Plain old paper

Sunday evening is usually when I do lots of my office work for the upcoming week - printing calendars, drawing maps to appointment sites, setting up directories for pictures I take on site.

This evening, just as I was getting started to do this, the laptop that has my business software started acting up, with the screen flashing on me, then freezing up, unresponsive to the keyboard. I powered it down and back up but it would not boot back into Windows. Further investigation showed that one of the pins on the hard drive had been bent and shorted against its neighbor, so I straightened that back out with a kitchen knife and reinserted it. This time, it got as far as spinning up the drive, but still I was getting a blank screen, even when I plugged a standalone monitor into the external video socket. So, I am guessing that something got fried on the video part of the motherboard, or the board itself has gotten fritzed out. Tomorrow I'm going to the computer store to see whether it can be saved somehow.

One good thing is that I was able to verify that the data on the disk was still okay, by putting it into a USB enclosure and attaching it to my wife's desktop computer. Although I could see all the folders and files, because my contact management software uses SQL Server, I could not read any of it on this other machine unless I were to take my program disks and install everything, then copy over the data files, and even then I might run into some problems with making sure my keys and licenses were all working. So it seemed that I was going to be starting out the week without a clue as to what I had to be doing day by day.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage some of the situation by means of good old paper records. I did have my printout of last week's calendar which had the names and the times of the customer appointments written out for this week. I am pretty careful to keep this up to date and in sync with what is on the computer, because it is my lifeline out in the field. Some of the customers were repeat visits, and for them I had previous maps to their addresses with telephone numbers and that kind of thing as well. Then there were new appointments for people I hadn't seen yet, and in those cases I turned to my pile of scrap paper - lists of calls to make, incoming faxes of messages left for me, and other old paperwork. Sifting through this junk, I was able to come up with an address and phone number for everyone I was scheduled to see this week. I plugged those into Mapquest and come up with the vital maps I needed.

So, here's a case where hoarding redundant and almost useless paper scraps helped saved me when technology broke down. It would be impossible to run my little business completely from paper records, I'm pretty sure, but it has proved to be the bridge I needed as a backstop when my two sets of redundant backups (the last one was updated just this morning!) were not enough to make sure that I could get the data I needed.

In the non-business realm, my main blog has been running for over three years now continuously and I would hate to lose that content if for some reason those backups were not enough. Maybe I should print out those hundreds of pages onto paper too. Also, it's probably high time to update my paper copy of my password file with all the new accounts I have had to set up lately. This one goes into a safe, naturally.

Update: I forgot to mention that also yesterday I managed to corrupt the Memos database in my Treo 650 the way I did once more, apparently by editing an item in a way that it didn't like. It is even giving me problems HotSyncing the records over to the desktop. It does seem as if this version of PalmOS is much more fragile than the one I had on my Visor Platinum.

Second update: It's been a long, slow process recovering from the madness. I convinced myself that there was not going to be any way to resurrect the original laptop, so I bought a new one on clearance at Staples. I had my hopes, but simply sticking the old hard drive into the new computer got me nowhere, so I found the next few days filled with such things as repartitioning the new drive, restoring the data from Ghost, overlaying the old (broken) Windows XP installation with a new one from CD, and now trying to reinstall all my critical applications. My current contact management software is a single spreadsheet, backed by lots of loose paper. And if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to the battle.

Dyeworks

True fact: I don't like fireworks. It isn't some kind of delayed September 11th thing either, I just have not been a fan of loud bright exploding things for a long time now.

So if there are other people who share my dislike (and I think there might be), why don't they take an idea from the people who produced the latest Sony Bravia ad and have colored non-toxic dye displays instead? No worries about things being set on fire, at least, and I think one might be happier not having the possibility of premature detonations. They would work best in the summertime where the colors could show off to best advantage, or else at night with lights and lasers playing through the streams.

I know that harbor cities sometimes feature spectacular fireboat displays, but I think the addition of liquidy charges going off at the top of the jets as in the ad is a nice touch too.

Block those pledge breaks

It's Fall pledge drive time for one of the two public radio broadcast stations here, a thing which always makes my level of goodwill toward the system plummet. I support the stations when I can (i.e., not at the moment), but it strikes me as unfair that those who do respond to the pleas and commit their money are not immediately spared the crapfest of begging for the remainder of the drive.

You get an initial bit of good-feeling when they thank you and maybe read your name on the air, but in the hours and days to come, what do you get for being upstanding? Only torture. You're at the mercy of the rest of the listening audience as to when the proceedings end, and who wants to trust those people?

Once the radio spectrum gets converted to digital, this can all end.

The idea is that at the time of a pledge, supporters would be given a limited-duration key to a station's secondary audio broadcast which would be blessedly free of fundraising activity. This incentive would be much, much better than a coffee mug or umbrella typically given out as a come-on! Special digital receivers would be built to accept a key that lucky listener would receive as part of the confirmation of their donation and this would unlock (unscramble, basically) the programming. The receiver would be portable, so that you could unlock it when you're at home, then stick it in your vehicle and bring it to work with you too. I would make the key pairs would automatically change after a brief time interval, say 5 minutes, to reduce any incentive to share these valuable pieces of information over the Internet or by other means. The subscription to the secondary broadcast would last for however long the fund drive lasts, and then become useless when the encryption would be turned off. Till next time.

Now I know this scheme is not bulletproof: the keys could be brute-forced, people could conspire to trade keys, the automatic key-changing algorithm could be attacked. But hey! these are public radio listeners we're talking about here, not people trying to hack access to a central bank, after all. More sinister would be the temptation for these broadcasters to go to into full-time fundraising mode, which would effectively turn their service to a sort of subscription radio for classical music and news junkies, sort of like the way the satellite radio companies run things.

Attention, Gnarls Barkley

How about a latte art remix of Crazy? I think it should be possible.

Edgy

Razor
Originally uploaded by Daffodilious.

Today, Otilius was posting about how he'd miss the razorwire if he ever left Brooklyn, and I commented about how nobody seems to have come up with the idea of razorwire jewelry. (Barbed wire jewelry is, by contrast, not hard to come by.) Hardcore urbanites could have a brooch, necklace, or bracelet with the pointy parts intact, while those who just like the look but do not want to risk the scars might want the edges filed down a bit. I think if one made a pair of dangling razorwire earrings, one would have to be careful not to poke one's own carotids inadvertently.