Articles I Like: 10 breakthrough technologies this year

Posted on March 1, 2018 by PolyWoggMarch 1, 2018

Technology Review has released their list for “10 Breakthrough Technologies” for 2018. It’s hard to argue with the list having some important developments in it:

3-D printing with metal — this could drastically disrupt manufacturing and give rise to lighter, stronger parts;
Artificial embryos — not exactly coming to a lab near you, but basically creating an embryo from another cell without an egg or sperm…great for research, but the ethical issues haven’t been worked out;
Smart-design for urban settings — using sensing technology and integrating tech into high-end design has always been part of the “future” in various sci-fi movies, but Quayside in Toronto will make some of it a reality;
Dueling neural networks — computer AI’s are bad at “creating”, but new techniques teaching them to learn off each other is creating a pseudo creativity with amazing applications for modelling, virtual entertainment, design, etc.;
Babelfish earbuds — auto translation in an earbud is great in theory, but I’m not convinced it will move out of the tourist zone as rapidly as some claim, particularly as early designs by no less than Google have been pretty clunky;
Zero-carbon natural gas — obviously, it’s still a non-renewable fuel, but having a clean version with no GHG emissions would be amazing, even if “Net Power’s technology won’t solve all the problems with natural gas, particularly on the extraction side. But as long as we’re using natural gas, we might as well use it as cleanly as possible.”;
Perfect Online Privacy through zero-knowledge proof — the idea is that you can provide “proof” of something (age, financial balance) without actually providing access…not quite a simple “proxy”, more like a cryptographic tool that says “You want to check if that record over there shows the person is over 18? Let me ask it”, and rather than performing the check itself, the cryptography gets the yes/no without seeing the original data…kind of like PayPal on steroids, but that doesn’t solve all the privacy issues online, it just makes the anonymous transparency of blockchains a bit more practical;
Genetic Fortune-Telling — the ethical issues of using DNA to predict health issues or even IQ are ridiculously bad, and based on the discrepancies in DNA testing for geneology, it can make economics look like a pure science; and,
Quantum leaps — building quantum computers is one thing, figuring out what to do with one is another…but modelling of molecules for design seems like a great first use.

However, for me, the one “breakthrough” that I think will affect us the most is the one the magazine dubs “AI for Everybody”:

Artificial intelligence has so far been mainly the plaything of big tech companies like Amazon, Baidu, Google, and Microsoft, as well as some startups. For many other companies and parts of the economy, AI systems are too expensive and too difficult to implement fully.

Machine-learning tools based in the cloud are bringing AI to a far broader audience. So far, Amazon dominates cloud AI with its AWS subsidiary. Google is challenging that with TensorFlow, an open-source AI library that can be used to build other machine-learning software. Recently Google announced Cloud AutoML, a suite of pre-trained systems that could make AI simpler to use.

Microsoft, which has its own AI-powered cloud platform, Azure, is teaming up with Amazon to offer Gluon, an open-source deep-learning library. Gluon is supposed to make building neural nets—a key technology in AI that crudely mimics how the human brain learns—as easy as building a smartphone app.

…

Currently AI is used mostly in the tech industry, where it has created efficiencies and produced new products and services. But many other businesses and industries have struggled to take advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence. Sectors such as medicine, manufacturing, and energy could also be transformed if they were able to implement the technology more fully, with a huge boost to economic productivity.

Most companies, though, still don’t have enough people who know how to use cloud AI. So Amazon and Google are also setting up consultancy services. Once the cloud puts the technology within the reach of almost everyone, the real AI revolution can begin.

Source: You’ll want to keep an eye on these 10 breakthrough technologies this year

My only disagreement with the last one is the timing. They argue it’s available now, partly based on things like Siri and Alexa invading homes. Combined with the dueling neural networks, there are great things to be accomplished. I just don’t think they’re as close as they optimistically project they are already.

Understanding Video Games – Week 7 – The culture of video games

Posted on December 29, 2017 by PolyWoggJanuary 6, 2018

It has been some time, eighteen months in fact, since I viewed any of the materials for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called “Understanding Video Games”. It was hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera, and affiliated for credit with the University of Alberta. I say “was” because the course was removed from Coursera’s offerings at some point during that last 18 months. I’m not sure when exactly, but when Coursera changed their website some time ago, and the links were all going to change, I downloaded all the videos to make sure I didn’t lose them and I wanted to enable offline viewing anyway. However, it was fortunate I did because when the course offering disappeared, so did all the materials. Which means while I still have all the remaining videos, and they’re probably sufficient for my purposes, I don’t have the syllabus outline or the extra reading materials for the week. Sheesh, hard to believe that a course I started two years ago isn’t automatically still available to my free-loading audit viewing, right? 🙂 I don’t even have the official title for the week either, so from here on in, it is more my “estimated” title.

Week 7 started with an explanation that up until now, most of the discussion was about “what” constituted a game. And there was a surprising amount (to me) of solid academic theory in there. Actual rigour in fact. However, this week relies heavily on cultural studies approaches, trying to look at “who” plays video games, and I found the limitations of the approach is as much about the content as it is about the limitations of cultural studies in general.

I went to Trent University, and it has one of the biggest and best cultural studies programs in Canada (at least, I think it is still one of the biggest and best…at one point, it was the only REAL program that had a full offering of courses as a specialization instead of a minor). And some of my administrative and policy studies courses were cross-listed with cultural studies courses, so the cultural studies approaches were often woven into the curriculum.

So here’s the rub for me. Cultural studies, like history or anthropology, has to mainly observe from outside of the culture. The obvious rationale is that this is a good thing, an ability to see broad themes by having a more distant and objective perspective. However, for me, that is also an extreme limitation. If you aren’t part of the culture, immersed in it, and explaining things within that culture, the best you can do is an abstraction. That’s not limited to cultural studies of course, any academic study requires some abstraction to hold everything else steady while you look at a couple of key issues or variables, but I find it difficult to accept the cultural studies one as readily. Partly because interpreting another culture only works if you first understand the culture well enough to step back, and that act of stepping back hides meaning, particularly when it is then combined with a translation process to “transcode” those observations into something those not of the culture can understand.

Take for example a situation where you’re observing the interactions between genders in a village. It’s easy to misunderstand hierarchies if you assume that hearth and home are “lesser” responsibilities than breadwinning employment — it is almost impossible to avoid some bias in the interpretation process. Descriptions are easy, interpretation and translation are best guesses as to why or for what significance.

I really liked the description the hosts give to the culture at the beginning i.e. that the culture includes not only the members themselves, but a specialized language, sense of community, identity representation of self and others, and how they relate to each other. Right down to defining who is “in” and who is “out”. As well, they talked about how you might look back at the history of gaming consoles and group them or “rank” them…would it be by amount of memory, type of graphics, simplicity or complexity of controllers, addition of narratives, etc.? And thus it is incredibly important to understand something within the context.

However, I don’t think they go quite far enough in critical analysis of the tool (cultural studies). If you accept that you need to understand within a context, and that you need to speak the language to understand the context, then any translation outside that context will necessarily involve at least some loss of meaning. To me, that sometimes moves the analysis into the realm of subjectivity or simple descriptive relativism. One analyst could argue it means X, another could argue it means Y, but neither one really knows if that is an accurate translation. As with all languages, some words have no direct counterpart, and idioms / symbols / signs are the hardest to translate at all.

