There is nothing like the frighteningly unwelcome appearance of a BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death] as ones computer crashes to enforce the backup lesson that one learned almost a year previously. As well as on less than 100% reliable DVDs, I now had our entire photo library on my Dell XPS desktop’s 1.5Tb hard drive but in mid November it threw me a BSOD and failed to reboot. If it could not have been resuscitated, I’d have a serious amount of egg on my face. Fortunately, a replacement memory board had me back up and running again.

When it comes to irreplaceable digital information, a belt and braces approach is definitely a good idea, just in case the belt breaks or the braces snap. My belt was our ever-growing collection of optical media (DVDs). Since that belt had already broken once, I was keen to buy a pair of braces, too. A USB-connected external hard drive would, in the embarrassing event of a catastrophic computer failure, enable me simply to plug said external hard drive into any replacement machine and once again be able to access our data. I started casting around on good ol’ Amazon and good ol’ John Lewis for candidate purchases.

Now, there are clearly a lot of total plonkers in the world and many of them appear to write product reviews on Amazon. After reading several ludicrous comments one begins to see the level at which some of Joe Public operates so it is well to take many of these reviews with a hefty pinch of salt. However, when it comes to external hard drives, a pattern definitely begins to emerge: external hard drives are clearly prone to more than infrequent failure. My Dell laptop suffered a catastrophic failure of its original hard drive and that’s the only hard drive crash I’ve ever experienced, mercifully. The external hard drives, though, for some reason sound as though they fail more readily than internal hard drives. I have no statistics to substantiate this but it’s a feeling I developed from the numerous reviews I read written by apparently sane examples of Joe Public. Nonetheless, with at least a number of positive reviews and at a mere £69.99 on Amazon, I was attracted to a Seagate STBV2000200 2TB Expansion USB 3.0 3.5 inch External Hard Drive. Let the fun commence!

Dear ol’ Amazon has a relatively new facility called Amazon Locker and was offering a reduced (£1.99) one-day delivery trial. Rather than waiting in at home on tenter-hooks awaiting a delivery, using Amazon Locker you can have your purchase delivered to a collection facility and pick it up at a time that suits you. In the UK, the collection facilities used are those run by Collect+. Here’s the theory: Amazon delivers to your chosen Collect+ depot, you then receive a Collect+ collection code and trot down to claim your parcel at your leisure. What a great idea. I’d previously used Collect+ to return an item to Craghoppers and that went well but was yet to use it for collection.

I placed my order on Friday 28th December, albeit with a little fuss ‘cos the Amazon website didn’t seem to want actually to use the trial delivery charge; a chat with customer services fixed that. Sure enough, on Saturday 29th December the courier’s tracking code showed me that my order was delivered to my nominated Collect+ depot at 9:45 AM. I eagerly awaited my collection code. At midday I was still eagerly awaiting my collection code. Late that afternoon I still continued eagerly to await my collection code and began the first of several further contacts with Amazon customer services.

“Give it 24-48 hours”, they said.

“That rather ruins the point of paying for next day delivery”, I replied, logically.

Amazon, bless them, refunded my delivery charge.

I actually trotted down to the Collect+ depot and explained the situation but, as I expected, without a collection code I could not pick up my parcel because it could not be released by “the system”. There are times when automated systems suck and this was one of them. I knew my package was sitting in the storeroom but I couldn’t have it.

48 hours later I was continuing eagerly to await any collection code and wqas now fearing the worst. After another couple of interactions with Amazon customer services over another couple of days, we learned that Collect+ wasn’t issuing a collection code because the package didn’t seem to have been entered into the system. Amazon (bless them) shipped me a replacement Seagate STBV2000200 2TB Expansion USB 3.0 3.5 inch External Hard Drive to be sent by guaranteed delivery to my door. It duly arrived successfully and I plugged it in, received the traditional “new hardware detected, driver being installed” malarkey, and was up and running almost immediately. Better!

Of course, just having a “spare” external hard drive installed does not do anything to ensure backups are taken any more than does possessing a spindle of DVDs – you still have to remember to make your backup. However, as a part of my investigations, I had found a couple of companies providing freeware that will monitor selected folders and maintain a duplicate/synchronized copy for you automagically. I installed and began to use Comodo Backup.

