Ad Hoc

I have finally gotten a job! I am working for a software company in Tucson, Arizona, doing Perl development and some system administration.
I have been quite disconnected from the world lately. I have no TV, radio (except the one in my new Honda Civic), or broadband internet access at home. I have been relying on my cell phone’s internet access capabilities. It is usable when connected to my laptop, and has reasonable download speeds, but its connection has a very high latency. It makes SSH pretty painful. Its biggest limiting factor, however, is that I can only use it on weekends or after 9PM. I should be getting DSL in a few days, but my modem has yet to arrive.
I am actually writing all this on my PDA phone, because, for the second time, my PowerBook’s hard drive has died. This time however I was not able to make backups before it went. At least there is an Apple Store only four or five miles away, so I should be picking it up tomorrow.
So, I have decided to get a hard drive just for backups and do nightly backups to it using cron tasks and rsync. I would rather not have to go through losing all my data again.