In the videos for the week, they had a pretty solid opening to describe the culture of first-person shooters for example. And the definition of what those who play video games would describe as a “gamer” (time spent, frequency, places, platforms).

However, there were three areas at the end that I found were lost opportunities for deeper dives. The first was the role of “modding” in the culture. How extensive is it? Does it represent 2% of the so-called gamer community or 20%? There was very little indication of scope, and so as an artifact of the culture, the modification of hardware and software, or the motives for doing so from total conversion to patches, from remakes to demakes, from cheat codes to plugins, remain just artifacts…descriptive, not analytical.

Equally, the description of the change in commercial distribution channels with the growth of Indies has some amazing parallels with the music industry, Kickstarter campaigns for inventions, and self-publication through Amazon, yet received a pretty light touch without much comparative analysis. Even more definitive mapping out some of the changes in distribution vs. new production techniques vs. simple evolution (shareware to apps) would have been helpful.

Last, but not least, I find it difficult to understand their limited analysis and coverage of COS players. If you want to understand a culture, one of the most basic tools of cultural studies is to look at ways in which they express themselves for both artistry and identity. And the physical embodiment of a video game character would seem to be the ultimate form of that expression. For some, it is simply a creative challenge — can you make a costume or do the makeup? For others, it is an opportunity for role play and to experience the game in a different way, not by actually immersing oneself into the game’s reality, but by bringing that reality into the broader world. And for some, it is simply Hallowe’en costume play. Yet there are people who can do it for a living — they’re booked and paid to attend in various costumes at ComicCons, they pose as models for photographers, they travel around the world doing it. And yet it is only a throwaway topic in this week’s videos, which I found a bit disappointing. It’s a dangerous area for mass misinterpretation, but still, I would have liked to see more on it.

I can’t help but agree with the hosts. In the end, it feels like we tend to have more of a corporate history of gaming rather than a social or cultural history of gaming.

Sites I Like: Web design – The Responsinator

Posted on November 14, 2017 by PolyWoggNovember 14, 2017

I really like sites that do one thing really well. My site, for instance, doesn’t. I blog all over the place. It’s pretty eclectic — HR, government, movies, TV, astronomy, recipes. It reflects my life, and I could probably grow it a lot faster if I’d pick one little niche and do it well over time. On the other hand, it’s fun for me, which is a key ingredient.

However, I admire when other sites do something really well. Like http://www.responsinator.com/. What does it do? It tells you what your website will look like on various mobile devices (heavily geared to iPhones). Think of it as your own little beta tester for web design. As of time of writing, you put in your URL, press GO, and it will show you what that site (probably your own) looks like on:

iPhone 5 portrait · width: 320px
iPhone 5 landscape · width: 568px
iPhone 6 portrait · width: 375px
iPhone 6 landscape · width: 667px
iPhone 6 Plump portrait · width: 414px
iPhone 6 Plump landscape · width: 736px
Android (Nexus 4) portrait · width: 384px
Android (Nexus 4) landscape · width: 600px
iPad portrait · width: 768px
iPad landscape · width: 1024px

If you create an account and pay, you can choose which devices show up, you can host it on your own site, etc. I use WordPress and it’s new custom themes option gives you some ideas of that already too, but it was nice to see a different version. For me, it is more about tablets than phones, I think I’m too verbose for phones. 🙂

Articles I Like: What I’ve Learned From Tinkering With the Raspberry Pi for Five Years

Posted on November 14, 2017 by PolyWoggNovember 14, 2017

I mentioned earlier that I have a plan to build a Raspberry Pi project, and I’m often haunting sites with articles like What I’ve Learned From Tinkering With the Raspberry Pi for Five Years. I like LifeHacker as a site generally, although I can’t follow it completely — it’s like drinking from a firehose if I subscribe to its RSS feed. Back in March (14th, to be exact i.e. Pi Day — get it? 3.14?), they published the above linked article, and I loved it.

Before hobbyists latched onto the Raspberry Pi, it was a computer for learning how to code targeted mainly at kids. Since then, the appeal has broadened, but it’s still impossible for a project to “just work” out of the box. You will have to tweak something, dig into the command line, or spend a few hours buried in an obscure internet forum to find solutions to problems that only you seem to be having. You will slam your head against the wall, yell a little, and throw your Raspberry Pi at least once for every project you attempt to make.

In just about every other hobby, that would be a buzzkill for me from the word go. I feel that way every time I have to assemble Ikea furniture or build a shelving unit in my garage. It’s not something I have a knack for (home repair), but as a project for a hobby that lets me build my only little computer? I’m willing to give it a go.

I suspect I saved the article mostly because it talks about his experience building a retro game console, which is part of my desire. But it’s a good metaphor for why I want to do a project at all — troubleshooting, a little bit of gaming, and maybe some Linux. Following the path of those who have gone before.

Articles I Like: Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time

Posted on November 14, 2017 by PolyWoggNovember 14, 2017

Way back in 2012, I saved an article entitled Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time from over at LifeHacker. What caught my eye originally was the initial premise:

Ever been told that you should fully discharge your battery to prolong its life? Or that jailbreaking your phone is illegal? Or that you should wait for the newest Intel processor because it’s going to be “so much faster”? These are tech myths we hear all the time, and likely spread to our friends—but most are just a waste of your time (and in some cases, they can actually harm your gadgets). Here are some of the worst offenders.

What kept me around though, and why I’ve saved the article all these years is the fact that many of the “top ten” are still pervasive, and are still myths.

One that I embrace is debunking the MP3 myth. If you go to any of the audiophile sites, they’ll tell you that having lossless quality audio is the only way to go, that an MP3 at 128 bps or even 256 bps is just a waste of time, blah blah blah. My ex-boss, who I respect, is heavily in this realm and has stereo wire in his house that costs more than all my computers combined, along with the highest quality digital files he can get. What’s the reality? Unless I’m comparing 256 to something less than 64, I probably can’t tell the difference. Why? Because I’m not playing it on super high quality systems and speakers. In fact, most of the time, I’m playing it on the equivalent of a high-quality AM/FM radio. Which means all that superior quality up front is completely lost at the backend. And with that output generator, most people’s ears can’t tell the difference. There’s even some evidence that only 1% of people are even capable of discerning a difference, even with lossless, although there are far more than that who will tell you they can.

The rest of the article talks about hardware specs vs. upgrades, android task killers, jailbreaking an iPhone, malware and Macs, extended warranties, discharging laptop batteries, wifi protection, P2P networks, and tweaking system settings to get speed boosts.

Articles I Like: How to Turn Your Computer into a Retro Game Arcade

Posted on November 14, 2017 by PolyWoggNovember 14, 2017

I confess that I have a plan to build my own little game arcade with a Raspberry Pi, and eventually I’ll get there. In the meantime, I frequently check out articles such as Adam Dachis’ article on How to Turn Your Computer into a Retro Game Arcade over on LifeHacker which often has alternative ways to do it, or links to good resources that I will need for the RaspPi3 project. The article dates back to 2011, but still has the main thrust:

While contemporary video games have come close to cinematic masterpieces, there’s often nothing better than the fun and simplicity of retro classics. If you’ve never jumped into the world of emulation, this guide will take you through the very simple basics and have you up and running right away. We’ll also take a quick look at ROM hacking so you can power up your emulation experience.

