Two hours to Mists of Pandaria!

DZ8UJYPBPBQ6

In just under two hours, the launch event for the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, is going to kick off.  And in about three and a half hours, the new expansion will be officially open.

I should be really excited, but I'm not - I guess my WoW playing is at a low ebb at the moment.

Not that the expansion won't be cool and I'm sure I'll get it, but I'm feeling a little under the weather at the moment - my body doesn't particularly agree with anything vaguely approaching cold weather, currently I've been off colour today plus my hands and feet are aching like hell due to skin happily cracking apart.  I've been using some skin cream but most of it seems to have vanished (probably put somewhere safe during the summer!) so I'll have to go buy some more.

I've just installed Google Drive to backup some of my key documents.  You get 5Gb free online storage, and one of the things that is always forgotten about is how fallible hard drives are.  Hard drives are a technology dating back decades, with moving parts, a need for an absolutely clean environment, and are liable to failure due to temperature extremes, sudden movement, or simply worn out - and when we say worn out, opinions vary but potentially even a year old hard drive could be on its way out (although we all hope it'll last many more years than that!).  At work the system makes multiple backups of files on the network so we never really worry about losing a file, but at home I have (as I'm sure everyone has) memories dating back years.

So, I'm making backups of my key documents, some of my writing, some pictures that I really don't want to lose.  Apart from Google Drive, Google+ also provides storage for pictures so the pictures are going up there.  I would recommend to anyone that you do look at backing up those files that really matter to you - from time to time I've been involved in recovering files from damaged hard drives and it's always family photos that people haven't got copies of that they would really miss.  In the "olden days" all the photos were kept in nice chunky photo albums but with the digital age it's amazing how many things you might only keep on your mobile phone or home computer.

If you missed my last post, I've now got my entry for the Guild Community Video Contest up here.  I'd really appreciate some views, likes of the video, even subscribes to my YouTube channel if possible if you have a YouTube or Google account.

So - time to get ready to become a panda!