Using Comodo Backup, you can choose when synchronized copies of your specified directories are maintained. One option is “automatic” meaning that the software sits watching for changes to occur and replicates them. I duplicated our “Photo Library” on my new external hard drive and, lo and behold, as soon as I made a trial change to my “live” library, the duplicate was immediately synchronized and remained in step. Marvelous! I got carried away with this seemingly wonderful facility and repeated the exercise using “My Documents” and “My Pictures”. [I detest those childish phrases/names.]

Mistake! Our “Photo Library” is one thing; I put images in there after we’ve finished monkeying around with them – “Photo Library” is completed work. A couple of days ago I’d been snapping garden birds and went through my digital dark room work flow which begins by loading my RAW files into “My Pictures”. I decided to delete two v. poor images for good to try and protect my reputation. I selected the pictures in question and hit the <Del> key. Away went the pictures. Next time I looked, I was more than a tad surprised to see them still in the folder. Was I dreaming? Had I forgotten to hit <Del>? I selected them again and once more hit <Del>. This time I continued to watch my screen. Sure enough they disappeared but about a second later, bing! – the two pictures magically reappeared. Arghhh! The penny dropped: my smart new automated synchronization task was re-instating the deleted pictures from my duplicate copy. Laugh, I nearly cried!! Deletion was impossible from either place. Now that’s what I call secure. Best to use delayed synchronization on work in progress type folders/files such as “My Pictures” and “My Documents” … daily perhaps. Another lesson learned.

Interestingly and most frustratingly, I failed to find any way to redefine previously defined synchronization tasks in Comodo Backup. I found some instructions for doing so on a Comodo forum but those instructions did not match my software – they weren’t even close – so I fell at that hurdle. I uninstalled the software and deleted all its data. I’m hoping that reinstallation will allow me to define sensible sync schedules for my work in progress folders, though I have yet to try. Duh!

Anyway, belt and braces in place.

Recent silence has been due to a combination of two major factors, (bloody) Christmas and a serious amount of investigative work. The investigative work stemmed directly from my Dell-inquent Computers.

Having never before suffered from a computer failure, my two recently temperamental Dell machines made me a little more concerned about data backup. As a good little erstwhile IT professional, I have been in the habit of writing out backup CDs/DVDs … occasionally. However, it is amazing how a complete year can drift by before one realizes that one hasn’t actually done a new backup in any one of the past twelve months. Very useful! Being in a euphoric state of retirement, it’s not as if I keep much in the way of mission critical data on my machines but there is data that I’d rather not lose, including a financial control spreadsheet and photographs. The financial spreadsheet could be reconstituted, though to do so would be a pain in the backside, but the photographs are a different issue.

Before digital photography, photographs were less critical; I still have 15 35mm slide boxes each capable of holding 500 mounted slides – lose a digital version of a photo or two and they can be painstakingly scanned back in again. The slide boxes don’t constitute an off-site backup but they seem otherwise secure. Digital photographs are another issue; they exist only in the ethereal electronic world as ones and zeros and if lost are gone for ever. It was our digital photographs that were causing me the most concern.

Two years ago, before Dell, I had never had enough computer hard disk space to store all our digital images. As a result, I was a very good boy and frequently wrote out our photos to optical media, originally CDs and latterly DVDs. We currently have a combined collection of ~50 disks. Originally, I could fit several trips worth of scanned images, as bmp files, on a single 700Mb CD. With our first forays into digital photography, each RAW image, a so-called digital negative, was now some 12Mb and a CD could hold only a single trip (50-ish images), though frequently a DVD was necessary if we were not hard-hearted enough at the deletion of duds. Since both of us were now digitally snapping away, that is, of course, a disk each. Given our latest generation of DSLR cameras, each new image has grown to some 24Mb and we are beginning to have trouble fitting our more recent, typically longer, trips onto a 4.7Gb DVD.

