Living in Germany Helloween never ever was a topic for me. Besides knowing it out of a  few movies occasionally  showing dressed up kids walking around and asking for candy and a few oversea contacts mentioning it, it always remains a funny but strange behavior for me.

Now since a few years the shops here have started to sell Helloween stuff as well  ….

Me always wondering about who really would need that to buy that, last year I was very surprised seeing two little ghosts and a bit of a pumpkin decoration at home.

Also our German kids seems to like it and once again it looks the Americans have archived to export some of their good stuff (like Hamburgers, Windows, root beer, Dr. Pepper Coke and KFC …. ) to us.

Nevertheless receiving some Helloween greetings today was fun indeed. It is still not like I would care about this Helloween. But seeing someone making effort, even sending greetings to people living in oversea is great. And specially in this case when exchange isn’t really that much though it values double!!

Perhaps I should now mark down this Oct, 31 for sending greetings myself next year?!!

It is great when you have reached a state with a friend from were on you just blind trust into his or her recommendations.
This is for sure not easy to get and needs a special situation or a longer common history getting familiar with each other.

But back to the topic… A few of you might have got out of my earlier postings that I recently have bought myself a new gadget to play with. Something new, fancy, from principle not necessary and perhaps just an expensive new toy …. we will see.
The truth is that I like working with it since the beginning. And even everything is very different, at the end and looking behind you will find yourself working with as you would never have done differently before very quickly.

With the intention to speed up the learning curve I asked a friend for a few recommendations – personal likes and favorites – and got back a list out of ten software packages as the minimum requirement to add to feel found and happy.

As for the list was coming from one of those friends I have such a mentioned "trust in blind" relationship I didn’t requery things and straight away started to install all packages following her list top down.

Now there was this SuperDuper pointed out as a must have on that list and it directly answered me a nagging question. As for me working as a system administrator for years during the past, backups are essential to me.  But backups and a full system recovery are two very different things!  Someone not being able to restore / repair a system from scratch bringing  it exactly again into an equal state like shortly before the crash …. is not allowed to call himself/herself a system administrator.

On the other hand having those experiences restoring system by tape boot for example then restoring a standalone backup, recovering or cloning windows system with Ghost and Ghostwalker, sysprep, tar, cpio and and and ….. I’m sure you never will be able to image me looking when I had a short glance through the options of SuperDuper …. You want a full and bootable copy? Fine! …. then I will do ….

WOW …. Thats Tops!