____  _____  ___  ___  ____  ____   ____   ____ ___  ____
          |    \(____ |/___)/ _ \|  _ \|    \ / ___) / ___) _ \|    \
          | | | / ___ |___ | |_| | | | | | | ( (___ ( (__| |_| | | | |
          |_|_|_\_____(___/ \___/|_| |_|_|_|_|\____|_)____)___/|_|_|_|

Ahh, junction, you never fail to bring me joy.

Use dropbox to sync your winamp settings (internet radio bookmarks, media library, etc.) between all your computers. Just set this up and it seems to work great. Caveat: I think winamp stores its media library in here, so if yours is big, you may eat up a chunk of your 2GB dropbox limit (in which case it might be better to junction to a removable drive).

junction C:\users\[you]\appdata\roaming\winamp C:\[your dropbox]\winamp

I'm working intently on something iphone-ish (iphony?) that I'm really excited about. It's been taking every minute of my time but I've almost got enough ready for a big debut here soon.

In the meantime, I thought I'd talk about backups. Up until last night, my backup strategy was, let's say, severely lacking. Even after losing over 160 gigs of MP3s to a Diet Coke a few weeks ago, the only real backup I had was some folders I copied halfheartedly before moving across the country this time last year. Prompted by a conversation at work earlier, I spent the wee hours of Friday night working on... backups.

I found a program called Cobian Backup. I like it because it supports FTP transfers, meaning that in addition to backing up my internal drives to an external USB drive, it also can pull from FTP sites, so I can backup snapshots of all my web sites too. It's a little rough around the edges but it's easy enough to schedule stuff and it seems fairly reliable.

With local data and websites now safe and secure, I thought about gmail. Backups of gmail may seem silly - gmail's not going down for the count - but, thanks to alcohol, it's entirely possible that I could do something ridiculous to lock myself out of my account. And there's always a chance I'd get hacked. An infrequent gmail backup couldn't hurt.

Lifehacker will tell you you need to install cygwin and then point you down the path of UNIX-on-Windows hell. Don't do it! There's a much easier way - some awesome guy has written "Gmail Backup." It'll let you backup via a GUI, or through a command line interface. Through a couple scheduled tasks, I've now got my gmail, and my wife's gmail both backing up to the USB drive every few months.

The one thing I wish I could figure out is a way to archive some of my pages on other sites. It'd be cool to periodically backup my twitter, facebook, and friendfeed pages. I dream of some sort of "web backup" tool that you can point at all these different sites and have it save off your news feeds and profile info. Also, where's the plugin architecture for Digsby??? I want to write one to remember all the avatars and taglines I change and put them in one of those cool flash-powered timeline displays that are all the rage on the internet.