Syncing and sandals

This morning, I took Clare to catch a train to take her to Coventry and a weekend looking after Rhiannon, while Kath and Anto travel north and east into Lincolnshire for the last of their back to back Rural Touring gigs with Sonrisa. She's now added Instagram to the band's Twitter account, and posts photos from the towns the visit, and when they're setting up. Good publicity, naturally, but also a pleasure for the family to see where they are working away. 

I stayed at home for much of the day, as there was nothing much I could contribute to the radio distribution now in full swing, until there's a pile of equipment receipts to supply more information to key into the new database. The efforts of the last few days intense concentration left me feeling quite drained and in need of respite. And there was still the OneDrive sync problem to puzzle over. It was late afternoon when the penny finally dropped, and I was running the same routine on my home computer. As ever it was was something trivial and quite misleading. The file being worked on, ostensibly within a web browser, was downloading and being opened from the hard drive and saved to 'Downloads'. Thanks to the speediness of the particular machine in use, this routine could be done without noticing where exactly the file was opening and saving from. On a slower machine this was visible.

I went down to the office and found no fewer than eight copies of the data file in 'Downloads', the result of repeated attempts by both Julie and I to ascertain how the update was not taking place as expected. Just one of them was slightly larger than the others, the first downloaded version worked on fully up to date. What a relief! Restoring this to its proper place on 'OneDrive' was trivial, as was texting Julie a brief explanation of what neither of us had noticed or understood. So we learn the hard way that while some files can easily open and close and be worked on in a browser, others cannot. The expectation isn't transferable, and the necessary cautious alertness easily forgotten if you're distracted or in a hurry.

While I was out in town, I bought a pair of Ecco sandals, having had such a comfortable experience with their walking shoes, bought a a couple of months ago. They fitted like a glove. When I went to Nerja on locum duty this time last year, I forgot to pack sandals and bought a chunky comfortable pair for a decent price in a town shoe shop. I started wearing them again a few weeks ago, once the weather warmed up enough, but discovered very soon that the hollow interior of both heels had caved in, and I was traipsing dirt in the house that had been caught in the cavities. They weren't yet uncomfortable to notice the failure for any other reason, but they had to be consigned to the bin, along with another older pair whose heel bases had collapsed rendering them unwearable, which had until now not been thrown out. A third pair also emerged that was unbroken, but they weren't comfortable enough for distance walking, only for popping down the beach. So I was pleased to be pushed into making the effort to acquire a really durable sturdy pair, which could last me several years, for a change.

In the evening, I watched with special interest the programme on Vienna in Rick Stein's 'Long Weekends' series. As a fan of Mediterranean cuisine, I find it all a bit too much 'mean & two veg' for my liking. Nor do the cake and chocolate side of things appeal that much. The white wine is much praised however, Weiner Gemischter Satz, grown on 700 hectares of land within the city's boundaries, made with several grape varieties planted and grown in a mixture in the same field rather than separately and then blended. This relies on the terroir as the French call it, the soil and the setting of vineyard, rather than the character of the grapes. No doubt centuries of experience in choosing the right varietals to take advantage of soil qualities makes for a praiseworthy product. It's something to look forward to.
  

Digital providence

This afternoon, we went to Newport to call on Martin, whose mother Jane died during the week. We've known them both since I was first ordained and working in Caerphilly, forty six years ago, so there was much to reflect upon together after her long life.

On the way there, we called at Maplins, and bought a hard drive USB dock to send to Kath to use to retrieve stray file data from the hard drive of her defunct laptop, which hadn't been backed up lately. It seems she has insufficient OneDrive capacity for all her files, much of which are music or graphics and photos, so just to be sure nothing's lost, the drive needs time spent on scrupulous inspection.

For the most part, however, she was operating normally once the configuration of her new Acer was complete. The only missing piece in the restoration equation however, was Corel Draw. It had worked perfectly, installed on her old machine under Windows 7, and had been working since upgrade to Windows 10 but wouldn't install from scratch on the new machine, even though installing a 32bit program on a 64bit machine should not be a problem.

