Switching Off

Smart phones have changed the way I live.

I remember in the early 2000's proclaiming to all my friends that the day I can check the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) storm radar images on my mobile phone will be the day true hand held computing will have arrived for me.

By 2006 my wish came true on my Xda O2 Atom smart phone/PDA device.  It was happy days - being able to keep on top of the weather's movements during the day was fantastic.

Cut forward to 2011, and everyone has a smart phone.  My current iPhone has a processor 200 times faster than my families first personal computer (with 1600 times the storage capacity and 10,000 times the RAM!).

They are everywhere, and they are rapidly altering the way I communicate and access information.

The biggest impact the first smart phone I owed had on me was being able to check my emails anywhere.  Suddenly, there was no escape - my emails sat with me next to my bed as I lay down to sleep, and they were there waiting for me when I woke up.  Heading down to the shops?  Waiting in line for something?  Watching TV?  My emails followed me everywhere, and I found that I would check them habitually just because I could.

This was not necessarily a bad thing - I did run my own business and it was very convenient for the most part.  It was just a change.  A BIG one.

The recent explosion of mobile apps and high speed data connections for mobile devices has obviously pushed this change into another dimension.  Our mobile phones have become the personal computer in our pocket, allowing multiple platform communications and access to information services that a few years ago didn't even exist.

But I do find that I am somehow addicted to my phone now.  If I leave the house without it accidentally, I feel somewhat naked.  For starters, how the hell will I know where to go without Google Maps? And when I get there, how will I get money into my account without accessing my banking services?  What if I have to wait for a few minutes - what will keep my mind occupied in those awkward social situations?  What if some news occurs and I am the last one to hear about it?

Back from my 'naked' excursion, I'll find myself with idle time, so I will check my emails, the weather, scan twitter, load the news updates and flick through a few blogs.  All these things are great, but my need for information actually increases by having it available, rather than it becoming satiated.  The habit of checking these information sources for updates is sometimes just that - a habit, rather than a fully conscious undertaking.

So, I have been switching my phone off for a few hours each weekend.  I know, that stimulating headline would read "Man switches off iPhone, lives life for a few hours".  It is pretty simple, but there is a freedom to shutting off your devices and forgetting about them for half the day or so.  Just being calm, slow and present with what you are doing feels easier this way, without the temptation of constantly seeking more and more info, or having your time interrupted by a call or message.

I recently watched an amazing documentary about a guy who camps out on Lake Eyre for 4 weeks taking photos.  I wondered at that feeling of isolation and how amazing it would feel to be totally cut off from society and communications, existing for that time in a barren wasteland. But in the third or fourth scene I laughed as Murray, the photographer, is shown having a half argument with his wife via a satellite phone.

Don't forget to switch off now and then.

Your Hard Drive Will Die

If you are anything like me, you sometimes live in a world of blissful ignorance about the reality of your precious data and the hardware that it calls home.

But my work has once again reminded me of the vigilance needed in the way that we think about data.  A colleague of mine had a hard drive crash recently and they had not backed it up to another drive (or online), so are looking at a large expense to get a data recovery expert to try to recover his precious family photos (if it is possible at all).

It is very easy to be complacent with technology.  We think that our laptops, phones and computers are built to last and that our data is safe and sound on our devices.  But the best way to approach technology and data is like this:

1. Your hard drive will die.  It is not a matter of ‘if’, just ‘when’.

2. Never have any data that you cannot afford to lose saved on only one device – you must have redundancy on this data in preparation for a failure.
 

Remembering these two simple rules allow us to change the way we see our data.

It takes some getting used to, to remember that our hardware will die.  Almost as if our minds have a combination of perpetual optimism and blind faith (or is that blissful ignorance) that blocks us from expecting our beautiful, man-made techno device to ever have an issue.

But the truth is harsh.  The laptop you are reading this blog on?  It will die.  Checking facebook on your iPhone?  The phone will die too in time.  In fact, the hardware we purchase and use is not built to last – it is actually ‘built to fail’.  It cannot last.  The hard drives in personal computers and laptops are only built to be ‘running’ for 8 hours a day 5-6 days a week, so eventually they will reach the end of their life.

Now we know this, what can we do?

We need to treat hardware (hard drives, laptops, phones, computers) as ‘transient’ items – that is, they will come and go, be used up, die and be replaced - but the data is the thing we want to keep permanently, (which generally involves transferring it from device to device as time goes by). 

Next time you turn your computer off, just pretend for a moment that you can never turn it on again.  Are there any pictures on there that you haven’t saved elsewhere?  Any documents that you may need that are not stashed on an external hard drive?  Any emails/attachments that are important that aren’t sitting on a server somewhere (say in your gmail account)?

If the answer is yes, you have some backing up to do.  Good luck.

A side note about hard drives:

Hard drives are actually very amazing devices.  The best analogy for a hard drive is a record player.  They both have flat, spinning disks that contain data (in one’s and zero’s), and a ‘read’ head that hovers over the disk (or platter) to read the information. 

