Wow. I've had these thoughts as well, though thankfully haven't had to deal with these issues at my work. I have a legitimate fear that everything I've written will someday disappear, and for that reason I've thought seriously about printing it all out in book form in order to preserve it.
Also when I purchase books that I believe have historical significance relating to current events, I usually buy physical copies now (instead of eBooks, which are more convenient and easier to read) for the same reason.
I've also made this observation more than once: The smarter we think we are, the stupider we become.
Murphy’s Law has been more relevant to my life than Newton’s Law of Gravity has been.
I prefer dead tree books but shipping has gotten so high that if from overseas, which basically all English language books are, I can’t afford them, so I buy e-books.
Yes, educational achievement can lead to hubris. We need to recall that there is no such thing as an unsinkable ship.
The bad news about paper and pen, is they can be destroyed. When my stuff was destroyed last summer, my computer, my sketch pads, my pencils, pens, clothes, toiletries, were all deep sixed. I am glad I brought my phone with me, otherwise it would be deep sixed as well.
Yes, computers degrade over time, as does data, but then so does paper age. The good news about digital is it can exist in multiple places. Your house burns down, and you still have access to your photos via iCloud. And yes, while older documents lose compatibility, chances are there are workarounds to get the majority of your documents back. through backward compatibility.
Concerning MS office. I know MacHeist has a lifetime subscription to MS Office that runs from 20-50.00. Also a lot of docx can be read in Pages. Individual usability may vary.
When all my stuff got destroyed, I chose to get an older computer to replace my older computer. They would have given me a new Mac Mini, but to do so would have been more expensive. See I have apps that work on my old mac that if I get a new Mac I face the same problems you talk about. I would have to pay ridiculous subscription fees.
Most notably, I bought Adobe CS5, which is Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. all before they became subscription based. I don't want to move on because I think it is weird to "rent" tools to do work. You're not paying a subscription for a fountain pen, so why should you have to rent computer tools? I don't think you should have to.
I hate subscriptions. I'd prefer, if I have to get one, to pay for it for a year instead of each month. I do think engineers should get paid for their work, but a better way would be to either figure out maybe mini purchases or some other model than having to pay for a subscription.
Actually, none of those photographs are paper, though I do have many from the 1860s which are. The first two are glass, the third on polished iron misnamed “tintype” by modern folk. Still, far from indestructible. However, if they and paper are well cared for they will last centuries while a well cared for computer simply cannot. Nor can its data unless periodically resaved on to new devices. Yes, some data can be stored off site. However, where are your passwords? I have hard copies written out and kept in three locations in the house. However, keeping them updated has proven too big a task for me. While I had no problem with my personal email account carryover to my new iPad, my school account did not. The password I have for is not being accepted, so I hope the school can let me know what it is.
Offsite storage also can increase the risk of data theft. To steal sensitive documents in the past required a physical break in and searching for and finding the correct files in a locked filing cabinet. Now, massive data breeches are now an almost daily news item.
Another facet is that despite all the money spent on the digital attendance systems, the teachers still have to take it by hand with pen and paper and then additionally correct the electronic record. The use of computers here just added massive expense to all involved and required much more time of the teachers.
Another factor is that in my photo loss case, with one keystroke, I lost all three copies I had of 5 months of photographs and 5 works of edits of others. That would take a fire to accomplish with my photo collection. Water could but only if they could not be dried before mildew or other mold got to them. But water and fire destroy computers too.
There are work around for some documents which are in old formats. But this is not always feasible. I have GBs worth of saved articles that are no longer readable. They can be converted, but the many times I have tried to so so, I could not convert them in bulk. Had to one at a time and I have too many to convert them all. iBooks defaulted all my documents stored in it to the “original” file names. I copy and pasted the headlines for each article as I saved it but iBooks took my whole collection and changed the titles of the files to “New York Times Article”. 1-1657. Same with all other sources. It empty all my collections too, so that’s the only way to fix it was to change each file’s name at a time and resave them to the emptied collections. If they remained in their collections as I saved them, still a monumental task but at least I could choose the topics most important at any given time. That was about 15 years ago. They still take up around 9GB of space but I are unusable. An earthquake that knocks all books off their shelves and all files out of their drawers does not change their names like iBooks did.
