Alea iacta est

Earlier today, ran into a reference to Julius Caesar's The die is cast, and its meaning in context. Here we are crossing the river, and while I have stacked up the odds in my favor to the best of my ability, from here on out its all down to ol' dame fortuna. Roll 'em.

As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.

And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.

So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.

Time Machine via WiFi (Airport Extreme)

This is how I finally got Time Machine to work over WiFi:

1. I plugged my big-ass[1] third-party hard drive into the USB port of the Airport Extreme base station that I had purchased the day before.


2. I let my desktop Mac, connected to the house LAN via Ethernet, discover the base station automatically (it shows up under the "Shared" section in any Finder window's left sidebar). Via the Finder, I connected to the airport and mounted the drive.


3. I told the desktop Mac's Time Machine System Preferences to use this mounted drive as its disk, and let 'er rip. Hours later, I had a working, browsable Time Machine history on that machine. Hooray!


4. I set up my laptop beside the base station, connected to it directly with an Ethernet cable, and turned off the laptop's Airport access in order to ensure that it would use only Ethernet for the time being.


5. I repeated steps two and three with the laptop, mounting the backup drive via the network and letting the laptop spend a few hours making its initial backup. And then it worked too. Hooray!


6. I turned the laptop's Airport back on and unplugged it from Ethernet, so it's back to how it usually is. Time Machine continues to work as nicely as you please, both in making its hourly incremental backups, and in browsing them through the Time Machine application.

Previously, I had the hard drive plugged directly into my desktop Mac's USB, and tried to have the laptop back up to it via network-mounting it from there, but it didn't work properly - Time Machine would make all of its scheduled backups, but the Time Machine application would not recognize them, acting as if no backups had ever been made.

Admittedly, I changed several variables at once going from there to my current, working setup. Most obviously, there is the presence of the new Airport base station, and the fact that the backup drive is now plugged into it rather the desktop Mac. But also, I didn't know that my laptop's ethernet port worked - I thought it was broken! So I didn't try to make my initial backup that way; instead, I connected the hard drive to the laptop via USB, performed the backup, and then reconnected the hard drive to the desktop Mac, doing subsequent backups via the network. I suspect this may have confused matters. (I discovered the working state of the laptop's ethernet last night, as a desperate move. Wow.)

Therefore, I can't prove that my previous setup wouldn't have worked if I had tried to connect my laptop to the network differently. However, I don't regret purchasing the Airport, because the house now has a very nice new router. It gives us not just 802.11n WiFi (several times faster than anything we've had before) but also gigabit ethernet (ibid) and a separate wireless internet node for guests, with a trivial password and no LAN access. Plus, classicaljunkie's old router is junky and prone to freeze up if you looked at it funny, so just as well that it get replaced.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that calling one and a half measly terabytes "big-ass" will seem laughable in a dozen years' time. I well recall how I purchased a two-gigabyte hard drive in 1997 and how infinitely huge it seemed then, and on and on back through time. This setup is for today, and lo, the ass, it is big.