I wasn't thinking of burglary as a problem in need of the backup, but instead, your data getting into the hands of a stranger. You're basically doubling your risk of that happening, assuming your link is secure, and your neighbor is solidly honest and has a secure PC.

Instead, you could drop your encrypted disk in a safety deposit box and have physical security, encrypted data-at-rest and no network exposure during the backup process, no need to wonder how secure your neighbor's network/PC is.

Here in Atlanta, we had a 500-year flood at the same time California was experiencing massive wildfires.

Mudslides, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, neighborhood-flattening gas leaks, the SWAT team trying to take out James DiMaggio/MOVE/David Koresh, or even the dipshit down the street burning leaves in a drought could take out both your houses.

The likelihood is small, but the consequences of failure are large. These are black swans. They don't usually happen...but they don't never happen either.

Y'know what's another huge risk, probably way more likely? Your backup failing. I remember being part of an IT project where an ancient SCA data drive went down on a database server. They had to get a replacement for the legacy hardware from the manufacturer's parts inventory, and spent 36 hours rebuilding the drive from backup tapes before figuring out that the database data itself had never been part of the server backup, because you'd have to disconnect the database to do that.

Fun.

Aren't you and your neighbor both sitting in the crater of just about anything bigger than a firecracker? I don't think of "next door" as off-site backup. Especially when you're talking burglary as a possible risk - you and neighbor probably have about the same odds of being hit.

Drop an encrypted disk in a safe deposit box at the bank.

Couldn't possibly buy one of these. My 3 and 5 year old get their TV from our carefully curated media server full of kids' TV. There's a month's worth of episodes of a number of their favorite shows (not just the 90-second clips the kids apps on the iPad want to show).

The PS3 is about the best frontend you can get for MythTV - navigates easier, more reliable, plays smoother, integrates into the home theater easier and builds the TV recordings into the rest of their entertainment.

Sony is doing all it can to get me to take my money and walk away.

I've seen 4K on a not-yet-released 20-inch Panasonic tablet - it's jaw-dropping. You might not be making "full use", but...oh, my it's beautiful. This from a guy who doesn't care much for TV or video.

OK, you're asking "why a 20" tablet? WTF?" - one vertical market for this is radiologists, who definitely need all the resolution they can get, high dynamic range, and a big screen. Saw it at a medical convention.

Lucky you can't get WiMax: your situation sounds like the way Clear works nightly: ISDN speeds for the crime of watching Netflix. Oh, you're not "capped". Certainly not. No, never. Is there a possibility your logs are just port scans (which suck, but aren't a DDoS), and your problem is that you're being traffic-managed by the ISP? That would "follow you instantly". I didn't think the log entries were close enough together in time to constitute a DDoS.

A Frontline documentary last year noted that tower work is done by small contracting companies that allow the big carriers to duck all responsibility, while pushing the firms to build so fast that safety gets shortcutted. Worth watching.

Oh wait...have one of those already. Check the oval office...

I thought a bus full of icons and widgets collided with a touch UI...

(this from a daily Android phone and tablet user...)

We had a model rocket birthday party for my son (turned 5). We pre-built a number of bulk-pack rockets, had the guests decorate them, took them out for a launch.

We made sure to warn parents that if they were flying soon, they would want us to handle the engines and post-launch rockets, for fear of the glorified mall-cops that are "protecting" us at the airport.

Little did we know that black powder was hard to detect. Guess that's changed now.

One reason that the hobby is waning: regulations that make it nearly impossible to launch rockets in/near a major metro area.

When I was a kid, I could launch on the ball fields of any of several local elementary and junior high schools. Now there's a single local park in our city of 4 million people where I can launch rockets on public land without going to the pokey.

Been over-the-air for years.

We get pristine 1080i network-supplied digital picture for free, no broadcast flag, a fair number of local channels, and Netflix, Amazon and Sony Playstation Store supply the rest over the internet.

Haven't really done much with Hulu, but it's another opportunity for you to stream fresh content.

I use MythTV and a HD Homerun tuner, running on Debian on a QNAP TS-119 (which draws something like 6 watts spun up). For TV frontends, I use the PS3, or a recent Mac Mini.Very reliable.

Took a fair amount of setup, but all works great. My just-turned-five kid has been working the remote himself for about 18 months, getting lots of great commercial-free kids programming from PBS.

Been forever since I've paid for cable TV.

Love, Love, LOVE my Ergotron arm (single monitor arm, 24" Dell, way adjustable). Check it out!

it _IS_ hard, but no reason it can't be done better.

take "stuff to do" (steps, gigabytes, number of files to copy) and divide "stuff done" into it for "fraction complete".

Put that "fraction complete" into a proportion with "time taken so far" as the known item and "total time" as the unknown.

Apply some inertia or hysteresis to the "total time" so you don't have it rapidly jumping all over the place (like file copy dialog estimates seem to).

This total time estimate relies only on knowing what _HAS_ happened at a given time, not on predicting what _MIGHT_ happen on a user's machine.

Apply "fraction complete" to the length of the progress bar, and report the expected remaining time as text.

The bar is for "progress", and mustn't go backward unless "progress" does so as well (maybe when you cancel an install? This is an edge case). The estimated time can vary as needed - but gee, maybe build some logic into the dialog to let the user know to bang on the side if it looks like something's hung.

You could trend completion speed ("that part went fast, you're slowing down now") as a sparkline or other visual decoration (color map - green for fast, red for slow) to give the user more confidence that the dialog knows what's going on.

Under NO circumstances should a site or app put up an animated gif in place of progress (because it shows only that the browser's still running, not that any completion is taking place). Think of how often this happens today. Tragic.

My wife found a butt-ugly electric sit-stand desk on Craigslist, from which I salvaged the legs.

Bought a nice $40 birch veneer top from Ikea, with their cable tray, attached a full-length outlet strip to the back, an Ergotron arm for my monitor, and mounted all the geeky gear (GbEN switch, KVM, USB hub, etc.) sub-surface.

It's nirvana, and I can sit or stand, and even raise the desk to get under it when they drop the big one.

You can find electric legs in my major US city new for around $500 (more than what I paid for a used desk).

"The White Mountains" trilogy enthralled me as a kid. Great for a young reader.

No, don't get the prequel (though I haven't read it).

If you've had customer face-time, and worked in a large company, or visited large companies and worked in them, your understanding of the corporate world is not to be underestimated.

Young clowns right out of school typically take years to understand how corporations work, how to navigate, how to handle the politics, how to communicate, hell, even how to dress. You probably want to focus on getting back in to corporate work, or perhaps consulting with corporations.

As another poster mentioned, you'll be hired at this age for experience - so parlay what you have, don't fret about age.

If you'd like to take on a modern language, Udacity's got a really good intro course on Python, six weeks long and free. Other courses on web application development, programming a robotic car, and more are there for the taking. Worth your time. Start with Python - its used there extensively, and is a modern interpreted language.