The approach generally is two-fold — get an emulator (something akin to a software version of the original hardware) and then get the games. The challenge in part is that there are LOTS of different types of emulators…some just for individual consoles/systems, others that mimic multiple consoles through plugins. At the time of writing, he had Nestopia for NES, SNES9X for SNES, Kega Fusion for Sega, and PCSX Reloaded or ePSXe for PS1. If you want more, he recommends checking out Zophar’s Domain.

For the actual games, the search is pretty quick even in Google — you search for ROMs (i.e. read only memory in computer parlance as the old consoles used cartridges that were on ROM storage) + the name of the game system you’re emulating. The popular sites mentioned include EmuParadise, CoolROM, UseNet or BitTorrent, etc.

While most of that is pretty straightforward, what I like most about the article is that it doesn’t stop there. It talks about configuring the keyboard, handling classic save points vs. digital “freeze” saves, options for controllers, and extensive links for Game Genie codes.

He also did an article for doing the same thing with Android or iPhone but the mobile market changes so rapidly for apps and operating systems, most of the advice is simply a retread of the PC one linked above and even has links for jailbreaking iPhones from the old days.

Still, this PC one is a pretty good overview.

Not in Canada – Cheap streaming options

Posted on September 12, 2017 by PolyWoggSeptember 12, 2017

Anyone visiting my blog, or following me on Twitter, or even just (gasp!) knowing me in person knows pretty fast that I like serialized story telling — movies with sequels, books in series, and of course, TV shows. Just under two years ago, I decided it was time to cut the cord (Cutting the cord – Conclusion). It was a huge decision for me. I was a slave to my corporate overlords for media consumption for home telephone, cell phone, internet, mobile data, TV, etc. And it was costing me a small fortune, even with bundling. I made a huge change. But every few months, I get an itch to have MORE choice that would stop me from having to make such all-or-nothing types of decisions.

And then today, I tripped over an article at How-To Geek entitled simply “The Cheapest Way to Stream TV: Rotate Your Subscriptions”. I don’t want to bury the proverbial lede too far so let me state clearly that the article basically asks why pay for multiple streaming options all year round when you could have one or two “base” subscriptions and just pick up a few of the others if/when there is something worth watching on that network. Like Game of Thrones, for example. [Source: The Cheapest Way to Stream TV: Rotate Your Subscriptions].

Is that why I was gobsmacked? No. It was because his matter of fact way of explaining the options he has to draw upon is simply not even remotely close to what we (don’t) have available in Canada.

For a basic streaming package, he uses Netflix and Hulu for a total of $22 a month. Let’s start with Netflix.

We do have Netflix Canada, so sounds good, right? Except we don’t have the same content as regular Netflix. They have first run TV shows added due to deals with networks. Very few of those shows make it to Netflix Canada until the next season. Current year? Not available in Canada.

Take Hulu or Hulu Plus. Another great basic streaming option. Lots of first-run series matching regular network broadcast schedules. Which is industry speak for saying when it airs on CBS or NBC or ABC or Fox, it shows up either same day or same week on Hulu. You don’t get EVERYTHING, but you get a heck of a lot. Great, sign me up for $12 a month! Oh, wait, not available in Canada. At least not legally. Lots of people are buying Hulu gift cards on eBay, and I’ve looked at it long enough to figure out it would cost me $20 to try it. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Still pretty shady though, on the black side of the grey zone of legality (yes, it completely violates their terms of service, but that’s not “law”, that’s a company’s ToS, not far off from removing mattress tags). Don’t get me wrong, there are very STRONG advocates that will and have told me that’s the slippery slope to cable Armageddon, although they haven’t yet told me why that’s a bad thing. But I digress.

We do have four other options in Canada to get basic service.

One option is to go with Crave TV. It’s meant to be like Netflix or Hulu, except its “first-run” show complement is somewhere around new episodes of The Beachcombers (for non-Canadian readers, it’s a home-grown show that has been off the air for years). If Netflix was Tier 1, Crave TV would clock in around Tier 3 or 4.

We do have Amazon Prime now, isn’t that exciting? Well, not really, as we don’t get the cable options in it, just the Prime shows. Another “Netflix-lite” style of Amazon Prime. No one would pay for it separately i.e. if it wasn’t included with the free shipping account we did pay for earlier.

A third option, although kind of defeats the whole purpose, would be to get basic cable or a satellite dish. The regulatory board forced Bell and Rogers and others to offer a “skinny” package of a handful of basic channels for $25, which is better than paying 50 or 100 bucks a month, but they also ding you with their add on costs for equipment and any “extras” like sports. Or in one case, a remote to work the set top box.

The final option sounds close to the article’s options: VMedia and it’s wannabe clone Zazeen TV. Less than the cable providers, more flex, and all through streaming. Sounds great, right? Well except they can only do it if you are connected with encryption boxes to their networks. Think of it kind of like people running a bar and having a whole bunch of licensing problems about what they can and can’t offer — so they skirt the rules by creating a “club” instead that you pay a nightly membership fee to enter. Problem solved, they’re not a bar open to the public, they’re a private club. Well, VMedia and Zazeen have special boxes that let you connect to their streams so it isn’t “open streaming” and they’re not broadcasters, so they bypass a bunch of the rules. Except to have that club status, you have to use their internet. And both their internet and their TV options are flaky for service. A friend’s husband is a sports nerd, and he had VMedia. It was so flaky that on the night of a big game, he went to the local bar to watch rather than stay home because he didn’t want to risk missing it. After he paid for the package so he could watch it at home.

Yet when VMedia and Zazeen tried to ditch the encryption boxes and offer pure streaming (they don’t like them any more than the customers do), Bell and Rogers smacked them with legal proceedings and roomfuls of lawyers that they couldn’t afford to fight. So they folded their streaming-only tents and went back to the encryption boxes.

You can also do over the air (OTA) antennas, but not really the same technology. Still, an option in some cities.

Other options

After that, even though I can’t match his streaming options, and certainly nowhere near the price / options / reliability intersection point, things screech to a halt.

HBO Now? Nope, not in Canada.

Sling? Nope, not in Canada.

CBS All Access? Surely you jest.

But wait, you do have options. Like Microsoft / XBox or iTunes season subscriptions to shows, or Google purchases. No worries, just $15-20. Per season. Per show. Yikes. A viable option if you only want one show though.

So I love the article, even if I can’t do any of it.

Now if only the CRTC board would read the same article and say, “Hey, why can’t we do that in Canada?” rather than having so many people switch to Kodi, one of the few options to still get first-run shows after you cut the cable cord. Canadians are still willing to pay, it’s not that we suddenly embraced a pirate lifestyle like a virus, we just want a service that can give us what everyone already has for options in the U.S.

