Word to the wise. This past week I nearly lost eight years of my life — my Wordpress mySQL database crashed and burned. Worse, I found out that my hosting company only keeps backups of the previous day’s data — so their backups of my stuff was corrupted as well.

Thankfully I had backed up my data in late August. That combined with the fact life has prevented me from posting much in the last few months, meant that I was able to reclaim any missing posts by looking at my previous .RSS feeds.

Moral of the story, install the Wordpress Backup Plug-In and have it send you e-mail backups of your data on a regular basis. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

This past Sunday, Joe, my father-in-law, passed away. Joe lived very long and full life — in his 85 years he marched through southern France as an infantry man in WWII, graduated from RIT when it was downtown, participated in the atomic bomb tests in the southwest though the U of R, and been loved greatly by friends and family. As an amputee, he’s managed to live independently up until he went into the hospital two weeks ago. While its terribly difficult to say goodbye to him, he was facing a lifetime of pain and future amputations that would have taken from him the independence he held so dear.

I have more to write, but right now we’re planning for the funeral. It will be Friday at 10.00am at St. Joseph’s in Penfield. Here’s his obituary from the D&C. The online “guest book” can be found here.