Our optical disks, however, proved less than completely reliable. Having acquired my Dell desktop last January, complete with a 1.5Tb hard drive, I thought I’d use some of the space to make our photo collection readily available – “on-line”, as it were. I began reading in our disks and storing them on the enormous hard drive. One disk failed to read. [See Cyclic Redundancy Check Nightmares.] I tried on three other computers but it refused to play ball. I’d lost a disk’s worth of images. I did find some recovery software which was partially successful in regenerating a few images but the majority were gone for ever.

Not only are the DVDs not an offsite backup but one failed disk out of 50 represents a 2% failure rate. Clearly, I needed additional data protection. Of course, I’d learnt this lesson last year when the disk failed to read but somewhere along the line I’d omitted to do anything about it. The lesson bears repetition.

Almost two years ago, I acquired my first laptop computer, a Dell Inspiron 1545. Within just a couple of months of its purchase I began experiencing failures which I eventually tracked down to a faulty hard drive, as reported New Year, New Hard Disk (Jan 21st, 2012). My laptop has worked fine ever since replacing the hard drive [fingers very firmly crossed].

Undeterred by my faulty hard drive and never before having suffered any computer failure in my life, in New Year, New Computer (Jan 25th, 2012), I spoke about replacing my aging Sony Vaio desktop computer with a sleek new Dell XPS 8300 desktop. I became very comfortable and happy with it. Life continued, despite 2012 descending into the meteorological disaster with which we are now all too familiar.

Every now and then, we get unsolicited international phone calls. I normally completely ignore them, Carol tends to answer them and give the caller an undisguised piece of her mind. Early this week Carol answered an international call that, it turned out, was from Dell. I was unavoidably detained by culinary matters but it seemed they were interested in how my computer was; they’d call back. That’s very caring of them, I thought, whilst wondering which particular computer they were interested in, having two Dell machines?

Yesterday, whilst I was seated at my Dell XPS 8300 desktop, our phone rang. “International” flashed up on the screen. Remembering that it might be Dell, I uncharacteristically decided to answer it. Sure enough, it was a nice lady from Dell wondering how my XPS 8300 desktop was performing, having purchased it in January.

“It’s fine, thank you”, I replied politely.

“Thank you”, she said, “that’s all I need to know”, and hung up before I could mention the laptop and its faulty hard drive.

You are not going to believe this – I still don’t believe it myself. Quite literally 30 minutes after having taken that “out of the blue” Dell phone call yesterday, almost 11 months after purchasing their machine and using it, I got a BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death, to those unfamiliar with the term]. The screen mentioned something fatal-sounding along the lines of:

Page fault in non-paged area: Windows has detected a problem and is shutting down to prevent damaging your system

I read the page’s further diagnostic suggestions, only partially understanding them, wrinkled my brow and went for a restart. When in doubt, reboot, where Windows is concerned, at least.

The machine restarted but I swiftly turned my back on it as Carol returned home. Homecoming greetings over, I returned to the machine and that blasted BSOD had reappeared. This time the machine refused to restart. It also refused to start in Safe Mode. Yikes, it must be bad! I hit F12 during another restart sequence to find a Dell screen offering one interesting option called “System Test” (or some such). Bravely, I tried it. It ran through a series of diagnostics (the sonar check in The Hunt For Red October, sprang to mind – “running diagnostics now, captain”), all of which passed except three different tests against the RAM. I tried another restart but, no, I was dead in the water.

This morning I went through a protracted phone call with Dell support, during which I was guided to open the tower unit, remove all four RAM modules and systematically replace them one by one. There’s a total of 6Gb of RAM on four separate memory boards, two 2GB boards and two 1Gb boards. One of the 2Gb boards is faulty; without it the machine is fine but with it the machine fails. I am now back up and running on the healthy 4Gb RAM and Dell is shipping me a replacement 2Gb board.

I am still thoroughly gobsmacked at the timing of this failure. I just cannot believe it. I never do well with coincidences. It’s almost as though someone phoned me to see how things were, then pressed a button to make the system fail. The support guy did try to sell me an extended warranty package, after all, but that’s too much like a paranoid conspiracy theory.

My two previous desktops, Fuji and Sony, survived about six and eight years respectively, and they were both pensioned off rather than failing. By contrast, my Dell laptop lasted just a few months, my Dell desktop almost 11 months.