In reality, I do not hate computers, I just hate how we are forced to use and rely upon them. Already in dire straits financially, having to buy a new iPad Pro just 4 years after my last one is just too expensive. I would rather use my 100 year old pens but few can read cursive writing any more and all daily documents for work are electronic now. And I didn’t even bring up how the discontinued functionality of certain apps and programs have forced a change in how I was able to assess my students in the middle of a semester. Simply not a reality with printed textbooks, handouts and tests, black boards and paper and pen attendance records, unless there is a major error in the textbook requiring correction, an occurrence I have never heard of actually happening.
To me, computers should be used in supporting roles only, or for fun. After posting the post we are commenting upon, I used an AI photo editor on one of the antique photos to create modern looks for the young lady who left this life long before our parents were born. That’s fun.
Have you tried Automator for Mac, not sure if they have it for iPad, but in terms of name conversion, it might help. I think automator may be able to be programmed to open an old document, save it as another format, and also add in some way rename it as needed.
This is me offering some form of a solution, as I have had to confront some of these problems.Kim Komando is not very well versed on the Mac side of things, I think Leo Laporte was better in that department. I used to listen to his TWiT shows all the time back in 2004. He's very "narrative driven" now though. I imagine he is probably still masking.
How did you lose all those photos in one keystroke? What was the cascading casualty?
In my case, I had a similar issue I think. When I created a new disk image of a Mojave formatted disk, I did sometjing to one of the permissions, and it caused a cascading failure which led me to not be able to read or write anything using my Pages app. So eventually I had to destroy whatever new files I had and do a reformat. Is that you mean?
While offsite storage can increase change of theft, the same can be said for stuff you leave in an unlocked house. Criminals tend to be lazy, so yes, they could steal your stuff, but more often than not, they would rather hold it hostage with ransomware. What would they care about my pictures of being in Jamaica as a kid?
With all the talk of paperless society, it doesn't look like its going to happen completely.
The format problem with the articles and losing all those photos were some of the many reasons I left Windows for Mac.. Now all those articles are stuck in external hard drives that I can not access with my Mac.. Years ago now, I had a device called “Wormhole”. It allowed for a descent transfer of all files from my windows machine to my Mac.. I would load up the Toshiba with files from the external hard discs and transfer them to my Mac.. took time and If I recall, I couldn’t do anything else while it was in operation. I got busy and was unable to get back to this task for an extended period. When I did, the wormhole was no longer compatible with my Mac.. They no longer make them and I could not find anything that would do the same.
The cascading casualty occurred when I had several external hard disc connected to my PC. I had rune out of space and was consolidating files when a brand new external hard disc failed. I thus lost all the data on it. No worries, thought I, I have it all backed up on another hard disc and my computer. I wrote down the names of each of the hard discs and took the dead one, named “H”, back to the computer store. They did not believe me and were shocked to see it was indeed dead when they tried it out. They gave me a new one. Plugging it in, I got a message stating they herd disc “H” required formatting. I didn’t think this particular model required formatting, but I guessed that was what caused it to fail, so I formatted it. Doing so, I ended up with two empty hard discs. My PC changed the names of my hard drives and I reformatted the wrong one. Have no idea why it told me any of them needed formatting. In all this, I lost all the data on two external hard drives and the same data that was on my computer. I have no idea how that happened but guess some of the data must have been corrupted causing all copies of the same data to be deleted. I do not put much stock in this explanation, though it is my own, I simply have no idea how it happened and tried to come up with reason.
I can share your pain on this. One of my external hard drives, that I never backed up, was destroyed. That was the main source of my despair last summer. Thankfully, much of my client work was backed on on the freelancing platform I used. But personal projects, and variations on client projects were all gone.