Yesterday afternoon in the office, I'd spent ages going through the diagnostic process and attempting a 32bit install in the manner which Windows 10 provides. This had worked last week for installing MS Office 2000. Corel Draw, however, has built in redundancy. Anto had similar problems with a costly multiple CD replicating device. It ran on an XP machine but not Windows 7. The company refused to provide new drivers for old hardware, so he kept running his XP machine until earlier this week, when Kath configured an unused Windows 7 PC to avoid reliability issues from an even older piece of kit. The XP machine will now be used only for CD printing. It runs Corel Draw, but oh so slowly!

Then serendipity threw up a surprise for Kath. Working out in the gym, she was chatting to someone about her computer woes, and mentioning her helpful geek of a father, when she was offered a Core i3 Acer laptop for her Dad to see if he could fix, by someone who'd decided to move over to a Mac rather than pay to repair a machine whose Windows 7 operating system had failed. The hardware seems to be working and if it is merely a software matter, I may be able to restore it to full use. Kath can install Corel Draw on it, and keep it on hand for whenever she needs to do some designing.
  

Arts support

Today, I spent the morning writing at home, and the afternoon in the office. While I was there I had a panic stricken call from Kath, saying that she'd just tipped some coffee over her computer, and there'd been a little spark ... exactly what happened to me last autumn. In just the same way, she could hear the hard drive still spinning, and the screen was blank, but she was unable to switch off the machine, and had to take out the battery. All are indications of a circuitry failure, dead by any other name. 

As it was her work machine, she was much distressed about what to do next. Thankfully most of her stuff is backed up to OneDrive, and a supplementary hard drive. Since she's a performing artist, running her Wriggledance children's theater project on a shoestring budget, I couldn't resist offering to pay for a new machine, and sent her off to Staples to buy the same model Acer E510 as I acquired for my sister June last autumn, confident that it has the speed, capacity and good keyboard, as well as a decent price. 

After work, I walked over to St German's for the Stations of the Cross. There were ten of us present again. As it was slightly warmer in church, we were able to sit together for slightly longer before the reserved sacrament in silent adoration for the fifteenth station of the Resurrection. I hope that in the coming weeks, it'll just just a little bit warmer, to enable us to sit for just a little longer. In this era of hyperactivity, places where silent adoration in a group is regularly practiced are fewer. Joining in with the Franciscan Missionary Sisters in Taormina for their daily Holy Hour before Vespers, when I was there three years ago, made a strong impression on me. It's not often there's an opportunity to share this with others, these days.
   

More on connectivity

Monday afternoon, I went into town, and hunted for a new office PC, in John Lewis and PC world, but didn't find what I was looking for. All in One HP desktops with touch screens are now retail flavour of the month. We don't need the touch interface for work purposes. An hour in the office re-examining the Cloud file sync problem, revealed that as long as you log in with proper MS Account details every time rather than an alias username and password, there's no problem. When Windows Update requires a system re-start, logging in with an alias won't deliver synchronisation. There's no warning. Get into the habit of accessing using an alias, your files get saved on your machine and local network, but not in the Cloud. It's obvious, but not obvious. There are so many useless bells and whistles to annoy Windows users, but a helpfully placed notification here would lower resentment and blood pressure levels.

Tuesday, I was going to extend my hunt for a new office PC, but as I was about to leave, Mary, our neighbour came over and asked if I could come and check her PC, as something was stopping her from accessing her emails, and she thought she'd done something wrong. She has an old slowish XP machine and was exercise by the thought of having inadvertently disconnected it from the router, but wasn't sure how to check this. Physically it was fine. The error messages were all of the 'network not found' type, and compounded by a confusing browser install of AVG 'Safe Search', which detracted from the simple browser set up she was used to. The problem didn't show immediately until I re-booted the router. No broadband. After Clare joined us for a cup of tea, the red light on the router had turned blue again, and all was back to normal. Back at home, I learned about an inexplicable spate of BT broadband outages across the country during the day. Not linked to any cyber attack. Is the weather, sunspots or what?