The joys of network attached storage or not

Posted on August 29, 2017 by PolyWoggAugust 29, 2017

So I had some fun awhile ago with my hard drives getting fried, and it looks like my Network Attached Storage went the same way. Not entirely sure, maybe it’s just a HomeGroup config problem with Andrea’s computer (the network doesn’t like me configuring homegroups, it only likes Andrea’s computer to do it). But I copied a bunch of stuff from Andrea’s computer over to the NAS before a computer tweak, and while the PC was in the shop, I tried to read the files on to my PC to process some photos. Nope, I could see them, but the NAS did not want to share.

Which means I can’t trust the NAS for the future.

Now, this presents a small but not insurmountable problem. I can simply get a new NAS. The question is if I want one or not. I have a 2TB and a 3TB regular HD that I use for backups. But I also like having a master that I can keep, just in case, on the NAS. It could be simply a third HD, but I prefer to think of it as a common resource. Plus I can copy any of my other PCs to it without tying up my computer, so kind of useful. But I’m not actually using the network functions on it.

Which means I’m at a small crossroads, with two needs:

a need for a third backup drive, preferably > 2TB; and,
a desire to stream music all over the house from a common source.

The third backup drive is REALLY simple, just over a $100, no muss, no fuss, done. The second element though is the one that creates a question, or at least some options to consider.

A. Keep the music on my main PC

While my main PC is usually on, I don’t know if I want it to be the source of streaming for any and every device. Mostly, I just don’t want it slowing things down if I’m working on something else. But, generally speaking, the person likely to be pulling things from the PC to elsewhere in the house is, well, me. I’m not able to be downstairs listening to music AND working on my machine upstairs, so maybe it’s not a real issue, but I don’t like the idea of having my PC being the main server.

B. Put the music on another PC

Jacob’s PC will not be stretched very far with his usage, and I could easily use it, but that’s a bit of a slippery slope to me, and in a few years if he’s gaming, that will change easily. Not a sustainable option.

C. Put everything in the cloud

I could, indeed, put the stuff in an internet-based cloud, but then everything I stream will be upload/download drains on my monthly usage. And really, it seems odd to stream stuff from the web when it is already on the network somewhere else.

D. Run my own server

Umm, how can I put this? No. 🙂

E. Copy the music to multiple locations

Most of the machines that I’m going to be streaming to have SD card slots, I could easily just make a bunch of copies and stream from the card. But if 3 backups is a pain to manage, 5 or 6 copies of the music library all over the house seems drastic overkill.

F. Repeat the network-attached storage

So I can go back to NAS options, but then I’m again facing a question mark:

Do I want a simple NAS that will allow me to stream about 250GB of data around the house?
Or do I want a more complex NAS that will hold all my current data, around 1 TB in total for active and some change for non-active?
Or do I want to go whole hog and get a full NAS with multiple drive bays for expandability, that will hold all my backups, can even create multiple copies of the backups with mirrored setups?

I’m leaning towards the simplest NAS storage I can do to put the music on it and leave the backups to straight drive copies. Not sure that’s the best solution, but it should work. The middle option is a good compromise but pushes me into the $200-$250 range pretty fast, and not really enough storage for the long-term. If I go the more complex route, I can easily push $300-400 for now, but with a huge amount of expandability for the future. But that seems like overkill.

Sigh. I know I’m obsessing over wanting to get it right, I just wish the “best” solution was obvious or that I was confident I was seeing the right variables.

Computers, mental health and crashes

Posted on August 3, 2017 by PolyWoggAugust 3, 2017

Computers are a major part of my life. I don’t mean this in the way that normal popular media overviews talk about technology infiltrating our lives, I mean computers themselves as a choice. I have been active with computers since grade 10 (1983/84) and particularly so once I bought my first PC back in ’87. I use it for entertainment, I learn with it, I keep myself organized with it. It’s an active tool in my life. And recently, I realized that when it doesn’t work, it affects me more than it would most people because of that degree of integration.

I’ll start first with the integration. Looking back at my 2017 goals, I had eleven blue ones. The first three were reading goals, which at first glance might seem non-computer related, but it is actually doubly so. I not only read on a digital e-reader so I stop filling up my house with paper books, but I also then like to blog about them. Could I do the first with just paper? Yes, but that’s not the question. The question is if I use computers to do them the way I do, and yes I do. No computer, and my two reading goals are much harder (no ebooks to read, have to go to the library or bookstores, extra “friction” in the transaction to use the economic vernacular) and the posting of reviews is impossible. I also have goals around posting TV reviews, digital photography, and an online learning course. Call it six out of eleven that require the computer. For my goals around organizing and regular backups, that’s another two that are truly “digitally enabled”, if not “digitally required”. Leaving three — astronomy, finance organization, and my honey-do list — that are not tied to computers directly, although I do use a computer to help with all three. Call it seven overall that are computer dependent, and another four that are enabled.

For my green goals, one of the three is computer-dependent, one is enabled, and one is not. For the yellow goals, eight require the computer (four are writing, so could theoretically be done on a typewriter I suppose), and while the other two do not (cooking, baking), they are enabled with web-based recipes and blogging about it. For my five red goals, none of them are computer-dependent, but I do use a computer for keeping track of my progress (weak attribution).

In summary then, I have a total of 16 goals out of 29 that require a computer. No computer, and those goals are almost impossible to achieve. Could I do them a different way? Sure, for some, but likely not. It isn’t so much that they are technically “dependent” so much as that they are so entwined with computers that doing them any other way drastically alters the approach to one that I wouldn’t likely do. Of the remaining 13 goals that are not computer dependent, 8-10 are still definitely enabled.

What does that mean? It means when I have a computer problem, it’s major. It’s not “oops, my computer died, time to get on with my life”, it’s close to causing a mental health breakdown.

If you read that as “he’s too dependent on computers, blah blah blah”, you might as well stop reading now as you’re never going to understand what I’m talking about. I’m serious. That’s not what I said, and so if it’s what you got out of the first few paragraphs, that’s just your own bias and ignorance showing through. Go look at cat pictures, you’ll be happier.

Do I spend time doing other things? Of course, I do have a life outside computers. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about my goals. The “big” goals I’ve been setting for myself since the late ’90s, almost 20 years now. Each year, I spend a bit of time at the end of the calendar year reviewing my progress in the last year and setting my goals for the new year. It is a huge part of how I define myself, my self-identity. I don’t care if others set goals, it’s not a normative thing, but for me, not setting goals would be like asking me to stop being me. I don’t know who I am without my annual “check-in”, it keeps me, well, me.

In some ways it is the belief that an unexamined life isn’t worth living, taken to a bit of an extreme, and hardly original. In other ways it is about my stopping myself from drifting too far from my core beliefs, my sense of self, my values, my commitment to some form of self-actualization to keep improving.

For some people, that’s a physical goal like running a marathon. For others it might be a social goal, like performing stand-up or public speaking. Others might be about trips, parenting, a new job, a new skill, etc.

For me, most of my goals are cerebral, and as I said above, digitally enabled if not outright digitally entwined. If I don’t have my computer working, all of my goals STOP. A crashing, screeching, stomach-heaving stop.

I had never thought of it quite this way before, until my most recent crash. I have a pretty good setup for what I need / want to do, but I am regularly pushing my hardware to the limits in certain ways. And so when one drive crashed, I have backups and things in place to deal with that issue. Or at least I thought I did. More on that in a minute.

