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BLARGH.
So, yesterday evening, my computer froze in a wonderfully typical show of display driver croaking, which is annoying in itself, but of no lasting consequence.
Except that when I rebooted it, it didn't come back up. It froze right at boot with the exact same error message Caroline started getting on her own computer two days ago.
Sorry to all those of you I left mid-chat -- that's the reason why.
So both our computers are now out of order, with the same apparent symptoms, at nearly the same time. I would very, very much like to know how that's even possible.
Some further digging revealed that my computer is probably fine and I hope to fix it with a mere BIOS setting switch, but I would be really interested in figuring out just how the HELL that setting came to change on its own. (Caroline's, however, looks like a plain nearly-dead hard drive, and there's nothing you can do about that, alas.) But, in the meanwhile... Blargh.
My already floundering NaNoWriMo is, henceforth, real, real fucked.
I'm now two days late on the schedule, and given how much of a struggle it's been to only keep up, I don't know how I could catch up.
I painstakingly reached my own mini-goal two days ago, a wordcount half an order of magnitude smaller than the official 50,000 that I had set for myself at the beginning, as a more realistic goalpost for a busy lifestyle, although I can't say that has given me the sense of fulfillment I was hoping for. I think that having almost stayed on track with the minimal allowable daily wordcount has given me a feeling that I could actually almost do this, the whole write-a-novel-in-one-month-and-get-away-with-it marvelous insanity, which makes reaching the mini-goal feel like much less of an achievement.
Not that I was doing very well, though, even without the computer crash. Raking my brains for the mandatory ~1700 daily words had become increasingly grueling, and the writing was hollow and contrived and generally frustratingly bad. Besides, on Sunday, I made the mistake of diving into old folders and reading some stuff I wrote many years ago, for a fanzine I took part in back then. Reading all these again was something of both a shock and a cold shower.
They were good.
I don't know how to not make this sound trite. I mean: usually, when looking back on some of my past work in any field, my initial and primary urge is to torch it and forget it even existed. But this... How could I put it. The writing is not very smooth and at times clumsy, but still sharp and evocative. The characters are vibrant with an intense, complex life. The emotions I put in there still ring painfully true all those years later.
And I would write that, several days worth of WriMo, in one or two fevered sittings.
Nowadays, I struggle to come up with a small thousand hollow words.
What the hell happened to me? When did that well dry up and how can I bring it back to life?
Bummer. That hasn't helped either my motivation or my inspiration any.
Anyway. Computer troubles first, alas. I know I've got good techies among my kind readership, and I have two questions for you:
1) Can brief brown-outs damage hardware? Would a desktop UPS be a good idea?
2) What workable solutions for household backups (10GB at most, I'd say) exist?
Thanks loads.
But of course, in the meanwhile... Nothing to do but wait, evidently.
Except that when I rebooted it, it didn't come back up. It froze right at boot with the exact same error message Caroline started getting on her own computer two days ago.
Sorry to all those of you I left mid-chat -- that's the reason why.
So both our computers are now out of order, with the same apparent symptoms, at nearly the same time. I would very, very much like to know how that's even possible.
Some further digging revealed that my computer is probably fine and I hope to fix it with a mere BIOS setting switch, but I would be really interested in figuring out just how the HELL that setting came to change on its own. (Caroline's, however, looks like a plain nearly-dead hard drive, and there's nothing you can do about that, alas.) But, in the meanwhile... Blargh.
My already floundering NaNoWriMo is, henceforth, real, real fucked.
I'm now two days late on the schedule, and given how much of a struggle it's been to only keep up, I don't know how I could catch up.
I painstakingly reached my own mini-goal two days ago, a wordcount half an order of magnitude smaller than the official 50,000 that I had set for myself at the beginning, as a more realistic goalpost for a busy lifestyle, although I can't say that has given me the sense of fulfillment I was hoping for. I think that having almost stayed on track with the minimal allowable daily wordcount has given me a feeling that I could actually almost do this, the whole write-a-novel-in-one-month-and-get-away-with-it marvelous insanity, which makes reaching the mini-goal feel like much less of an achievement.
