I have been in the technology industry for over a decade. In that time I have worked for companies as varied as a small sports apparel manufacturer and wholesaler with less than a dozen employees, to a large worldwide credit union services corporation with thousands of employees. Add in a meat rendering plant, an animal research facility, a medical school, and a couple years consulting and I’ve pretty much seen it all.

I am currently happily supporting the faculty, staff, and students at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism & Mass Communication. My position allows me the freedom to do what I need to do to make sure the mission of the school is accomplished. A welcome change from some of the positions I have held.

On the personal side, I have been married to my wife Sarah for over eleven years. Other than Sarah’s dislike for terrible sci-fi movies, films I love to hate, we have a perfect marriage.

We’ve got three great kids; our daughter Noah (age 10), and our sons Jackson (age 7) and Joseph (age 2). I have apparently done a good job of indoctrinating my children into nerd culture. Noah and Jack are both big Star Wars fans, with Joseph catching up quickly. Noah will read anything fantasy , and Jack is a big science fiction guy.

I originally registered this domain name back in 2000 or early 2001. I don’t remember exactly when. I do remember my employer at the time owed me some money so when I registered a couple domains for him sterlinganderson.net was tacked on to the order. I’ve played with many different content management/blogging systems over the last ten years. Even writing my own.

Archives go back as far as 2003. The rest is lost to the Internet Archive. Content is all over the place. Lots of useless information, a few posts that have generated some decent traffic, and quite a few family pictures.

I am in the process of a redesign right now so the archives are not available at the moment.

Go Time Machine Go is a Dashboard Widget for Macintosh OS X that will initiate a Time Machine backup when clicked. Your Time Machine volume will be mounted if possible (if it can’t be you’ll get a standard Finder error), and Time machine will start.

OS X Leopard has a great backup feature called Time Machine. It’s a drop dead easy backup feature, that after a simple setup, pretty much works on its own.

Users of laptops have one major issue. In order to get backups, one must either remember to plug in his Time Machine disk or make sure his network share of his Time Machine backup is mounted. Then she must wait for Time Machine to start its backup. Assuming your Time Machine disk is mounted in the Finder and the Time Machine icon is in your Dock you can control-click, or right-click on the icon and select “Back Up Now”. I ran across the fact that it is also possible to start Time Machine backups from the command line.

After going through the trouble of actually dragging the Time Machine icon to my dock, selecting “Back Up Now”, then removing the icon from the dock, I figured there had to be an easier way. That’s where this widget comes into play. All Go Time Machine Go! does is the equivalent on the Terminal command that fires off Time Machine. A nice side effect of the widget is if your Time Machine volume is not mounted it will attempt to mount the volume first. If the volume cannot be mount you will get a Finder error stating so. No big deal.

Download the widget: Go Time Machine Go 1.0.2

If you like my widget please feel free to leave a small donation.