First let’s talk about the crash.

I have two hard drives in my system, both Western Digital, one black and one red (it’s a series of drives put out by WD), both with 1 TB sizes. C drive is my Windows operating system, M is my data drive. The nice part of these different series is that they are designed to run 24/7, something a lot of drives can’t do. And I have no patience for reboots, startups, etc., so my system is in some form of “on” pretty much continuously. 24/7, 7 days a week, close to 52 weeks a year. Sure, if I’m out of town, I’ll power down, but most of the time I don’t when it’s just through the week.

Awhile back I accepted the upgrade to Windows 10, and because I do a few things outside the norm, that’s presented a few problems. Things like the way in which it migrated Homegroups, or that I had an old parallel printer attached that I wanted to keep using. The printer is 20 years old, not surprising that it didn’t handle the upgrade well, but it’s a shame — that HP LaserJet 4L was a workhorse that did everything I needed it to do, just not super fast. I’ve had it repaired twice over the years, shame to have to jettison it. But Win10 doesn’t play nice with old hardware.

And two Tuesdays ago, my system ran the weekly update and installed the dreaded Creators Update. I am generally okay with Windows approach to upgrades, a cost of doing business, and I’m not one of the ones who gets too fussed about the fact that sometimes it totally fraks my Homegroup settings. I have two machines running Win 10 (mine and my wife’s), plus a laptop running Win8, and most of the time I can get them to work. Then a major update comes in, looks at the setup and goes batshit crazy resetting things to defaults. Whatever. Annoying, but it was a free upgrade, so there’s some pain that comes with it. (I’ll talk about alternatives later, but suffice it to say, there isn’t a viable one, so you dance with the one that brought ‘ya).

CU ran, my system seemed okay initially, and then Wednesday night was acting a bit sluggish. Thursday it was downright piggish, but I didn’t really have time to figure it out. I eventually did a complete reboot late Thursday night, and all hell broke loose.

My system should complete the initial boot in about 60 seconds, max of about 2 minutes to desktop loading. This time? 8 minutes to complete the boot, and it ran a full DSKCHK on my C or M drive for some reason. 22 minutes to fully load my desktop. WTF?

Okay, it finally booted, let’s run some diagnostics. Nope.

Umm, okay, let’s surf the internet and see if this is a CU-related problem. Nope.

Any program? Nope.

The system would not run anything. It acted like it wanted to, it really did, but it just wouldn’t. Weird.

Now, just for fun, this was a REALLY bad time for it to happen. I had volunteered (aka been guilt-recruited) into being the coordinator for the RASC star party for that weekend. I needed a few files that were on my system, plus, you know, a working system to send out the announcements, track replies, check weather maps, etc. I have a laptop to cover off most of that, but I still needed some files off the drive that I had received that week, and not a lot of time to play without them.

I was too tired to figure it out Thursday night, so I went to bed and figured I’d work it out Friday morning. With the upgrade to Windows 10, they finally put in place one of the biggest software developments of the last twenty years. If your phone gets messed up, you can press a series of keys and reset it back to the default bios and settings, essentially wiping everything. Same for your tablet. Just about every phone or tablet now have a “reset” option built into the system…while some people think this was a feature given to users, it’s really a boon for tech support. If you screw things up so bad that they can’t undo it easily, they just reset it. Windows didn’t have that functionality. If Windows (or DOS before it) got screwed up, they basically had to wipe the disk and reinstall from external media. With the phones and tablets, this “reset” is built in, no external media required, and Windows 10 has the same capability. You actually have three options:

Wipe the disk entirely and reinstall from an external source (the old way — you lose everything);
Wipe the installation and data, and reinstall from the built-in version (like a tablet or phone, again losing everything); or,
Wipe just the installation, keep the data, and reinstall from the built-in version.

I have already done option 3 once in the past, and it works like a charm. It still has to install some updates, but that’s fine. It took about an hour last time, so I started first thing Friday morning, around 6:30 a.m. I figured I’d be done before I left for work.

Except it was giving me no end of trouble just to start the process. It was like I wasn’t “fully booted”. Eventually I tricked it into running, it started, and I thought it was good to go. I started getting ready for work, came back 10 minutes later, and now it had advanced to a second menu. It hadn’t been doing it, it was just taking that long to bring up the second option. Wow.

Okay, chose that, and waited. About another 7 or 8 minutes. Chose another option on that menu. Finally, it was good to go.

About two hours after starting, it was still only about 20% installed. I had a light schedule at work, I really wanted this fixed and running again, so I checked with my boss and she said no problem for staying home. Okay, my deck was cleared, even if it made a friend laugh that I was the only person he knew who would take a day off work to install a new operating system. More on that later, but it’s a harbinger of truth.

Finally, just after ten, it said, “Done!”, and I thought, “Finally!”. Except it wasn’t.

It was done the PREPARATION process, not the installation. Now it could start the install. WTF????

Okay, late afternoon, and the system is finally finished the re-install. Whew.

I reboot. It is EXACTLY the same as before the install. 8 minutes to finish initial boot, 22 for full desktop. And again, nothing wants to run.

Time for Level II intervention

At this point, I’ve exhausted my level I knowledge on how to fix it, and I’ve been actively searching online with my laptop and tablets to try and diagnose the problem. I’ve also started doing contingency planning for the star party, and managed to cobble together what I needed. Not everything I wanted or had planned, but enough to handle the announcement. That crisis was averted, although not without some brain cell casualities.

But the level II intervention is starting to look problematic. It isn’t a problem with my Windows, it isn’t the O/S upgrade, it is my hard drive. Likely just my C drive for operations, but I’m suspicious of my M drive. It doesn’t seem to be responding, and I can’t figure out why…my windows problem and the data drive problem shouldn’t be related. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm.

Because while I’ve been going through all this, I realized a horrible truth. My backups are only partially intact. 1TB of data and I’m not as safe as I thought I was:

My “Documents” folder, which has some 17GB of data going back to 1993, is complete. I might be missing a small file or two, but nothing of consequence;
My “Music” folder is 176GB of files, and I initially think it is completely safe…except it isn’t, not exactly. I haven’t lost any files, that part is clear, everything is where it should be, or if it isn’t, it’s in iTunes and Google, and I can redownload it. Except then I have a small seizure and realize that I spent a good part of my spring completely re-organizing all my files. Stuff that was all over the place between iTunes and general Music folders had been completely resorted, and I cut the cord from Apple Music’s shady file management practices (Averting disaster with my music files). But is my backup before or after all that work? I can’t be sure, because I can’t SEE MY FILES! A potentially really annoying blow, but well, if I had to redo it, so be it…a first large blow from the original crash issue, but not crazy time yet;
My “Pictures” folder has three main sub-areas — “Current” pictures which has 9GB of data in it, and is mostly this year. I was worried that I had lost some stuff that had been uploaded to my drive from my phone and tablet, not yet sorted or processed, and not fully backed up yet from the previous time. It’s a gap, but well, that happens. A second blow, and a bit more painful — with actual loss of some stuff for Jacob including his birthday party and end of year at school. A few other things, but nothing life-shattering. For pictures that are “Done”, there’s another 355GB of data in there of photos and videos. Almost entirely backed up in more than one place, all good. Except then I realized that I just spent a lot of time reorganizing my astronomy photos. Which are now in the wrong directory, unsorted. Nothing huge lost, but a small loss, if I can’t access. Non-Current is another 165GB of files, but those are fully backed up. Haven’t changed in the last three backups, I’m good to go there.
Applications is the e-downloads of all the programs I have installed, since most have moved away from “CD” installations, and that is not an insignificant set of files — 16.5 GB of files. But again, all backed up. I had them better sorted in another version that I don’t think made it into the backup yet, but again, mostly white noise.
Clipart is another directory of little concern — I have two or three clipart collections gleaned over the years when they were on sale or I needed a specific set of sub-files for something, but they’re fully backed up for the 10GB of data they represent.