Not that I was doing very well, though, even without the computer crash. Raking my brains for the mandatory ~1700 daily words had become increasingly grueling, and the writing was hollow and contrived and generally frustratingly bad. Besides, on Sunday, I made the mistake of diving into old folders and reading some stuff I wrote many years ago, for a fanzine I took part in back then. Reading all these again was something of both a shock and a cold shower.
They were good.
I don't know how to not make this sound trite. I mean: usually, when looking back on some of my past work in any field, my initial and primary urge is to torch it and forget it even existed. But this... How could I put it. The writing is not very smooth and at times clumsy, but still sharp and evocative. The characters are vibrant with an intense, complex life. The emotions I put in there still ring painfully true all those years later.
And I would write that, several days worth of WriMo, in one or two fevered sittings.
Nowadays, I struggle to come up with a small thousand hollow words.
What the hell happened to me? When did that well dry up and how can I bring it back to life?
Bummer. That hasn't helped either my motivation or my inspiration any.
Anyway. Computer troubles first, alas. I know I've got good techies among my kind readership, and I have two questions for you:
1) Can brief brown-outs damage hardware? Would a desktop UPS be a good idea?
2) What workable solutions for household backups (10GB at most, I'd say) exist?
Thanks loads.
But of course, in the meanwhile... Nothing to do but wait, evidently.
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2. I don't remember if you saw my backup solution - I keep a clone of my entire laptop hard disk, both at the office and at home. An external hard disk kit is about £10-20, the hard drive can be as small or big as you like (£30-300, I guess), and the software can be either free or cheap. Having lost drives before, I can tell you how valuable it is to have a whole system backup that you can boot onto. Murphy's law dictates that things will go wrong when you're in a hurry or need to do something important, so it's good to back up the whole thing so that you can finish editing document X and print it without having to reinstall Word or something :)
2a. To be fair, what I just described is good for disaster recovery. What it doesn't do (and most backup packages do offer, is multiple backups over time, so that you don't just have the latest copy of a file, but older ones too in case they get corrupted). Even cheap backup software usually offers incremental backups, so it's probably worth looking into finding something that suits your needs and your budget :)
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2. Thanks too. :) An external HD sounds like the best solution right now, although, don't you risk losing everything in the not so unlikely event something happens to the drive, like, if you drop it?
And, thanks for your other reply. I'll think on it. :)
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Bleurgh, I know exactly how that is. Though a lot of my old stuff is embarrassingly bad, there's more than enough things I can look back on and whimper at how much better they seem to me than what I do today. I think that the more you know about what you're doing, the harder it is to do it properly, whereas a little naivety lets you just spill words onto the page. I had the same thing with web design back in the mid-90s. We didn't really have standards back then, people just did whatever, and it was really easy to come up with something that everyone thought was awesome. Nowadays I find it almost impossible to design a site. Often I just give up and I end up with something like RTN. Bear in mind though that we look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles - there's a lot of filtering going on there, and a shift in perspective. Don't be too hard on future/present-you :)
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It is my understanding that input power that outside of the listed parameters (110-120 VAC, 60 Hz over here) is "bad".
> Would a desktop UPS be a good idea?
FFS, YES!
If anything, they're nice for those stupid "blips" in power you get during a storm when the lights blink. It means the difference between having your session interrupted or not.
> What workable solutions for household backups (10GB at most, I'd say)
> exist?
I need more details. For example, are you /really/ changing 10 GB of data every single day? If not, then you can make one or two backups of stuff that is mostly static (MP3s, etc.), and just do daily backups to CD of stuff that is changed, like word processor files and email.
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> parameters (110-120 VAC, 60 Hz over here) is "bad".
What do you mean, "bad", Egon?
> If anything, they're nice for those stupid "blips" in power you get
> during a storm when the lights blink. It means the difference between
> having your session interrupted or not.
I know. However, I asked our admins, because they are cool and pro-pony, and they say that the battery in your average desktop UPS will go out in one or two years, tops, so it's not worth it. Besides, the consumer-grade UPS models don't protect much against common problems of irregular power supply, according to Wikipedia. So I don't know.
> I need more details.
I have stuff I don't want to lose -- personal documents and creations, emails, logs, photos. And while I'd also rather not lose data that can be reacquired one way or another (music, games, etc), it's not as important. All said, 10GB should cover it nicely. The personal stuff will vary daily or weekly, but the rest, much less often, I think.