I have to say that I think Dell support is pretty good but then, at the rate their machines seem to fail in my experience, they’d need to be, wouldn’t they? 🙁

Have you ever taken much notice of the artwork on some packaged food items? We don’t generally buy a whole lot of processed food but those that come complete with so-called “serving suggestions” have frequently given me some entertainment.

A few weeks ago I popped into a local small co-op store because I needed some fresh bread. I wasn’t expecting much but, to my surprise, they had a perfectly reasonable-looking oatmeal loaf, albeit ready sliced. I grabbed one, paid for it and returned home for my lunch. Naturally there was artwork on the package but then, one expects that.

Wait a minute, that ham and lettuce sandwich apparently constitutes a “serving suggestion”. Am I to understand that co-operative customers need assistance when it comes to making use of a ready-sliced loaf of bread? I know educational levels have slipped a little but … strewth! I think that’s a tomato sneaking in on the right of frame. What I can’t quite determine is whether I am supposed to put tomatoes in with the ham and lettuce or just leave them sitting on the board. Should I have bought a different loaf if I’d wanted to make a cheese sandwich? [“Thick sliced” for thickos, presumably.]

Our little local co-op is also our little local post office. Today, after first applying for an extension to our mortgage, we went along again to buy some Christmas stamps. Regrettably, the post office window in our little local co-op was besieged by a less-than-little line of people, presumably comprised of many of those co-operative customers who need help with the correct usage of a ready-sliced loaf of bread. We extended the line still further.

As we waited, in addition to wondering whether we were actually going to get our stamps in time to make the last posting date before Christmas, I began looking at the food cabinets beside which we stood. There were some ready-made pizzas on special offer [short-dated] and a warm lunch seemed quite appealing given the outside temperature hovering around freezing. We bought one, together with our stamps, and returned for lunch. [There’s a theme, here.] Guess what?

The artwork on the pizza box allegedly constitutes yet another “serving suggestion”. It seems that our educationally challenged co-operative customers don’t know what to do with a boxed, ready-made pizza, either. Mon Dieu! Now, this one really isn’t completely obvious. The pizza is clearly not still in the box so I guess Charlie Customer is going to realize that he is supposed to extract it from the packaging before eating it. Now that, I have to admit, is a very handy suggestion. We don’t want people munching through the cardboard, cellophane and polystyrene after all, do we? However, to make completely successful use of his pizza, Charlie Customer is going to have to look a little more closely.

“Errr … that cheese in the photo doesn’t look quite as it does on my recently extracted pizza; it looks gooey, sort of melted. Those tomatoes look a bit wrinkled, too, sort of dried out. Wait a minute, I wonder if it’s been baked? I’m sure I’ve seen pizzas being served hot, somewhere. Yes, here we are, the box also comes complete with baking instructions.”

Well done Charlie!

Notice that the pizza is not cut into slices, though. Charlie is supposed to wolf it down whole, I imagine.

I hope the postage stamps came with instructions, too.

Having been treated to a feeding display by a flock of Waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus) in Woburn two weekends ago (Dec 2nd), I’ve been wondering where our usual band of visiting Redwings has been. It’s that time of year when we quite frequently peer out into our back garden and the woods beyond in the hope of seeing something less than common-or-garden but, so far this year, nothing. Until, that is, today. This morning, I was delighted when Carol, a.k.a. Hawk-eyes, declared that she thought she’d seen a Redwing (Turdus iliacus) raiding the berries near our kitchen window.

I dropped everything (!) and looked out of an upstairs window to see what I thought was a tell-tale russet flank disappearing back into the woods. It had probably been chased off by one of our larger Blackbirds – larger than the Redwings, that is – which tend jealously  to protect “their” berry supply. I’m certainly not surprised at that reaction this year; some of the natural food seems to be a little scarce after our appalling so-called summer. I grabbed camera and bar stool and settled down to wait, somewhat patently, for a Redwing to return. I think I spotted just two, neither of which posed particularly favourably, but I did managed to get a recognisable documentary shot for the sake of evidence. Shooting through a bedroom window doesn’t help but here it is.

