This past summer we vacationed in Scandinavia, visiting Norway, Sweden and Russia. This photo was taken as we travelled by ferry from Oslo to Balestrand, Norway.

The hard drive on my iMac is making a funny noise, which is a good excuse to review my current backup strategy. It’s fairly simple these days. All of my data is on a 3TB iMac fusion drive. That gets backed up 3 ways. It’s backed up to an Apple Time Capsule, which also serves as my main WiFi router. I also use CrashPlan to back up to their cloud service, CrashPlan Central.

I read with interest Marissa Mayer’s comments today at the Goldman Sachs Technology conference, specifically her mention of Yahoo Groups: One of our strongholds has been Yahoo Groups, as it moves to the phone it opens up all kinds of possibilities. The phone is a much better place to do group communication. My first startup was ONElist, which was renamed Yahoo Groups after we were acquired in August 2000. Over the past 12 plus years, I’ve watched as Yahoo did basically nothing with Groups.

I’ve been on safari in Africa twice; the first time was our honeymoon in 2011. We had such an amazing time that we decided our next trip would be another safari, and so we went again this past June. And we knew even before we returned, that it won’t be our last safari. I’ve posted some of the photos I took on those trips here on the blog and several adorn our house.

Sam Rushing recently came across some old photos he took, including this one, which is a panorama of the old ONElist building in Redwood City. It was taken in February, 2000, which was after we merged with eGroups and before we were acquired by Yahoo (and became Yahoo Groups). The office was a converted warehouse and had about 50 people in it. This photo doesn’t show all the cubicles behind the photographer, nor does it show the offices underneath.

The Space Shuttle Endeavor did a flyover of the bay area this morning. I headed out to KPAO, the Palo Alto Airport, to see if I could get a good view. It was impressive as it passed overhead at 1500’.

Lee suggested that we’d have time for a brief drive before our flight this morning. We jumped at the opportunity to do so, calling it our bonus drive, and we were immediately rewarded. Lee mentioned that he had heard some lion calls near our lodge in the night, so we went looking for them, and 10 minutes later came across a pair of lions mating. Out of respect for the delicate readers of this blog, this first photo is post-coitus.

As mentioned previously, we set out this morning to see hippos and crocs. The section of the Grumeti river where the hippos and crocs were located is a two hour drive from our camp, so we left the lodge early. On the way there, we came across three cheetah, a mother and her two one year old sons. We found them in a tree, and followed them for half an hour as they stalked some Thomson’s Gazelle.

Things really kicked into gear today. Our wakeup call was at 5:15am for our 6am drive to the balloon. The balloon flight was outstanding, lasting a little more than an hour. We then had an extended game drive until around 12:30pm, and another game drive in the evening. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s a view from the balloon of some of the wildebeest. They look almost like ant trails when viewed from a few hundred feet AGL.

This morning we took an hour flight north to the lodge we’re at now. Our lodge overlooks the Serengeti from a hill. The first pic is the view from the lodge itself. Those dots down there? Each is most likely a wildebeest, although they could also be zebras, antelope of various species, lions, leopards, hyena, and, well, you get the picture. The Great Migration started 3 days ago, and should last about 8 days.