That scynching feeling

Rachel got in about half past three, tired but happy, and we all got up late. It rained most of the day, and Clare took Jasmine around to Anwen's house for another afternoon of play. With nothing better to do, I decided to update the funeral database record I've kept since returning to Britain in 2002. It's occasionally useful to consult if a family request me to conduct a service for another of their kith and kin. I was appalled to discover that I hadn't made any entries since the end of May, only filed away some, but not all of the paperwork. There were half a dozen entries to make, not counting the half a dozen funerals taken in Spain on three separate locum visits. I didn't have any documentation for those, only odd notes in my diary, and very different recollections from those attaching to the sombre routine of pastoral duties close to home.

I'm now making an effort to maintain a degree of consistency between records and documents kept on all work and personal Windows machines via Sky Drive, still fearful that I'll end up losing stuff with automatic synchronisation, because I've forgotten to configure something properly. The source of this apprehension is trouble I've had with getting X-Marks to behave synchronising bookmarks between devices, phones, tablets and computers. Not configuring something correctly at installation of a new browser extension, I find it hasn't merged, but added the same set of bookmarks to the X-Marks web server, then synced multiple copies of the duplicated set of bookmarks to other machines. I then have to spend time de-duplicating bookmarks on X-Marks web server, and browsers I use - two, sometimes three different browsers for each operating system installed, ten different uses of X-Marks on current and legacy computers. It's a tangled mess going back years. It's what you get when you allow auto-sync to rule before checking you have it configured correctly. It's good to achieve some order and consistency, but it can be dauntingly difficult. It's not the stuff of which to make New Year's resolutions, it takes too much time!

 

I also use Google Drive to shift material around between machines I use, work and personal in a rather ad hoc manner, simply because all our accounts are GMail. This system also has its virtues, though I'm not in a position where I work collaboratively on documents that can take advantage of them. In a perfect world all work and personal stuff would be backed up on both Google Drive and Sky Drive for any kind of access, but it's hard to imagine Google and Microsoft competing Cloud systems being able to synchronise with each other.