One of the advantages of writing wildlife observations, such as this, down in a weblog is that it gives me the chance to look back and find out when things happened in previous years. Of course, we’re not exactly staring out of our windows all the time so the observations aren’t what you’d call scientifically rigorous but Hawk-eyes doesn’t miss a whole heck of a lot. I did a search for my Redwing posts over recent years and they really are remarkably consistent, considering:

• winter 2009/10 – December 17th
• winter 2010/11 – December 20th
• winter 2011/12 – January 14th (a month later – I wonder if we missed an earlier visit?) 
• winter 2012/13 – December 10th

We also had a small gathering of four Long-tailed Tits (Aegithalos caudatus) today for the first time this season, that we’ve seen. I’m glad because we’ve invested in a large supply of fat balls together with a squirrel-proof fat ball feeder mainly with those little charmers in mind. The last couple of days have also seen our hitherto solo Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) get joined by three more friends. They also have a feeder largely dedicated to them, a nyjer/niger seed feeder, though they continue apparently to prefer the sunflower seeds, just like everyone else.

Almost two years ago, I was admitted to hospital for the first time in my life. I was about to have my prostate removed to fix an irritating case of prostate cancer. Removing a prostate, not unnaturally, rates as a major operation. Recovery times have been improved by the use of keyhole surgery when possible but we are still talking about general anaesthetic. None of this namby-pamby local anaesthetic nonsense for a prostatectomy; only real men can have their prostate ripped out. 😀

Anyway, the first person I met after arriving chez the good ol’ NHS was my anaesthesiologist. If that sounds odd, I should explain that, on my arrival, my ward was closed for cleaning having suffered an attack of a vomiting virus. Great start! An anaesthesiologist, evidently, is not only in charge of knocking me out but also in charge of subsequent “pain management”. Apart from giving me a swift run down on what would be happening the following morning in the operating theatre, the main thing the anaesthesiologist wanted to know was what type of pain management I would prefer. I had a choice to make. I had to choose between:

1. an epidural system, such as those much beloved of women giving birth, and
2. a PCA (Patient Controlled Analgesia) morphine pump.

Which did I want?

This choice may be offered with all good intention, that of giving the patient (or should that be customer?) choice, but the patient had never before had his prostate ripped out – a repeat performance would be somewhat difficult – and had no clue as to how to make such a decision. Surely, the reason we use professionals is that they are supposed to be experienced and should know which is better? By all means ask simple questions about my medical history to determine if one alternative might be ill-advised in my particular case but otherwise, how the hell am I supposed to know? You tell me. Going into hospital can be stressful enough without being faced by mega-decisions.

Today seemed to be putting us in a similar, though hopefully less painful, position. Today we had another decision to make. Today, for the first time ever, we’ve been given the chance to exercise a newly bestowed democratic right to vote for a “Police and Crime Commissioner”; a choice which, it seems to me, amounts to choosing between five candidates (in the case of Bedfordshire) about whom we know next to nothing to fill a new role that, I suspect, most of us don’t understand. I certainly don’t. To be fair, there is a little information available on-line about each candidate but it wouldn’t fill a single side of A4 paper; it’s less than a 400-word school essay. Four of our candidates are from four political parties: three of those are the mainstreamers (Conservative, Labour and Liberal) and one is much scarier, representing the so-called British Freedom Party which is, apparently, the political arm of the English Defence League. The fifth candidate is said to be an independent. One of the candidates even knows a little something about policing. Strewth!

So, we’ve never been faced with this choice before and we don’t know what’s involved – pretty much like my operation two years ago. I suspect a lot of people are confused, too, because we just returned from voting where, at 5:00 PM, we were voters #100 and #101 out of 1600. That’s a 6% turnout so far. There’s more time before the poles close but it’s November, it’s dark and cold outside, and I can’t see the polling station suddenly getting swamped. I think we’ll be lucky to see a 10% turnout.

I have heard more than one person state that they were going to vote “just to try to keep the British Freedom Party out”. Fair enough! We have, after all, just celebrated Remembrance Sunday to commemorate an uncomfortably large number of selfless people who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep Hitler’s Nazis out of this country, amongst other laudable causes. The ballot box is a much better approach whether that’s the only way we can make sense of the election or not.