Computers are (almost) human

So you think you can tell the difference between a computer and a human?

Take the NY Times Quiz to see if you are right:

Technical wobbles

My computer died two months ago, not sudden death but in stages. The first warning that something was seriously wrong was the 'blue screen of death' and an instruction to use the recovery disk. It took time to locate the recovery disk amongst all the other accumulated techie clutter but I eventually got the computer working again, stored the disk back in its plastic wrapper and carried on working as if nothing had happened.

Resurrected computers don't live forever and it wasn't long before I had to get the recovery disk  out again. This time I could only manage to get the computer working in 'safe mode' so I decided to do what I should probably have done long before, I backed up everything on DVD. I made a second backup of important documents (a book manuscript) on USB. This was really overkill as I had an external hard drive which had been plugged in intermittently and which was mostly up to date As I backed up on DVD and USB I thought how ridiculous it is that we keep so many copies of things nowadays, even things we have in hard copy.  There are whole power stations that are dedicated to maintaining the server farms that store our documents in perpetuity and I decided that using DVDs was probably a better option than storage in 'the cloud'.

It wasn't long before my computer developed a terminal illness, a short circuit which sent me to the recovery disk and back in a perpetual loop and I was left to work on my small travel eeePC or a very old laptop, over ten years old. That's when I discovered the flaws in my strategy.

Unbeknownst to me the external hard-drive that was my 'fail-safe' back up was not fail safe. It had not backed up properly and had only old drafts of my manuscript.

"Whew, thank goodness for my multi-back ups," I thought.

Then I realised that the eePC doesn't have a DVD disk drive and the very old laptop doesn't read DVDs. That left me with the USB backup as the sole usable source. I loaded my manuscript onto the eePC from the USB with my fingers tightly crossed. Luckily it worked and I am now back out of the woods and don't have to wait until I get another computer to see if the DVD back ups were successful.

The moral of the story is that you can never have too many back ups. I hope the cloud-farm people have a back-up strategy that is more robust than mine. My own strategy of multi-backups was only successful due to good luck. I was given ample warning but technology is tricky, doesn't always work and is often incompatible or outdated. Nothing seems to beat plain old paper copies.

In the meantime I discover lots of things that I failed to back up properly, like online bookmarks.

Things come in threes ...

The shed roof that was left hanging over the fence by the high winds was taken off last Sunday by the very helpful SES men. They folded it up (it was so rusty it almost fell apart) and put it inside the shed which they straightened and tied down.

I poured myself a glass of wine, congratulated myself on managing the damage and turned my laptop computer on, only to find ... oh dear, the blue screen of death.  I spent endless hours nursing the laptop to life again and then immediately burned my files to a DVD drive ... just as well as the computer updated itself then died once again and now no amount of nursing helps. So it will join the shed on the scrap heap

Then my TV died. I had had it repaired about a year ago so I looked up the documentation to see if it might still be under warranty. I eventually found the invoice (after deciding I really must update my filing system) which showed the TV was mended in September 2011. So that was good .... but before I took it to the repair shop I read the instructions again and discovered that I had been pressing the wrong start button. It still works if you press the right button. How do you forget which button is the start button so suddenly? Maybe I just expected everything to break.

In the meantime I hauled my very old laptop out of a storage box and eventually figured out the password. Then I discovered that it can't read DVD discs. So if I need any of my files I will have to wait until I have a new computer.  Perhaps I may never need them ....

Technobaby

Today's babies are not even out of nappies before they are computing. This 19 month old wakes up, climbs on the chair and logs on, unbeknownst to her mother.

I read that researchers have found that retinal (back of the eye) blood vessels of 10 year olds who spend more than 2 hours at the TV/PC are dangerously narrowed compared to those of kids who play ouside a lot. Maybe schools should return to hand written homework.