It feels like Christmas today...I've been given some awsome toys to play with today (well at least awsome to me).  I got an DAT drive, it's basically a tape backup device, but this one has an auto loader which will rotate our tapes for us (four of them)!  Each tape has a 20GB capacity so I have roughly 80GB of backup space on this bad boy.  I have enough tapes to backup a small town's worth of computers so I'm going to come up with some sort of rotation for this.  The tape drive is slower then cold syrup, but it's fun to play with nontheless.  I figure I'll set one of these up at the data center and another here and late at night I'll backup the datacenter machines here...and the local machines to the datacenter.  I just need to figure out how to do an incremental backup (replace only the files that have changed) as opposed to a full backup every time, I know how to do it normally, but not on a tape drive.  It'll be a nice challenge. 

My other toy is a CardScan Executive card scanner.  Since I'm now confirmed as going on the trip to the International Builders Convention in Orlando Florida, they want to get this thing working.  I guess last year they did a business card raffle and gave away a kick ass Dell laptop, then used all the business card as sales leads when they got back.  It sounds shady, I know, but they generated nearly 200 customers from the trade show and about 50 were from the business cards!  I got it all installed and working and was blown away by how accurate it is.  Even if I scribble on the card it see's beyond that and finds all the information.  I scanned 10 cards from 8 different companies, only the two from the same company had problems and that can be blamed on the fact that their cards are printed front and back.  So we'll scan in the near 500 cards they are expecting and confirm the information one by one! 

So as I just mentioned, I'm going to the IBC for sure now and my business cards, shirts and hat has been ordered.  The flights will be booked next week as will my hotel room.  I'll be there from Wednesday morning to Sunday night, so 5 days all together.  I'm actually excited about it, this'll be my first company sponsored trip!