That's the bad news. The good news is that I still have writing from the late eighties from my first macs that used macWrite. It was a completely different format, but I believe in my case I had a conversion program I used to convert the documents into text edit documents, and then transfer them to new pages documents.
It sounds to me like you had somehow gotten a hard drive corruption error not necessarily of the files themselves, but of the file directory. That means that the files were still there, it is just that your computer lost the ability to find them. I know on macs we have disk utility that can rebuild a file directory, and there are also third party apps that do the same thing. Not sure if Norton or another program does the same thing on the PC.
Sometimes files can survive despite an erase and format...as long as you don't write over the data.
Spent weeks with various recovery programs. Recovered some but not all. They all crashed after recovering a specific amount of files. Rerunning them eventually recovered the same files each I reran them but few of the ones they hadn’t before. I ended up with 12 copies of some all the way down to not being recovered. Still plagued by too many copies of files.
Up until that point, I was a prolific amateur photographer. I carried my big DSLR with me all the time. Took all kinds of photos and then spent a lot of time editing them. That leads to another horror story that if I relate, I will do so later. Losing 5 moths of photos as taken and all the edits I did over the same period was the first of two big blows that killed my enthusiasm for photography and editing.
I still shoot and edit but nowhere at the scale I used to. I also have a negative scanner and kept scanning my negatives right up until the panic. Haven’t been able to since as my wife uses the same room to work from. It is too noisy, especially for Zoom meetings. I have to use my Windows 7 machine to run that scanner. Haven’t even plugged that in these past 4 years.
Ages old problem, I was lucky to graduate from college before computers became commonplace.
Oh, with the latest software, user accounts, computer hardware, subscriptions, it is going to be easier, yes, sure, unless you are the one with a problem. In college, I remember using an extension cord to get my commodore calculator through the exam. Today, a student wanting to do the same might be expelled. Yes, all the answers to the question are to be found in the power line!
I was in college when they were first becoming common. I actually used my mom’s typewriter for most of my work but had to use a computer for some classes later on. Couldn’t afford one then but the school had many computer labs. Netscape was the browser they used.
Isn’t that insane, how the power cord can have data in it? Now I have to find a way to determine if my students are using AI to do their homework.
Simple, use AI to determine it. Who cares if the response in inaccurate, it is AI. It can't be wrong until it is. Seriously, and who even thought up the power cord thing, and then did it, the CIA, anyway you are on the verge of becoming a non-person. You have already been investigated, judged, and found to not have enough earning potential left to warrant another chance, and that is why you are being discarded by the system. Now the people in charge haven't figured this out yet, they will force you to get a new email and attempt to set you up for a fourth account, then a fifth, sixth, and so forth.
There was a bumper sticker years ago, college time as I remember. It Stated:
GIVE: To support the helpless victims of COMPUTER ERROR
“GIVE: To support the helpless victims of COMPUTER ERROR”. I do not recall seeing this but it is on target. COMPUTER ERROR Caused my college to lose all track of me ever having set foot on the campus each and every semester. I was relating this and more to a coworker who graduated when the one piece of paper the issued with your schedule was your only proof of enrollment in classes. He said it so much better with computers because he once lost his and it took a full two weeks to sort out. I cried out, “TWO WEEKS!?. TWO WEEKS!?. I’d give my left arm if I could solve my records problem in two weeks. I have been unable to get credit for my time at my school’s overseas campus for TWO AND A HALF YEARS! I am having to repay student loans while still attended class because the system thinks I was not enrolled for a foul year. TWO WEEKS!? O N L Y TWO WEEKS? Try two and a half YEARS and paying off loans.” He never spoke to me again. Doubt he changed his view on the wonderfulness of computer based recordkeeping.
I believe this is the genesis of my distrust and eventual hate of how we use computers.
I do. Though I did not know that there was still a budget item for it, but that does not surprise me in the least. While in the navy, I was supply PO for my division for a while. We still have “Headlamp, 1934 Ford” in the supply chain. Not really the same but the mentality is.
