During a negotiation theory course for my MBA, I recently learnt about the tit for tat solution to the prisoner's dilemma.

While growing up, I would always prefer to avoid conflict and retaliation. Internally, I justified this to myself as taking the high ground. Unfortunately, to the observer, I was just getting trampled on.

Unhappy with this, I learned how to deal with conflict and no longer accept being trampled.

Tit for tat provides a balanced approach that is optimistic, proactive and forgiving without being weak in its responses. It is proven, logical and sound as a strategy. Most of all, it's the type of person I try to be.

After weeks of pain in the bad old days of dial up, our new ADSL connection finally went live yesterday. It's amazing how a few weeks of dial up completely changed our habits: buying the paper for a TV guide, not checking email at night, wireless laptop never leaving the study.

Using iiNet broadband starter we have up to 1Mb/8Mb speeds with 4GB of data download a month for $39.95. Our apartment connection seems to be line synching at about 0.8Mb/2.3Mb which is a little disappointing, but not unexpected.

So far the speed seems to be highly variable, but is absolutely flying throughout the day. Even late last night things were particularly slow. I'll give it a few days to settle in. For real numbers, the Oz Broadband Speed Test is helpful. We get about 200kB/sec real usage speed. When it works, it's great!

PS: Using our Alcatel Speedtouch modem I could get the line synch speed through a lot of fiddling around to access the web interface (http://10.0.0.138).

Managing the myriad of passwords for systems is a huge headache for everyone. Personally I use the KeePass software to keep a complete list of all passwords.

It's good to get in the habit of making passwords around 8 letters long that use a combination of lower case, upper case and numerics. This seems to be the sweet spot for getting through the various "security enforcing" password systems. Of course, with each one subtlely different it's a nightmare trying to do anything consistent. I like to use simple word / number combinations ( e.g. song title & length in secs) or words with some letters substituted for numbers (e.g. t00thbru5h).

I have employed a system for many years of having a secret number which is combined with a sensible keyword on each site (e.g. blogger5147, gmail5147, etc). Unfortunately this means that should the number become compromised you have to change all your passwords. Some protection to this can be offered by having different numbers for different levels of security, but the site owners may still store the raw password and be able to compromise you in other places.

At Synop, we've employed both the above sysstems to good effect even as the company and number of passwords quickly grew.

Two things are important when it comes to backups:

1. Backup copies for protection against short-term loss (e.g. hard disk fail).
2. Archived copies for protection against long-term loss (e.g. deletion, catastrophy).

I run the following backup procedure to protect the home office:

• Everyday: Copy all important files to a separate physical hard disk used purely for backups. For protection against complete machine failure, preferably this is in a separate machine to those storing most of the data that gets backed up.
• 1st Mon of month: Burn all data to a permanent DVD+R archive that is stored off site.
• 2nd Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon2 DVD+RW.
• 3rd Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon3 DVD+RW.
• 4th Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon4 DVD+RW.
• 5th Mon of month: Reburn all data to the Mon5 DVD+RW.
• Every Wed: Reburn all data to the Wed DVD+RW.
• Every Fri: Reburn all data to the Fri DVD+RW.

This system requires a hard disk, 6 DVD+RW's and one DVD+R each month. It provides the following levels of protection:

• Daily copy of all files to separate hard disk.
• 3 snapshot points during the latest 7 days.
• One snapshot point per week for the last month.
• One snapshot point per month indefinitely.

The maximum possible loss scenarios are:

• If you lose a single data hard disk then you should lose no more than one day's work.
• If you lose the backup hard disk and a data hard disk simultaneously, there will be no more than 2 days work lost.
• If you lose the entire office, there will be no more than 1 months work lost.
  As the office size grows, you can protect your data more rigorously by increasing the frequency of the archival points. For example, reburn data DVD's on Tue and Thu as well while making an archive copy every Monday rather than every 1st Monday. Similarly if your data set grows beyond a single DVD (4.7GB), simply add a second DVD burner and effectively double your capacity by using A & B disks on each day.

Like most things in my life, e-gineer morphed to become part of Synop as it formed. Then, like many other things, it was heavily neglected as Synop grew and changed.

With Synop coming to a close, this is an ideal time to reclaim e-gineer and use it as a basis for rebuilding my personal IT infrastructure and sense of self. (It's an indication of my high level of nerdiness that my sense of self is intertwined with a web site and email address). Having spent 7 years designing and building CMS software, it's only natural that I decided to come up with a framework for e-gineer that should help it survive a lifetime of personal change, neglect and rediscovery. I'll be describing this in more detail through a series of posts about Personal IT.

It's traditional for a first blog post to make promises, build anticipation and represent a burst of enthusiasm. Since most blogs start with no readers, I guess it doesn't really matter. Anyway, here is what to expect from this blog:

• Posts made in infrequent bursts. The great thing about RSS is that it costs readers nothing to continually check for new content from irregular authors.
• A wide ranging set of topics. Focus is nice, but this is a personal weblog that I'm taking on my journey into entrepreneurship. Who knows where we'll end up?
• Honesty and openness, to a point. I prefer conversations with substance to smalltalk, and seem to quickly end up in deep discussions with new aquaintances. But, this is the web and everything I say can be stored, archived and referenced for all time. So, I'll hopefully say enough to be interesting without going too far.

Of course, the only important outcome for any blogger is to find your voice.