Earlier in the day I spent a couple of hours thinking about doing another daily Lenten blog. Last year's was quite demanding to sustain but worth the bible study and mental exercise it entailed. This time, I'd like to write about the venture of prayer, especially bearing in mind that I'm currently working with a newly baptized Christian convert. He is coming to Lenten activity afresh, a first time experience, both of prayer and participation in Liturgy. I have to keep Hamid in mind as I write, even if his English is far from adequate to understand what I write. On a one to one basis ideas can be communicated more simply than they can in writing.

I enjoyed my double class of Chi Gung and Tai Chi this evening, and wasn't nearly as tired at the end of it. So much so, that I set up a new blog page and wrote for an hour, in readiness for the weeks to come.
     

Cloud data near disaster

This morning, I took the car into our local Kwikfit workshop on my way to celebrate the midweek Eucharist in St John's Canton. Father Mark arrived before me to prepare things before slipping away on an errand of his own. It's the first time I've seen him since the Spring, so I was glad to have a few moments to catch up with him.I was relieved that the exhaust adjustment was successful, so the car is altogether pleasant to drive once more.

To my horror, when I got home I had a message from Julie in the office today that the office OneDrive filesystem seemed to be missing six months worth of documents. Oh dear, something I did when tidying up her machine yesterday had evidently unintended consequences. An office visit and a joint investigation thankfully provided us with a way to roll back the filesystem to its state when she last worked on it, although it took us ages to find this. The trouble was that the Windows 10 upgrade from a machine running Windows 7 had left us with multiple OneDrive icons (deep down one or other had been originally a SkyDrive icon, before the name was changed). 

I had been suspicious that older machines with this kind of history weren't syncing properly, as I'd seen this at home. I deleted what I thought was a short cut, when it was File Explorer's main route of access to the on-line files. The other OneDrive icon was a shortcut to a copy of the file system (where it lives, I know not where) six months old. Windows 10 is meant to give you a hard drive filesystem copy of data in the Cloud, to sync for off-line use. If you access OneDrive files from any machine, as you might from a Network hard drive in the office, using a web browser and be sure to save to this location, there's no problem. But, when different machines are in use, and saving stuff off line on the machine to sync with the Cloud later, this seems create version control problems, with the risk that some stuff will get lost. Glad we haven't stopped backing up filesystem to a physical hard drive close to home. After that little incident, OneDrive now has to re-earn my trust

The news from Papworth is that Eddie is holding his own, recovering very slowly from surgery, still heavily sedated if not unconscious, and ventilated. A visit to the hospital is planned for tomorrow.

 

Windows 10 comes home

A sunny Friday morning started with a computer notification that the Windows 10 upgrade was ready for installation – eight days after the new operating system was launched. So, around eleven, I clicked go, then went off to my GP appointment. Thankfully the blood pressure was what it should be again. What it was like at the end of this day, I didn't bother to check, but I imagine it'd be high in the light of what I now report.

The upgrade took about an hour on a machine only a little slower than my office PC, but took another quarter of an hour to configure to my requirements. Again, all installed programs run nicely, the Edge browser is still a fiddle to set up for my default choices, but this time expected.
 

I started writing my Sunday sermon on another Windows 8.1 machine, my little underpowered travel portable, and it soon gave me an installation notification, but when I clicked on it, downloading the upgrade hadn't finished. An hour later, it changed its mind and let me start. Again this took about an hour and a quarter to get to a state usability, except for one thing.

Internet access speeds on standard consumer 2mb/sec broadband connection plummeted to the point where it took a minute or two to access any new page. Other wi-fi devices in the house were also crippled, and even the phone signal booster struggled to deliver the consistent in-house signal we've got used to relying on. The reason? One Drive was busy syncing 8GB worth of files with both Windows 10 computers entirely from scratch. In fact, when the second sync started, the first stopped in its tracks, and could only be re-started once the other finished. 