I remember in a college class when we were discussing the US budget and how we could save so much simply by including a “sunset clause” in the budgeting as once appropriations are made, they never, ever cease. Then, on my own, I learned that the congress violates the law every year for many years and do not even debate a budget, they illegally vote on a continuing resolution to continue the budget as it was passed many a year ago with a certain percentage increase across the board.
Better, yes. Preparing to carry mikoshi for a tiny shrine that I have photographed for around 30 years that in near where I studied a life time ago. Stranger/better still, will do so with my wife and kids. Gotta get up crazy early for it though, of which I am apprehensive.
It is not easy to compare naval ratings with land based, civilian trades. Ships are confined environments that require all crew members to perform tasks that do not for the direct translations of the ratings. You would be a snipe, like me, aboard ship. “Snipes” are the ship board engineers. Snipes come in two broad varieties, “Pit snipes” and “A Gangers”. The “Pit” aka the “Hole” is where the propulsion machinery is: in my my case the boilers and steam turbines. A gangers are in the “Auxiliaries division” and operate and maintain the auxiliary engineering equipment. As I type this, I am thinking that while both Boiler Technicians (BT) and Machinist’s Mates (MM) can be pit snipes, and Machinery Repairmen (MR), Electrician”s Mates (EM) and Damage Control Men (DC) are all A gangers, only MMs can be either pit or A gang snipes. If memory servers, BTs were not in the A Gang. I am not sure about Gas Turbine Specialists (GS), but they are certainly engine room snipes but can they also be A gangers? I think so but do not know for certain. OH! Diesel Men can be either.
Mrs are the inside machinists. Had a great relationship with those guys.
As a Machinist’s Mate , I was an outside machinist, plant operator, ship board fire fighter, damage control first responder, for lack of a better term, pipe fittin’, deck sweeping, deck swabbin’, deck buffin’, needle gunnin’, wire wheelin’, paint chippin’ jack of all trades, master of none. Basically, if wasn’t electrical or flew, I have probably did some work on it.
I was a lucky man, happen to be brought to emergency with one of the greatest neurosurgeons in the country on call, and he put me back together and kept me out of a wheelchair. The same doc that put Shiela E back together.
Ah. Ty for that. Well I started in Kodak and a machinist, having gone through an apprenticeship, they wanted pipe fitters so I said ok and went through that apprenticeship. Then got in the power plant, as operator. Worked my way up to first stationary engineer, and then they want me to go through electrical high voltage apprenticeship, so I did. Throughout this I became a certified welder with multiple certs, and then I broke my neck at work. So they fired me. That’s what they did with badly injured employees. So I went to work for all the companies that contracted to Kodak. Funny how that works.
Well, Apple is very well known for their planned obsolescence and their wanton abandon when it comes to replacing 'old' interfaces with 'new' interfaces. But, point taken.
Personally, I've never used and never will use an 'Office app' unless explicitly required by a third-party. BBCode or MarkDown work perfectly fine for simple text, and LaTeX covers the rest.
Any books I like are bought or printed in physical format; and anything digital of worth at the very least has incremental backups locally and somewhere at least a couple km away. Preferably with some form of revision metadata attached.
Although, I don't think the loss of data is as much of a risk as drowning in data.
Wow. I've had these thoughts as well, though thankfully haven't had to deal with these issues at my work. I have a legitimate fear that everything I've written will someday disappear, and for that reason I've thought seriously about printing it all out in book form in order to preserve it.
Also when I purchase books that I believe have historical significance relating to current events, I usually buy physical copies now (instead of eBooks, which are more convenient and easier to read) for the same reason.
I've also made this observation more than once: The smarter we think we are, the stupider we become.
All great reasons to just pull the damn plug.
Murphy’s Law has been more relevant to my life than Newton’s Law of Gravity has been.
