Blog restored, operas booked

The man from SSE came to read our gas and electricity meters this morning. We chatted briefly about how smart meter introduction will affect his job. It seems they've not yet been told. I told him my concern about how data was to be harvested wirelessly from our side of the street, suffering as its does from such a poor phone signal. He didn't say much except that uneven reception happened in all sorts of places. I wonder if there is a Grand Plan, or if it's a case of hi-tech trial and error?

Thankfully for Owain, the blog failure crisis is over. It was nothing more than a broken SQL database link. No hacks, no data loss. Immediately he set about installing a site backup plugin on his WordPress software, and has learned how he can do his own repairs in future. There was a time when I was keen to learn all the technical details to be able to build and manage websites, but I was never well pleased with the results for the effort invested. I used Google sites to build web pages for several years, but in the end, got daunted by the enhanced security measures and difficulties encountered in linking pages to URLs I'd purchased, and gave up altogether. Now I concentrate all my effort on journal writing, and minimise the amount of time I spend on design or tweaking default settings.

Over the weekend I received two more requests to officiate at funerals, so that I have three next week, none this week, and so have enough time for preparation. After several days in succession without a good walk, I got out at the end of this afternoon, and walked around Llandaff Fields and then Pontcanna Fields, covering three miles as the sun was setting. There was an east wind, but the temperature rose to eight degrees, so the wind didn't bite quite so hard as it has done since new year. Not that spring is yet in the air. Snowdrops and crocuses are out, and a few prodigious blossoms among the abundance of daffodil shoots growing taller by the day, but few signs of buds swelling yet, ready to burst. But who knows what a few days of milder weather might bring?

Early booking for the 2017-18 season of opera performances at the Wales Millennium Centre started today. Rather than buy on-line, Clare went down to the real world booking office and obtained perfect seats for four operas in our usual place, the middle of the few rows of front seats behind the orchestra pit which are at subscriber discount prices due to the steep line of sight to the surtitle screen. There are three Russian operas in the schedule. We decided we could cope with one, 'Eugene Onegin'. Then there's our old favourites 'Tosca' and 'Don Giovanni', and Verdi's 'La Forza del Destino', which we've not seen before if my memory serves me right. Plenty to look forward to.

  

Blogger's nightmare

While I was writing my Sunday sermon yesterday morning I had a phone call from a worried Owain. He'd got back late last night from a week off in Berlin, and had just got around to checking his music and media blog for the first time in a week, only to discover that the homepage wasn't delivering any content. All his content is hosted on a web server we've been sharing for the past ten years. He needed to check the access details before logging into the server, and it was quicker to ask me than rummage through his paper document hoard. I was soon able to verify the information, and left him to investigate.

Later in the day he came to Cardiff to have supper with friends and called in to leave his overnight bag as he was stopping over to watch the Wales v England rugby match, and have a drink with us first. He was still waiting to hear from his mate who designed and built his website, and set it up for him using WordPress on our shared server. He suspected a broken link to the SQL database, but didn't know how to fix it. I couldn't help him as I never had occasion to learn how to use the software, having used Blogger exclusively since I started in November 2005, so it was a matter of just waiting. I enquired about site  back-ups, and he admitted he didn't really know much about what happened where his own site was concerned, a thought which gave me the horrors.

Owain writes and edits copy for a living, daily uploading stuff to an assortment of sites with  more experience than me of different content management systems. I hired server space for us to share not long after I started blogging, and he's used it more than I have, both of us using the excellent CuteFTP browser based app for server file management. I thought he was better acquainted with back end stuff than I am, but apparently not. 

At the time we got started with the web server, I hadn't checked he knew about backups or made this part of his discipline when it came to managing his own web based publications. So, I feel as if I am partly responsible if this glitch turns into a catastrophic failure, and Owain loses the past three years of blogging output.

Part of my evolution as a computer user meant that twelve years ago, all my data was kept on hardware which lived with me, some of which, if needed on-line, would be 'backed up' to the web server. My, how things have changed with the advent of Cloud based computing in the past five years. I still keep hardware backups of everything, and that's a bit of an effort when Windows 10 with OneDrive is the ever so handy default. I'm still reluctant to entrust my entire digital life to web storage. If things can go wrong they may well do, sooner or later. And there's also the threat of getting hacked, and ransomware attacks out there to insure against as well.

I'm crossing my fingers this'll be easily resolved. It's taught me another lesson about being those who seek my help and advice about computing matters both understand and are properly informed. There are some good aspects of this troublesome situation, however. It's the first time anything has gone wrong for Owain with his blog since he got started. This shows how reliable, easy and user friendly it has become to make and run a custom website. Also, he now has the motivation and need to know more about troubleshooting and tackling server issues when his helpful techie friends are un-contactable. But it's not over until it's over!