The sync process notification said that files were downloading from OneDrive. I was mystified by this, as previously in Windows 8.1, a personal filesystem was uploaded to the internet and disappeared the machine. If you wanted to save work in progress to tackle when off-line, you had to hide it where OneDrive wouldn't whisk it away. This time, when the syncing stopped, after four or five hours, I discovered that all my files had been returned to the hard drive and now could be accessed off-line. Or so it says!

While this initial syncing process was going on, it seemed to consume most of the available bandwidth, to the point that other network attached devices were, for most purposes, apart from receiving notifications, un-useable. Like a denial of service attack, but in effect a provision of service sucking up all the capacity of the system.

It was so bad that when, later in the afternoon, during the sync-fest, I sought to retrieve my half prepared sermon from OneDrive, it wouldn't deliver, as pages were loading so slow they timed out. Finally, after more long waits, my trusty Linux Mint six year old Dell machine managed to slip through the traffic stream and deliver me vital file. Then I was able to complete the sermon off-line and print. It then took several attempts to upload the edited file to OneDrive. 

This may be a one off experience to do with upgrading. It won't much affect people with fast broadband, but anyone with ordinary broadband speed is going to be confounded by the experience, wishing they'd never bothered to upgrade.  In essence the upgrade is a seamless experience, apart from this issue, which is a stumbling block for those unwarned.

What I have been reminded of by this waste of a day is not to rely totally on any Cloud based service or application. Great for back-up, or file sharing, sure, but today's experience reduced fancy new Windows 10 to an offering no better or worse than a Chromebook, and brought the household to a halt.

Admittedly we're running a lot of connected devices on our domestic broadband service. Four wired devices and six to eight wi-fi devices are attached at any time, but most are just idling. Any massive file download is going to disrupt. So, it's time to pay extra for more capacity, and switch to a fibre optic system. Cable has been in the street for over a decade, and the BT cabinet around the corner has boasted of being upgraded for the past two years. 

It may be a long time before we have such a diminished service again, but truth to tell, we're now so dependent on seamless delivery, it's hard to cope with such disruption. Are we right to be so heavily reliant on internet connectedness? Days like this seem to suggest untold disasters if things ever go wrong on the macro scale.
 

Windows 10 comes to CBS

Today has been spent in the CBS office again, working on a job description to drive recruitment for the appointment of a Business Crime Reduction Manager for the city centre. The job will take on many of the Partnership functions we've been carrying and developing over the past six years. It's been quite a revelation to review all the minor activities generated by our work, making up the total picture, like camera pixels

First thing, my office PC, being the newest, fastest and most capable of taking advantage of the faster office broadband link, announced it was ready for the Windows 10 upgrade. True to the Microsoft promise, the upgrade took an hour, and left every program I installed working properly. Just as well, as I needed to be able to put it to use immediately. It'll take a few days to read the reviews and try out all the new features, however.

Ashley and I had a first meeting this morning with the new Brains area manager, who has been invited to be a BCRP Board member. Another element of much needed progress in developing the public face of the organisation is now in place. On the the way back to the office, we bought a new Acer 23" desktop PC for Ashley in John Lewis', to replace his six year old Vista laptop. In the business realm, the value of equipment like this decreases to virtually nothing, even though it works adequately. Everything else works well enough with new cloud based services, but older kit can struggle a bit for lack of processing power, or a not fast enough network hardware on board

I say 'works well enough', as Windows 10 re-synchronises the whole of our OneDrive file system as if it had never happened before, and it proved annoyingly slow. Working files saved, so others could access them, took an hour or so to show up and be accessible from another machine's file menu. Curiously however, OneDrive accessed from a browser found the files immediately. With millions of computers re-syncing with their Cloud drives on any given day after upgrading, it seems to me we can expect a period when file access from the desktop filesystem is less than efficient.