I prefer dead tree books but shipping has gotten so high that if from overseas, which basically all English language books are, I can’t afford them, so I buy e-books.
Yes, educational achievement can lead to hubris. We need to recall that there is no such thing as an unsinkable ship.
The bad news about paper and pen, is they can be destroyed. When my stuff was destroyed last summer, my computer, my sketch pads, my pencils, pens, clothes, toiletries, were all deep sixed. I am glad I brought my phone with me, otherwise it would be deep sixed as well.
Yes, computers degrade over time, as does data, but then so does paper age. The good news about digital is it can exist in multiple places. Your house burns down, and you still have access to your photos via iCloud. And yes, while older documents lose compatibility, chances are there are workarounds to get the majority of your documents back. through backward compatibility.
Concerning MS office. I know MacHeist has a lifetime subscription to MS Office that runs from 20-50.00. Also a lot of docx can be read in Pages. Individual usability may vary.
When all my stuff got destroyed, I chose to get an older computer to replace my older computer. They would have given me a new Mac Mini, but to do so would have been more expensive. See I have apps that work on my old mac that if I get a new Mac I face the same problems you talk about. I would have to pay ridiculous subscription fees.
Most notably, I bought Adobe CS5, which is Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. all before they became subscription based. I don't want to move on because I think it is weird to "rent" tools to do work. You're not paying a subscription for a fountain pen, so why should you have to rent computer tools? I don't think you should have to.
I hate subscriptions. I'd prefer, if I have to get one, to pay for it for a year instead of each month. I do think engineers should get paid for their work, but a better way would be to either figure out maybe mini purchases or some other model than having to pay for a subscription.
Maybe provide a la carte functionality.
Actually, none of those photographs are paper, though I do have many from the 1860s which are. The first two are glass, the third on polished iron misnamed “tintype” by modern folk. Still, far from indestructible. However, if they and paper are well cared for they will last centuries while a well cared for computer simply cannot. Nor can its data unless periodically resaved on to new devices. Yes, some data can be stored off site. However, where are your passwords? I have hard copies written out and kept in three locations in the house. However, keeping them updated has proven too big a task for me. While I had no problem with my personal email account carryover to my new iPad, my school account did not. The password I have for is not being accepted, so I hope the school can let me know what it is.
Offsite storage also can increase the risk of data theft. To steal sensitive documents in the past required a physical break in and searching for and finding the correct files in a locked filing cabinet. Now, massive data breeches are now an almost daily news item.
Another facet is that despite all the money spent on the digital attendance systems, the teachers still have to take it by hand with pen and paper and then additionally correct the electronic record. The use of computers here just added massive expense to all involved and required much more time of the teachers.
Another factor is that in my photo loss case, with one keystroke, I lost all three copies I had of 5 months of photographs and 5 works of edits of others. That would take a fire to accomplish with my photo collection. Water could but only if they could not be dried before mildew or other mold got to them. But water and fire destroy computers too.
There are work around for some documents which are in old formats. But this is not always feasible. I have GBs worth of saved articles that are no longer readable. They can be converted, but the many times I have tried to so so, I could not convert them in bulk. Had to one at a time and I have too many to convert them all. iBooks defaulted all my documents stored in it to the “original” file names. I copy and pasted the headlines for each article as I saved it but iBooks took my whole collection and changed the titles of the files to “New York Times Article”. 1-1657. Same with all other sources. It empty all my collections too, so that’s the only way to fix it was to change each file’s name at a time and resave them to the emptied collections. If they remained in their collections as I saved them, still a monumental task but at least I could choose the topics most important at any given time. That was about 15 years ago. They still take up around 9GB of space but I are unusable. An earthquake that knocks all books off their shelves and all files out of their drawers does not change their names like iBooks did.