So at this point, I’m feeling a bit antsy about my current install, but not terrified. I have almost everything, or at least so I think, and if I’m missing a few things, it will teach me to be more hyper vigilant with my backups. I don’t know that I’ve got two more blows coming.

Calling in the big techies

Saturday morning had me at the computer shop where I bought my PC, and I think that mostly what I have is a blown HD for Windows and I just need to fix that, but in the meantime, I’ll remove my data drive and be good to go. The tech pulls the first drive, and it doesn’t show up on their test machine. It just won’t read it. It doesn’t give an error, it just never completes. Weird, but no problem, that must be the Windows drive that is kaput.

Try the other drive, nope, THAT one is the Windows drive. The one that isn’t reading is my data drive. Somehow, they’re both fried. It’s not a malware issue, not a simple tech issue, the two drives are NOT working. And my simple plan to yank out the HD is dead in the water.

I decide to focus on the hardware, get myself going with an external drive bay with the data drive so I can work on it separately, close up the old box in anticipation of future repairs, and head on out. Over to another computer shop that sells last-generation tech. I can’t afford the premium machine that I now want and need, at least not new, but a fully refurbished PC with two HDs, decent graphics card (suitable for gaming if I need it, but I only need the video processor for photograph processing), and an i7 configuration that I’ve wanted for about four years and couldn’t justify. All boxed up by mid-afternoon, working by suppertime, and then I have to break to go to the star party.

A blow out of nowhere

I get back later that night, and of course, most of the time I’ve been out, my mind has been on the data drive. What’s missing? What’s missing? What’s missing? How bad am I screwed from the backups? I think it is just some photos, and even then, not all of them. I might have some other options. But I want to try the drive again.

I’m working on it late at night, and I suddenly realize that there is something missing. My book. My HR guide. While you might think I should have realized that first, I didn’t. Because most of it is online already, and versions exist in the cloud for other types of backup. But over the last week, I’ve spent a lot of time learning to format with a template that a super online friend gave me, and I’ve integrated my cover. I can recreate all of it, that’s not an issue. It’s that all the editing, rewriting, tweaking, and layout options that I’ve been doing for a week are gone.

I’m not expecting the blow that comes with it. So much of my personal identity is tied to my HR guide, I feel the loss like a punch to the gut. Yes, I can fix it. Yes, I can redo it. But it’s a second blow after the potentially lost music setup, and twice the size. Plus I feel really stupid.

Separate from the lost work, how can I not have backed it up immediately? How can I not have realized immediately? Rule #1 of any writer is to back up your work in progress (WiP). What kind of worthless piece of sh** doesn’t make a copy of their WiP?

Kind of going back to the early paragraphs above, I know that I’m digitally entwined for my goals. I know how to do proper backups. And here I am taking hits that are totally preventable. Stupid ones. Ones that cut to the core of my self-esteem.

I also know that it’s late at night, I’m exhausted from dealing with it for two days without a solution, and when that happens, I go into mental self-mutilation mode. I am never harsher than when I’m judging myself, and this is a perfect storm that has been brewing for two days.

I try to lock it down and keep working, when I should have stepped back, blew it off and relaxed. And then another blow hits.

I am checking backups, preparing for my reinstall to the new machine, and I realize the data on my Ebooks looks ominous. It’s fairly recent, should be fine, and up until now, I’ve not been worried about it. My ebook collection is rather static. A few files here or there might be missing, but nothing I can’t redownload from Amazon or the library. No issues, I thought.

But as I move from the music files potentially missing all the reorg work, I touch on the ebook directory and see a whole series of folders that SHOULD NOT BE THERE. I re-organized them all. And then deleted the old ones. There should be seven directories, and I’m seeing at least 30. Doesn’t sound like much, as I know the files are fine, but I’m staring at potentially hundreds of lost hours of reorganization. Gone. I didn’t do a new backup because, well, the files weren’t new. I had no new content, I just sorted them differently. I would have caught the backup in the next full mode, but I was another two weeks from that. And the differentials wouldn’t catch that type of change unless I triggered it manually. Which I hadn’t.

I crashed. Mentally. Physically. I felt like a complete and utter waste of skin. Lost photos of my son. Lost work on my music and ebook collections, potentially well over a hundred hours of work. And my work in progress, gone.

If I am supposedly a planner, I’m the stupidest one on the planet. I went to bed and glared at the ceiling for two hours. I was so frustrated, so empty, I wanted to scream. I slept, finally, but not well.

Starting the rebuild

I couldn’t change what “might” be the problem, I just had to triage the situation and assess the battle damage. I separated my mental energy into two halves — the first half started working on re-building from what I have backed up on two external hard drives plus my network-attached storage (yes, I have the tools, I just didn’t use them properly, f***ing idiot that I am).

So it might sound simple to just copy those back over, and each of them are indeed full copies — I don’t do proprietary format / encrypted / compressed backups. I do full copies of the files, fully browsable and active. Missing a file? Just copy it back. No muss, no fuss. Back when storage was expensive, those other formats were fine, but you also run the risk that a couple of corrupted bytes or so can ruin your whole backup. It’s slower, but copies are the only way to fly. But with the reorgs, different dates for backups, etc., it took a bit to figure out which versions to use.

The Documents folder was fine, as was Clipart. Applications is a bit disorganized, something I forgot I had already fixed one afternoon, but won’t kill me. My Pictures folder is a hit/miss proposition, mostly as I’ve lost a lot of organizing work on my astrophotos, but I have what I need in the cloud if I want to redownload at some point from SmugMug. And worst case scenario, I can redo the astro sort. I get a really pleasant surprise on my Music folders — the reorg has been backed up in April to the network. I thought I did some of the reorg in May, but apparently I was done before I triggered a backup on April 24th. Whew. And a partial surprise on ebooks. I ran a backup in May, and once I see the date, I vaguely remembering triggering it because I was about to try something big and wanted a quick restore option. And I stored it in a weird place as it was “temporary”. But it has almost all of my reorg work there. So I’m feeling like I can handle what’s been loss. My book can be redone, I can finish the ebooks, I can use the missing photos as a reminder to be more vigilant in my backups.

I still feel like an idiot though, because that recovery isn’t solving my problem. My drive shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing, and I should be able to fix it. Which is where the other half of my mental energy is focusing its time.

