Wednesday, March 20, 2013


All went well yesterday,  more or less. Cable television is reasonably easy to manage. The television set has become a zombie which will only operate under instructions from Richard Branson, but that’s all right as long as we can watch our programs.

It was a stressful day. My husband was working on one of the longest of his documents, 50 pages or so with more than 200 footnotes. Difficulties kept arising. The Virgin Media man needed guidance on the matter of stapling the famous cable along the sitting-room skirting. If I was ever any good at multi-tasking, I’ve lost the knack.

Later on, after Virgin Media went away, my husband finished that document and started on another, mercifully shorter. He managed to delete all the text and save the empty document back to the list. (Our antique DOS-based machine would have saved the previous edit automatically.) The machine started asking silly questions, he said, "so I gave silly answers". The proper version will still be on the hard disk of the old machine, and can be translated again into a modern format. In extremis, it could be reconstructed from the print-out. It's still a nuisance.

Today’s excitement will be the long-delayed visit to our GP in hopes of enlisting his aid in our application for a Disabled Parking Badge. By our standards, the appointment is at the crack of dawn, so I mustn’t linger here.

The weather has calmed down, although the forecast continues to promise lots of snow for eastern Scotland. I’m sort of glad. After today’s appt, we’ve got a few days clear – but I want to drive Archie from his school to the airport on Friday as he sets forth on his Easter holiday. With the weather like this, there’s no question of Strathardle – so Archie it is.

Knitting

I made a good start on the first Relax sleeve (they’re short) at the end of a long hard day yesterday. I’ll be able to try it on again when the sleeve is finished.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that Franklin has made his Craftsy class (topic to be announced). All will be revealed in about a month. Exciting!

Judy L at the Patchworktimes blog is having a Pooling Sock Yarn Challenge. The prize is a $50 gift voucher from the Loopy Ewe. All you have to do is photograph your unknit sock yarn on a March calendar page, and then submit a photograph of the finished socks by June 1. I might as well enter my soon-to-be-knit Pakokku’s.

I heard from Myrna Stahman the other day. She is involved in the production of “an e-book, with the proceeds going to support the research of Deb Robson on the Shetland breed of sheep.” She wanted to write something about Gladys Amedro and, apparently, the obituary I wrote for the Scotsman is the best if not the only source.

I heard of Amedro's death through the KnitList. I remember wondering whether there would be an obituary if I didn’t attempt it. It was fun, ringing up all those people, like a real journalist.

Time to get started on Wednesday.

4 comments:

  1. =Tamar10:56 AM

    Backups! ASAP! Get some of those large USB drives (64 gig now) or a terabyte external hard drive and back everything up. One backup is not enough. I believe the rule is "Three backups, two different forms, at least one off-site."

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  2. Anonymous12:27 PM

    I second the praise of back-ups. I believe a draft of my dissertation may still exist on 3.5-inch diskettes in a friend's freezer in Paris…

    Might Archie, or another grandchild, benefit from the Surface if it is to be cast off?
    cheers.

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  3. in WORD there is a place to setup an auto save. each version has it in a different place. but go to help and look for auto save, or auto backup. once you determine the folder in which to place the saves, you set the time (like ev 5 mins) and then you always have a recent copy in the folder. there are other tricks to find "temp files" made by word, let me know if you need them.

    as for backups - dropbox is perfect and you could have you autosave point to a folder in dropbox as well - also Mozy Home and Carbonite are the other two big vendors for online backup . each has a little app that sits in your system tray and you tell it what you want to backup (based on the space you buy per month) and how often to backup during the day and it just runs on its own. its extremely reasonable - plans start at around $10/month. and that is reasonable for insurance and peace of mind.

    most professional IT folks dont recommend external hard drives - as we say, there are three states for a hard drive - read, write and fail. online and in the cloud is the best place.

    (all data is encrypted during the uploads).

    from your knitting IT gal.

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    Replies
    1. Very many thanks for this. I will investigate OpenOffice for automatic backing-up today. I made a complete copy of everything of my husband's onto a memory stick yesterday, but I note what you say about external backups.
      We had an odd experience yesterday. I reconstituted the file my husband had lost, and he started working on it, and soon reported that the same thing had happened again. He was innocently inserting a word when the screen went blank -- and attempts to re-load the document seemed to suggest that the one in the list was somehow equally blank.
      But this morning it has returned, including the small amount of work my husband had done on it. I am completely baffled.
      Apart from this, he is managing the new laptop and OpenOffice fairly well.

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