In reality, I do not hate computers, I just hate how we are forced to use and rely upon them. Already in dire straits financially, having to buy a new iPad Pro just 4 years after my last one is just too expensive. I would rather use my 100 year old pens but few can read cursive writing any more and all daily documents for work are electronic now. And I didn’t even bring up how the discontinued functionality of certain apps and programs have forced a change in how I was able to assess my students in the middle of a semester. Simply not a reality with printed textbooks, handouts and tests, black boards and paper and pen attendance records, unless there is a major error in the textbook requiring correction, an occurrence I have never heard of actually happening.
To me, computers should be used in supporting roles only, or for fun. After posting the post we are commenting upon, I used an AI photo editor on one of the antique photos to create modern looks for the young lady who left this life long before our parents were born. That’s fun.
Have you tried Automator for Mac, not sure if they have it for iPad, but in terms of name conversion, it might help. I think automator may be able to be programmed to open an old document, save it as another format, and also add in some way rename it as needed.
This is me offering some form of a solution, as I have had to confront some of these problems.Kim Komando is not very well versed on the Mac side of things, I think Leo Laporte was better in that department. I used to listen to his TWiT shows all the time back in 2004. He's very "narrative driven" now though. I imagine he is probably still masking.
How did you lose all those photos in one keystroke? What was the cascading casualty?
In my case, I had a similar issue I think. When I created a new disk image of a Mojave formatted disk, I did sometjing to one of the permissions, and it caused a cascading failure which led me to not be able to read or write anything using my Pages app. So eventually I had to destroy whatever new files I had and do a reformat. Is that you mean?
While offsite storage can increase change of theft, the same can be said for stuff you leave in an unlocked house. Criminals tend to be lazy, so yes, they could steal your stuff, but more often than not, they would rather hold it hostage with ransomware. What would they care about my pictures of being in Jamaica as a kid?
With all the talk of paperless society, it doesn't look like its going to happen completely.
The format problem with the articles and losing all those photos were some of the many reasons I left Windows for Mac.. Now all those articles are stuck in external hard drives that I can not access with my Mac.. Years ago now, I had a device called “Wormhole”. It allowed for a descent transfer of all files from my windows machine to my Mac.. I would load up the Toshiba with files from the external hard discs and transfer them to my Mac.. took time and If I recall, I couldn’t do anything else while it was in operation. I got busy and was unable to get back to this task for an extended period. When I did, the wormhole was no longer compatible with my Mac.. They no longer make them and I could not find anything that would do the same.
The cascading casualty occurred when I had several external hard disc connected to my PC. I had rune out of space and was consolidating files when a brand new external hard disc failed. I thus lost all the data on it. No worries, thought I, I have it all backed up on another hard disc and my computer. I wrote down the names of each of the hard discs and took the dead one, named “H”, back to the computer store. They did not believe me and were shocked to see it was indeed dead when they tried it out. They gave me a new one. Plugging it in, I got a message stating they herd disc “H” required formatting. I didn’t think this particular model required formatting, but I guessed that was what caused it to fail, so I formatted it. Doing so, I ended up with two empty hard discs. My PC changed the names of my hard drives and I reformatted the wrong one. Have no idea why it told me any of them needed formatting. In all this, I lost all the data on two external hard drives and the same data that was on my computer. I have no idea how that happened but guess some of the data must have been corrupted causing all copies of the same data to be deleted. I do not put much stock in this explanation, though it is my own, I simply have no idea how it happened and tried to come up with reason.
I bought my first MacBookAir days later.
I can share your pain on this. One of my external hard drives, that I never backed up, was destroyed. That was the main source of my despair last summer. Thankfully, much of my client work was backed on on the freelancing platform I used. But personal projects, and variations on client projects were all gone.
That's the bad news. The good news is that I still have writing from the late eighties from my first macs that used macWrite. It was a completely different format, but I believe in my case I had a conversion program I used to convert the documents into text edit documents, and then transfer them to new pages documents.
It sounds to me like you had somehow gotten a hard drive corruption error not necessarily of the files themselves, but of the file directory. That means that the files were still there, it is just that your computer lost the ability to find them. I know on macs we have disk utility that can rebuild a file directory, and there are also third party apps that do the same thing. Not sure if Norton or another program does the same thing on the PC.
