If you lost your cell phone and an honest and helpful person found it, could they get it back to you? If you’ve filled out the owner information, and if your cell is not password-protected, probably yes. If your phone is protected, though, the finder might not be able to get to the owner information. The same logic applies to cameras, calendars, paper-based address books, and planners. A phone number on the inside cover, or inside battery cover (Sharpie), is usually accessible to anyone who would take the trouble to find an owner.

Don’t use your cell number on your cell phone.*

I found a well-used planner in the exit lane of our office parking lot once, where it had fallen after its person had placed it on the roof of the car and forgot it. It had six weeks of future appointments and no owner information. Because it was clear it belonged to a Realtor®, I left it at the front desk of (one of) the attorneys’ offices in the building, in hopes that the owner had a) been at a closing and b) would remember the last stop. Never heard.

A return address label in the front, along with a cell phone number, would have solved that problem much faster. One of my friends adds a “reward for return” note next to her phone number.

*I have a friend who locked the keys to a padlock ON the hasp of the padlock… For sure, he never lost the keys.

20091109 Update:  In the process of packing up my PC to carry it to a convention, I wondered how many other people might have the same model (few, but this is a theoretical thought).  Then I realized I had no identifying information ON my PC itself!  Oops!  Added an address label with my phone number on the bottom of the case, and another inside the battery pack, and one in the laptop sleeve, and on the charger.  I’m certain I’ve missed something, but I’ve covered what I can think of at the moment.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The next best time is now.

One of my external hard drives is dying. On the way to the store to buy a replacement, I thought that perhaps I should price on-line backup first. If I am willing to spend $80 on a piece of hardware that offers more of the same protection I already have, I should be willing to spend at least that much for a different type of protection altogether. Gina Tripani’s Upgrade Your Life recommends mozy.com; $5 / month buys backup for unlimited amounts of data. Discounts apply when you prepay for two years at a time.

I forked over my credit card number, downloaded and installed the application, and clicked the “backup now” button. The application did its thing and came back to tell me that it would take five days to back up my hard drive at my current connection speed, a little less if I could accept some performance degradation in my system.

Wow. Five days’ of data? (15G, BTW) Five days to PROTECT my data? Good thing my (internal) hard drive isn’t already making funny noises!  At the end of the first 24 hours, the system reports that 5.1G have been backed up, so perhaps they’ve overestimated.  (The FAQ tell me that if I have to disconnect, Mozy will pick up where we left off.)  Future backups will be incremental and take much less time.

It was at this point that I thought about flood insurance, a useful policy to consider for people who live in the path of hurricanes (among other forces that make water cross property lines).  Flood insurance is sold with a 30-day delay.  You can’t wake up one rainy morning and buy coverage that will be in effect by nightfall.  You have to decide that floods are a possible risk for your home and take action long before it is possible to know that any given rainfall will threaten your property.

For almost all of my readers, the relative risk of hard drive failure: flood damage is 1:0.  Unless you have a much faster connection, or less data on your hard drive, than I do, the time between deciding to back up online and BEING backed up online is measured in days.  Get that tree planted now.