You see, the data drive doesn’t “crash”, it is just REALLY REALLY REALLY slow. Like tortoise slow. I download some trial software to start my deep level scans, and it starts to find stuff. Windows itself times out, but the deep level scan doesn’t. It can “see” the structure and even lets me recover some files. One of the first things I try for is my work in progress. My HR guide. I was up to version 3, and while I can’t quite get that, I get a decent copy of version 2. Or at least, a “version” of version 2, if not the final version before I switched to v3. One of the many saves I did. Not great, but hey, it’s not nothing either. And is promising. I buy the full version, and I’m disappointed with the final result. Once you get through the deep scan, which takes about 15 hours, the program lets you “save” the info so you can then just reload it later without doing a rescan. Except it won’t reload the saved scan. And once it finishes the scan, it won’t actually recover the files…they all come up, but with zero size. Even the ones it ALREADY found. I’m ticked, and disappointed, but honestly, it did find some worthwhile files, so I can’t fault it completely.

I do some more online searching, and I like the looks of a second program. I download it, pay the freight, and start it running. Very similar interface and operations, and 12 hours later, it shows me what looks like a full hard drive directory. What the heck…I tell it to recover everything to my external drive, and press “GO”. It doesn’t get everything, but it sure tried. 21 hours later, and I’ve gotten everything I am going to get.

Including the “lost” photos and videos of my son’s birthday party and final celebration at school. And golfing. And a bunch of other little things that I’m glad I got back.

And my final ebook “structure”, albeit with a few missing files that I had to manually find.

And.

Wait for it.

My work in progress.

My HR guide, version 3, in its entirety. Which I promptly email to myself, upload to two different cloud accounts and copy to a flash drive.

How much did I get back? I’m not really sure. Some files are going to be “bad” when I go to access them. Perhaps a video file that didn’t quite get fully recovered, or a photo that doesn’t want to load. But if it all works, close to 99% is back. And backed up twice at the moment.

What I learned about myself

It seems obvious now, but it was an unintended and unexpected truth bomb to see it in action. I knew that my goals were tightly entwined with a lot of technology, even if the rest of my life isn’t. Again, it’s not about computers being my life, it’s about the fact that I use them as a prerequisite tool when I’m doing my goals. And I know that my approach to self-improvement, as represented by my goal-setting, is a fundamental part of my self-identity, of how I see myself.

I just never realized how A’s link to B and B’s link to C in this instance means that maintaining my self-identity almost requires a functioning computer setup.

Sure, my wife and son will still love me tomorrow if my system crashes. Yes, I’ll still have a house, get up, go to work, all those things. But without the computer enabling me to keep working on my goals, I feel stagnant. And when I feel stagnant, that is not a good thing for my mental health. Ever. I know that.

When I crashed on the Saturday night after the 3-4 “blows” to my ego, I was pretty damn low. I spiraled like a chipmunk chasing a chestnut in a swirling toilet. I have a pretty healthy ego, and self-confidence, partly born out of my past successes in setting goals and achieving them. Or just a narcissistic personality. And although I’ve been a bit more vulnerable this year with a painful job search (50by50: Start a new job (#03)), I am pretty good at spotting triggers that can cause me to spiral.

A computer crash wasn’t on my spiral caution list. But apparently it should be.

And it means I need to be doubly pro-active in making sure my computer is working in a way that a technical crash doesn’t knock me out. But that’s already taken care of…

Interestingly, a friend noted that I’ve had lots of big computer problems over the years. Which isn’t quite accurate, or perhaps is a bit overly simplistic, but I realized with the comment, part of it is that when it does happen, it affects me more than most. Because my reaction isn’t about the specific problem, it’s about the link it has to my approach to my goals and how it affects those. Making me perhaps more hypersensitive to those problems when they happen.

But it’s not just about my goals

Part of the problem is what I’m trying to do on any given day. Two people on my FB list made the frequent facile comments made by all Apple users (insert smug nasal voice here to say), i.e. “You should get a MAC, there’s never a problem with a MAC”. Both people who made the comment know me pretty well, and likely know that there is zero chance of my ever using a MAC.

Most people know that Apple has less than ten percent of the computer market, and that’s not because 90% of the people just didn’t know Apple was out there. There are a lot of reasons why people don’t buy Apple, and only a handful why they do. The biggest reason most people don’t buy them is price. Three times the cost of a PC, for about comparable power/specifications. Another “separate” issue is really just the same issue by a different name — Apple doesn’t sell “entry-level” computers … you get the big guns at a high price, or nothing. The other reason so many don’t buy Apple is that the software they want isn’t available for a MAC. Literally hundreds of thousands of programs are only available in PC versions. Other people avoid it because MACs aren’t good for gaming. Reasons in favour include stability — the system never crashes. My Vic-20 never crashed either, doesn’t mean I want to use it. People also like to tout that there are no viruses, but actually that’s not true. It’s simply with less than ten percent of the market, there’s no reason for people to target them. But there are viruses that work just as well on MACs as on PCs. However, the real added value of the MAC is really about graphics, CAD, and video processing. It does all three excellently. And if you’re in advertising or communications, it’s a great tool. If not, most people buy medium-power PCs at 2/3 the price and can work with anyone.

But those are the “general” reasons people don’t buy MACs, they’re not really the reasons I will never have one. I wouldn’t even take one for free. I simply don’t like Apple’s approach to systems design.

They are very much a one-size-fits-all model. You cannot customize a MAC, Apple doesn’t want you to do so. Because then it might not work and you’ll want tech support. Which is expensive to provide. They also have maintained tight control on both the hardware and the O/S to force that “any colour you want as long as it’s black” approach. It’s also one of the reasons why the system is so stable. It is so locked down, you can’t possibly tweak anything that will cause instability.

That design is pretty good, more or less, when it comes to tablets. I bought Jacob an iPad, and recommend iPads for less-technology-friendly family members. An iPad will just work, straight out of the box. It won’t let you do anything to force it outside of its comfort zone, it won’t get up and dance for you in the way you want it, but if you press the buttons in the order Apple tells you to do, it will do some pretty great things. You’ll pay for that privilege and security, but it’s a solid product. Similarly for iPhones. I even had one as I wanted a bit more bling at the time, but it didn’t take me long before I was frustrated with default settings and had to jailbreak it.

But when it comes to my PC? No way in hell am I letting someone dictate how I do something or whether I can even tweak it. I’m not a hard-core techie, but I do have some special demands. For example, on a busy day, it’s not uncommon for me to be:

Trying out new-to-the-market organizer programs while synching with my tablet, phone, and online websites;
Editing a video down in size, or changing formats, and using three different programs to match my workflow;
Sorting through hundreds of photos, customizing a few on the fly;
Stacking some astronomy photos in the latest astro program, only available on PC;
Ripping music from my CDs into my system;
Running multiple browser windows simultaneously;
Streaming shows;
Managing multiple cloud accounts for storage, along with backup solutions on the ground;
Managing my ebook library and transferring files to and from my Kindle, Jacob’s Kindle and Andrea’s Kobo; and,
Using Office 365 for Excel, Powerpoint and Word documents.

Of those 10 main functions, I can use a MAC for part of b; c; e; f; g; h; and j. What I can’t do is customize the workflows I would use for each to the way I work — you have to use the MAC’s approach, because it can’t be tweaked. And I can’t do a, d, or i at all, because MAC doesn’t have the software for those, or when they do, it’s several iterations behind the PC version. With the exception of the videos and the photos, almost NOBODY uses a MAC to do those things because the software and the power just isn’t there.