Still, that's number one machine updated. I wonder how long I will have to wait before Windows 10 is ready to install on any of my home machines?

Information age issues

Yesterday morning, an email arrived saying that my verified identity documents had been received by diocese in Europe child protection officer, and that now I could complete the application on-line, through the Churches Agency for Safeguarding website, something of a change from the last time I applied five years ago. Thankfully, the process was simple and user friendly, and ended with a confirmation of reception registration number, allowing the enquiry to be tracked if needs be.

In the morning post was a set of application forms for the Church in Wales CRB check. The older paper process is still used by the Provincial child protection office. I believe the reason for this isn't that the Church is Wales lags behind in technological labour saving devices, but because the automated enquiry cannot be carried out in Welsh - something I noticed when I logged into the CAS website. A bilingual church has its own values and priorities to maintain, and this may require a different way of engaging with a necessary process.

I wrote in my Lenten blog on Sunday on clouds in scripture, and the contrast between the image of the 'cloud of unknowing' reflecting the common experience of how cloud obscures all we think we know, and the marketing image of the internet Cloud as the ultimate receptacle of information and knowledge. Such a remarkable change has occurred since I retired. The user friendliness of interactive services delivered by the internet has improved vastly, shopping, banking, video and audio entertainment, travel booking, tax payment, CRB checks increasingly 'just work'. 

Personal productivity tools which were once a necessity on everyone's PC can now be used freely from the internet, courtesy of Microsoft One Drive or Google Drive and other services providing data storage and apps. All depends upon having an internet connection and a device that can be used for access, and that's a different story to what it was a few years ago, with phones and tablets now as powerful as a desktop machine, albeit, not quite so easy as a proper sized physical keyboard. But, there are still limitations, not least confidence in the continuity of this vast and elaborate electronic construct.

While writing this my internet connection, twice as fast as when I retired, and still the cheapest offer from TalkTalk has temporarily disconnected half a dozen times, and then stalled the router altogether. Using my Chromebook on this occasion resulted in losing the final part of my text. Despite caution in copying and saving before rebooting stalled router and Chromebook, the fully saved text was nowhere to be found, and the internal SSD is certainly not full. It a clever Cloud device, but not that clever. I'm not clever for trusting it, knowing how flaky my connection can be.

Admittedly, much more is required of our channel of communication to the internet now than three years ago. Three computers, two tablets, three smartphones, the phone signal booster, and the YouView internet TV box could occasionally all be running at the same time, and their connected data streams competing to communicate with the world outside the house.

It's not long since we had only a third of that number of devices connected. That's bound to make a difference. However much basic and essential service capacity is improved, however much we benefit from them, it's likely that demand will continue to outstrip supply. If I pay extra for a faster service, what guarantee will there be of improvement, as more devices are made requiring on-line access? Connectivity limitations have consequences for all development. It will remain a political, economic and social issue until the next paradigm shift in global communication occurs.

We're being warned that technological development has bred an obsolescence in hardware and storage media which puts at risk vast amounts of early digital data because it becomes unreadable, either due to deterioration of the media, or the breakdown of irreplaceable equipment used to read it. In addition to this is the long standing issue of file format incompatibility bred by unhealthy business competitiveness between software producers. Universally readable file formats are now becoming more widespread in their acceptance, but this can still be problematic for reading historic data and documents, so there is a double risk of loss.

Written information about life in ancient times exists because of the way records were kept. Although a great deal has undoubtedly been lost over millennia, new investigative material keeps on turning up. Thanks to forensic archaeological techniques more is discovered about our past. Understood better than ever today is how vital good data about anything is. Data retention needs future proofing, so that our generation aren't dubbed the problem ancestors who, despite themselves were careless about how they kept records. Thankfully, there is growing collaboration in the effort to find long term solutions to these problems, and hopefully the historic impulse to competitiveness can be be transformed into a desire to excel for the common good, if not for the glory of God.