Mind, weekly or monthly backups would probably suffice. I can design my own backup process, rsync-based or, hell, with Subversion; it's more the best suited hardware that I'm unsure about. I'm afraid an external HD would be horribly flimsy -- drop it accidentally and your data is gone. At the same time, it would still be loads more practical than DVD-RWs, the long-term reliability of which I'm also very uncertain about. So... Ah, dilemma, dilemma. :/
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> I know. However, I asked our admins, because they are cool and pro-pony,
> and they say that the battery in your average desktop UPS will go out in
> one or two years, tops, so it's not worth it.
I'm gonna have to call bullshit on that. I had an APC Back UPS Pro 1000 that lasted me 4-5 years. I still have another APC UPS (LS 550, I think?) that is going strong after 2.5 years (it powers my TV and PS2 now :-)
Of course, brand does make a difference. APC is a pretty big/well known manufacturer, so I stick with them.
> Besides, the consumer-grade UPS models don't protect much against common
> problems of irregular power supply, according to Wikipedia.
I haven't seen any evidence of this. I've used UPSes through plenty of power uh, "events" without any difficulty. The only time I ever had a UPS fail when was the battery in my Back UPS failed after 4-5 years. And that was caught during the self-test that the UPS ran every 2 weeks, as it should have been.
[backups]
I'd suggest burning the majority of stuff that doesn't get changed (music, games, etc.) to a couple of DVDs once every 6 months, and your more "mutable" stuff to a CD or DVD once every week or so.
The benefits of this are enormous: the cost of media will be less than $100/year, the media is very durable (dropping it won't do anything), you can have multiple copies for redunancy, and it can be read on virtually any machine, PC /or/ Mac.
If you want to be really badass, I'd recommend a media safe from http://www.firecooler.com/. It's expensive, but it's a one time cost and is a great place to store your data securely. You can fit several dozen DVDs the safe. (Yes, I own one)
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1) I guess short surges are a greater danger to hardware. That's why I have a surge protection for my computer. But I guess brown-outs don't do much good ...
2) I can't really advise anything ... I guess there are a lot of dedicated programs out there, you just have to pick one you're willing to trust. Regarding the medium I'd advise a dedicated harddrive over DVD-R(W) because it's more reliable, and holds enough space so you can schedule automatic backups without worrying about loading a blank disk, but of course it costs a bit more.
BTW, it reminds me of the backup feature in the next MacOs called "time machine" : http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html I think it's a great idea, it looks really easy to use and it comes with the system so you just have to plug a backup drive and it does everything in background ... sounds like it will even wake up the computer during the night to do the backup (yes, mac programs can do that ^_^). And I love the startrek-like interface ^__^
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2) Programs aren't so much of a problem... Rsync for the win and everything, y'know. Thanks for the suggestion about the hardware though! That's what I was wondering about. A DVD 'feels' less fragile than an external HD, instinctually, but I was wondering about its long-term reliability.
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There actually turned out to be several issues with it.
What the hell is going on this week?!
As for Caroline's, though, no luck. :(
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Ils en font de supers maintenant.
Des que les anti-virus ne détectent même pas.
On en a chopé quelques uns comme ca au boulot il y a 2 mois.
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Tu as une protection anti-surtension? Une prise de terre?
C'est la même carte mère? C'est peut-être un défaut constructeur, ca arrive.
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Ptêt' pas, quoi. :)
> Tu as une protection anti-surtension? Une prise de terre?
Oui et oui.
> C'est la même carte mère? C'est peut-être un défaut constructeur, ca
> arrive.
Non, les deux ordis n'ont rien à voir. En fait ce n'est même pas le même problème. C'est juste les symptômes externes qui sont identiques.
Enfin, c'est réparé pour moi. Par pour Caro malheureusement. :/
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C'etait quoi le probleme pour ton ordi ?
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Détail cocasse: ça s'est reproduit plus tard dans le mois, dans le sens inverse. Le premier cas a coïncidé au niveau timing avec le passage au kernel 2.6.18, le second à un retour au kernel 2.6.17 (à cause des freezes avec le kernel 2.6.18). Je suis donc tenté de déclarer que le kernel 2.6.18 c'est de la merde.
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Awh... I do miss Mykam. He was a pretty good character and I've always wished I could know more about him.
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