And more importantly? I am often doing 3-5 of those things SIMULTANEOUSLY.

I don’t even like the way iTunes manages music (see above link about avoiding disaster), and it is endemic of the way Apple treats customers. Like stupid sheep that have to be herded in the same direction. You can be creative, but only with your output…not with the design of your system.

I’ll buy iPads for Jacob, and iPhones for Andrea, partly because I know I won’t have to provide any tech support that way. They won’t have the full power that I have available to me to do all the things I want to do, but they also can’t get into too much trouble if the system is locked down as much as Apple likes to do it. I would use Linux before I would go to Apple. About the only exception I would have to that rule is the full MacBook Airs. They are super light and lightyears beyond the sleekness of other manufacturers. If I was in the market for a high-end word processor and web surfing tool for travel or just out and about around town, the price is terrible but the product is perfect for it.

What I really find funny though is when people actually think a MAC would be a viable option for me. It would be like talking to someone with a motorcycle problem with their custom-built Harley, and suggesting to them they wouldn’t have the problems they have if they would just drive a nice reliable but really expensive Vespa scooter. Umm, sure. I’ll get right on that.

Moving forward

As I said, computer functionality and my frustration with it when it drops quality is now on my trigger caution list. I hadn’t viewed it in the same way as other triggers before, but because it was a downstream issue, I didn’t see the link.

I’m testing various new backup tools, and am closing in on a solution. I’ve repurposed my 2TB external drive into a relatively stable / not-much-changes drive, and made my 3TB drive my primary backup. Everything is backed up there twice — one collection of “old” backups, and one copy of the recovered drive. Just in case in future a file turns out to be corrupted and I can’t access it, those two old backups are now permanent copies. I’ll copy them to NAS storage too.

I haven’t figured out quite what to do with some OneDrive and DropBox space that I have. I don’t want it synching in the same way and making another copy, but I do want to “send” them some files for safekeeping.

And I probably won’t talk much about computer problems in the future. Because people think I’m really talking about something “simple” like a glitchy hard drive, when it is more closer to a full on mental meltdown that just happens to be digitally triggered.

Version 4.0 of my website

Posted on July 2, 2017 by PolyWoggJuly 2, 2017

In my last post about the server side of my website (Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things and Version 3.3 of my websites: the software side), I talked about a problem I was having with GreenGeeks that they couldn’t solve. It was a lot more complicated than just one problem, or even their laissez-faire approach to changing settings on my site without telling me, it was more of a governance issue and I finally had to bail on them. I’m still using them for one site that has low traffic, just until the prepaid balance is used up, and then I’ll migrate it over to my new host.

Because I did indeed find a new host, as I said…I moved to WebHostingCanada. And things were going along pretty well with them.

I had an error at one point, one that I haven’t resolved yet, where my WP-CRON (the file that regularly runs a set command at a set time) doesn’t want to post “scheduled” posts. So, for example, if I write a post, and I want it to go live at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, you use the schedule feature in WordPress and at 8:00 a.m., or shortly thereafter when WP-CRON runs, it notices a pending post, and switches it to live. Or it is supposed to. For some reason, while some of the Cron features work for other things, it won’t “schedules” my posts to go live and actually make them live at that time (it schedules them, it just doesn’t do it). Like an alarm clock that just doesn’t go off when it should.

Not a giant issue, I rarely schedule posts that way, and when I do, it’s often part of a larger strategy that requires manual intervention anyway.

Then I upgraded to a new version of WordPress. Then another. All good.

Then I went up to a version where suddenly I couldn’t save my updates. It was like the auto-save would start as I was typing, and never complete. So when I went to later save, it wasn’t able to “activate” when I pressed “update”. Other people were having this too, with nobody seeming to have a solution.

Now, the normal way to resolve this is to go to your plugins and deactivate everything. Check again — if it works, then you have a plugin conflict; if it doesn’t, it likely means it is something else (* remember this asterisk). You then move along to themes, switch to a basic theme, see if the conflict goes away. Etc. It helps you narrow down to what is wrong. If you disable your theme and your plugins and your connections to just about everything, it might be a server problem, something wrong with your config.

Which is where I was looking for solutions. Because disabling my plugins and theme didn’t resolve the problem. But my server settings all looked fine.

Except for one small glitch. My server load was high. Now I had this before with Greengeeks when running Piwigo and WordPress, and they thought it was some sort of outside attack. Webhosting said “nope, not that”, this looked more like a config problem to them. So I got a phone call from them noting it was really high and asking if they could log in and check a few things. They weren’t spammers, they didn’t need my credentials, they just wanted permission before they started poking around.

I was like, “hell, yeah”. Greengeeks went in, poked around and changed things, without asking or even telling me. Here Webhosting Canada was, phoning me in person to ask if they could look around my setup and see if there was anything going on. I walked the guy through the background, stuff I’d tried in the past, and off he went. I wished him luck, as this could have been a rabbit hole.

He found the problem in less than 3 minutes. As soon as he saw one of the security files set up by Better WP Security, it was clear what the problem was. The file was HUGE, and it was calling itself. So every time I logged in or even loaded a page, it would go into an almost perpetual loop of constantly checking and then rechecking and then rechecking itself again. He tweaked the file, disabled the plugin, and the load dropped to normal. It was just that one plugin.

Now, back to that asterisk. Disabling the plugin hadn’t helped. Because disabling it didn’t undo the security file changes. The plugin wasn’t active, but the huge file was still being triggered. Undoing those changes and making the changes relatively straightforwardly with another security plugin to do the same thing worked PERFECT.

And my editing / saving problem went away too.

Their totally different attitude to solving the problem made all the difference for me. And while diagnosing WP problems is not their job, that’s a config problem, they did it at no charge.

I feel somewhat unfair now about the previous hosts. They had the same issue but no idea how to solve it, and all evidence was pointing to a server problem, not a software config problem. But the guy found it in under 3 minutes once he stepped outside the normal “not my problem” box that most tech supports have. Back when I was working tech supports, it was the same “not my problem” attitude of others that drove me batty. And my alternate “let’s see if I can help with anything else while I’m here” attitude is what made me popular with my clients.

Thumbs up to WebHosting Canada. The site’s working great. WP-CRON is still acting up, but I can live with that for now. And it gave me the confidence to merge the two sites into one (50by50: Who am I when I’m online? (#01)). I also reconfigured the categories and groupings into Government (Civil Service, Development, Government), Hobbies (Astronomy, Computers, Humour, Ideas, Learning, Photography, Quotes, and Recipes), HR (HR Guide and PS Transitions FP), Personal (Experiences, Family, Goals, 50by50, Spiritualism), Reviews (Book Reviews, Music Reviews, TV reviews), Writing (Libraries, Publishing, Art of Writing) and Links.

I’ve also decided to be a little less demanding re: the “one category per post” rule that I’ve been doing, it’s hard to find things sometimes where I’m talking about a goal that pertains to one of the headings, for example — is it a post about goals or a post about the hobby?

I’m liking the new design, and trying to be a bit more flexible.

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Category Archives: Computers