decrease bandwidth and improve end user performance.

Great post on lifehack.org (http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/digg-life-how-social-media-will-change-the-world.html)  Discussing how social media will / could change how we get information.  To some extent I agree with the post, but I do still like my Sunday paper (old school media) to catch up on local information and also to have something physical to read.

Last week I lost my hard drive in my laptop.  The everyday laptop that I use for almost everything.  It was about 1 month old (new dell D820 laptop).   The drive in the laptop is nice a 7200 RPM (SATA) drive, but have seen some failures (Dell forums).   The drive completely died, no data recovery.

The ironic part of this hard drive crash is the fact that I had started my backups (Microsoft synctoy) the day that the drive failed.  It was going to take too long for the backup 4 hrs, and I had to make it to a meeting.  So there is no one to blame but me for my loss of data.

I did recover data from other backup sources that I use but lost a lot, because of my poor backup process.   Some files I just never added to the backup procedure.

For those of you who have had this happen before you probably understand the hardship I am going through.  If you have not lost a drive or data you are lucky.

Here are a few of the tools that I use and made this issue not so bad.

1. Mozy.com - they give you 2 gig online backup for free.

2. idrive.com - 2 gig online bacukp.

Both of the above products can be scheduled and run in the background.