Sometimes files can survive despite an erase and format...as long as you don't write over the data.
Do you do photo editing?
Spent weeks with various recovery programs. Recovered some but not all. They all crashed after recovering a specific amount of files. Rerunning them eventually recovered the same files each I reran them but few of the ones they hadn’t before. I ended up with 12 copies of some all the way down to not being recovered. Still plagued by too many copies of files.
Up until that point, I was a prolific amateur photographer. I carried my big DSLR with me all the time. Took all kinds of photos and then spent a lot of time editing them. That leads to another horror story that if I relate, I will do so later. Losing 5 moths of photos as taken and all the edits I did over the same period was the first of two big blows that killed my enthusiasm for photography and editing.
I still shoot and edit but nowhere at the scale I used to. I also have a negative scanner and kept scanning my negatives right up until the panic. Haven’t been able to since as my wife uses the same room to work from. It is too noisy, especially for Zoom meetings. I have to use my Windows 7 machine to run that scanner. Haven’t even plugged that in these past 4 years.
Ages old problem, I was lucky to graduate from college before computers became commonplace.
Oh, with the latest software, user accounts, computer hardware, subscriptions, it is going to be easier, yes, sure, unless you are the one with a problem. In college, I remember using an extension cord to get my commodore calculator through the exam. Today, a student wanting to do the same might be expelled. Yes, all the answers to the question are to be found in the power line!
I was in college when they were first becoming common. I actually used my mom’s typewriter for most of my work but had to use a computer for some classes later on. Couldn’t afford one then but the school had many computer labs. Netscape was the browser they used.
Isn’t that insane, how the power cord can have data in it? Now I have to find a way to determine if my students are using AI to do their homework.
Simple, use AI to determine it. Who cares if the response in inaccurate, it is AI. It can't be wrong until it is. Seriously, and who even thought up the power cord thing, and then did it, the CIA, anyway you are on the verge of becoming a non-person. You have already been investigated, judged, and found to not have enough earning potential left to warrant another chance, and that is why you are being discarded by the system. Now the people in charge haven't figured this out yet, they will force you to get a new email and attempt to set you up for a fourth account, then a fifth, sixth, and so forth.
There was a bumper sticker years ago, college time as I remember. It Stated:
GIVE: To support the helpless victims of COMPUTER ERROR
“GIVE: To support the helpless victims of COMPUTER ERROR”. I do not recall seeing this but it is on target. COMPUTER ERROR Caused my college to lose all track of me ever having set foot on the campus each and every semester. I was relating this and more to a coworker who graduated when the one piece of paper the issued with your schedule was your only proof of enrollment in classes. He said it so much better with computers because he once lost his and it took a full two weeks to sort out. I cried out, “TWO WEEKS!?. TWO WEEKS!?. I’d give my left arm if I could solve my records problem in two weeks. I have been unable to get credit for my time at my school’s overseas campus for TWO AND A HALF YEARS! I am having to repay student loans while still attended class because the system thinks I was not enrolled for a foul year. TWO WEEKS!? O N L Y TWO WEEKS? Try two and a half YEARS and paying off loans.” He never spoke to me again. Doubt he changed his view on the wonderfulness of computer based recordkeeping.
I believe this is the genesis of my distrust and eventual hate of how we use computers.
Remember Y2K. You know the government still has a budget item for that, 24 years ago.
I do. Though I did not know that there was still a budget item for it, but that does not surprise me in the least. While in the navy, I was supply PO for my division for a while. We still have “Headlamp, 1934 Ford” in the supply chain. Not really the same but the mentality is.
I remember in a college class when we were discussing the US budget and how we could save so much simply by including a “sunset clause” in the budgeting as once appropriations are made, they never, ever cease. Then, on my own, I learned that the congress violates the law every year for many years and do not even debate a budget, they illegally vote on a continuing resolution to continue the budget as it was passed many a year ago with a certain percentage increase across the board.
Hi...Kitsune......Are you doing better?
Better, yes. Preparing to carry mikoshi for a tiny shrine that I have photographed for around 30 years that in near where I studied a life time ago. Stranger/better still, will do so with my wife and kids. Gotta get up crazy early for it though, of which I am apprehensive.
Thanks for asking.
I’m guessing the pit is below decks? Mm2 on drives and such?
It is not easy to compare naval ratings with land based, civilian trades. Ships are confined environments that require all crew members to perform tasks that do not for the direct translations of the ratings. You would be a snipe, like me, aboard ship. “Snipes” are the ship board engineers. Snipes come in two broad varieties, “Pit snipes” and “A Gangers”. The “Pit” aka the “Hole” is where the propulsion machinery is: in my my case the boilers and steam turbines. A gangers are in the “Auxiliaries division” and operate and maintain the auxiliary engineering equipment. As I type this, I am thinking that while both Boiler Technicians (BT) and Machinist’s Mates (MM) can be pit snipes, and Machinery Repairmen (MR), Electrician”s Mates (EM) and Damage Control Men (DC) are all A gangers, only MMs can be either pit or A gang snipes. If memory servers, BTs were not in the A Gang. I am not sure about Gas Turbine Specialists (GS), but they are certainly engine room snipes but can they also be A gangers? I think so but do not know for certain. OH! Diesel Men can be either.
Mrs are the inside machinists. Had a great relationship with those guys.
As a Machinist’s Mate , I was an outside machinist, plant operator, ship board fire fighter, damage control first responder, for lack of a better term, pipe fittin’, deck sweeping, deck swabbin’, deck buffin’, needle gunnin’, wire wheelin’, paint chippin’ jack of all trades, master of none. Basically, if wasn’t electrical or flew, I have probably did some work on it.
Funny I should have known you were an operating engineer. Same here. 20 years anyhow. The second twenty were as a pump /turbine tech. Interesting.
MM2 in the pit and O2N2 plant.
Using navy terms I don’t get. Spent 20 years in Kodak’s power plant, coal fired cogen, and 20 years repairing pumps everywhere.
I was a lucky man, happen to be brought to emergency with one of the greatest neurosurgeons in the country on call, and he put me back together and kept me out of a wheelchair. The same doc that put Shiela E back together.
Anyhow, I love steam. Something about it.
Lucky indeed! Glad for it.
One of the things that wowed me about Disney parks is that their paddle wheeler is live steam driven!
Ah. Ty for that. Well I started in Kodak and a machinist, having gone through an apprenticeship, they wanted pipe fitters so I said ok and went through that apprenticeship. Then got in the power plant, as operator. Worked my way up to first stationary engineer, and then they want me to go through electrical high voltage apprenticeship, so I did. Throughout this I became a certified welder with multiple certs, and then I broke my neck at work. So they fired me. That’s what they did with badly injured employees. So I went to work for all the companies that contracted to Kodak. Funny how that works.
Yikes! Broke your neck! At work? Therein lies a story, to be sure. Obviously, you recovered, that must be an even more compelling story.
I was a second class machinist’s mate in the engine room (throttleman) and liquid oxygen/liquid nitrogen plant.
As a machinist. Whew. Beer
Well, Apple is very well known for their planned obsolescence and their wanton abandon when it comes to replacing 'old' interfaces with 'new' interfaces. But, point taken.
Personally, I've never used and never will use an 'Office app' unless explicitly required by a third-party. BBCode or MarkDown work perfectly fine for simple text, and LaTeX covers the rest.
Any books I like are bought or printed in physical format; and anything digital of worth at the very least has incremental backups locally and somewhere at least a couple km away. Preferably with some form of revision metadata attached.
Although, I don't think the loss of data is as much of a risk as drowning in data.
https://annas-blog.org/annas-archive-containers.html
Even vast archives of data stretching back to the early 1800's only require some 100s of terabytes of storage after all.