A hard drive has many platters, and the information can be read and ‘written’ by changing the magnetic state of sections of the platter.  The platters rotate at blistering speeds, and the read/write heads whip around the different sections of the platter finding and saving the information. 

They are relatively complex devices that have a lot of moving parts and many possible failure points.  Some failure points are easier to fix than others – one of the worst being when the read/write head crashes into the platter and corrupts the data there (called a ‘head crash’).  This can make data recovery impossible, even with the most advanced recovery techniques.

Generally people are flabbergasted when they have a hard drive problem. 

"This has never happened before!!"

My thoughts to that (apart from sympathy for the frustration) is these people are lucky that it has only happened to them once.

It wont happen over-night, but it will happen.

Mind versus Filter

'Technology' is certainly not the exclusive domain of computers and IT.  Here is a tale of my Saturday morning...


I headed out to my folks place to do some maintenance whilst they are away for a while.  Time to check the pool, mow the lawn and water some plants.  Only, I had been sick for the previous few days, and had a shockingly bad sleep the night before, so was not in the most enlightened mood to be doing other family members house chores.

I arrive, and the pool is green.  Mold, slime, rotting dead toads, crap everywhere.  I check the filter - and it is broken.

Frustrated, I flick a bunch of switches, nothing.  Getting more agitated, I check the cables, pushing leaves and sticks out of the way.  My arms are flailing, and I am getting hot and annoyed.  I really dont want to be doing this right now - the wind is blowing around me and my hair is flying in my face.

"I'm going to be stuck here all day now.  Dad is going to be pissed.  I am feeling like death.  This filter is a piece of crap."

Nothing that I try works, so I give up, go inside and email my Dad with the news to get his opinion on what to do.  Deflated, I get ready to leave.

After a few minutes though, I calm down and do some thinking.  A realisation of stinking hypocrisy dawns on me - I have just fallen into the mind-trap of frustration that can so easily block positive thought and conducive problem solving.  In fact, I was in this mind set even before I arrived at my folks house, using tiredness and illness as my cloak, which really gave me no chance of ever having a good interaction with this troublesome filter.  I also realise that if I was trying to fix this filter as part of my work, I would have approached it very differently, with much more quality and presence, regardless of tiredness or not feeling well.

So, I reset my expectations and decide to give it another go.  I calmly step outside and move towards the filter.  It sits there, intent on fooling me, willing to send me home without success.  But I have a weapon.  My level-headedness shall prevail.

The main street empties, a tumbleweed rolls across our path.  I take another step.  The wind blows the nearby leaves into a flutter.

I arrive at the filter, and calmly run through a process of elimination.  After 2 minutes, I isolate a $5 powerboard as being broken, run the filter cable directly into the power socket, and up she springs.

Fixed.  I leave the house with the filter issue resolved and the green pool on its way back to blue health.

Later it dawned on my that even if I had not found the issue (i.e, if the issue was something I could not solve at that time for example a blow motor), I still would have felt better after the second round of problem solving, knowing that I had approached it in the right way and had moved to negate my earlier frustrated response.  The anger and frustration blocked my abilities to think clearly, but with some awareness and resolve, I was able to change my response and work through the tiredness/sickness/hotness back to a place where I was much more likely to have a positive interaction.

Technology and Me

This is not what I do.  That is, I'm not a professional blog writer.  This is not a commercial pursuit, an undertaking that puts food on the table or petrol in the car.  This is an expression of thought, and hopefully at times, knowledge.

I fix people's computer problems.  That is what I do.  I could even broaden that to say "I fix people's technology problems".  Computer technician.  Support dude. Technology consultant.  The IT guy.  Nerd.

That is me.  Every family has one - every business needs one [or possibly quite a few] - and increasingly, our personal lives could benefit from one also.

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We all have a relationship with technology.  This relationship changes frequently, morphing like the desert sand-hills, (and sometimes oscillating wildly, moment to moment like some sort of wild, oscillating device) but my experience has shown at any given instant this relationship of humans with tech can be slotted into one of four main categories.
 

Need, want, love and hate.
 

Need
 

You cannot escape it.  Communication, business, entertainment, transport, medical.  It surrounds us, engulfs us.  We all need technology at some point.
 

Want
 

That slightly slimmer, slightly faster, slightly cooler and slightly more expensive phone/laptop/camera/gadget has just been released.  Want one. Bad.
 

Love
 

“What, there’s an app that lets me “insert verb describing previously annoying or laborious task made easier by simple piece of software” on my phone?" Life now complete. Love that.
 

Hate
 

“This computer doesn’t fucking work”.
 

“My phone is fucked”.
 

 “How the fuck do I “insert task that should be impossibly easy but always seems impossibly hard”.
 

“I hate Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Apple/any or all other tech companies that are seemingly out to destroy life's simplicity and beauty with their ugly, ugly technology."
 

 “How the fuck do I archive my emails.”
 

"I hate printers".

 
This is generally where the IT guys comes in .  The hate category.

Sometimes we get called in at the need stage, but the very nature of a need decries an item or process or solution that is not necessarily wanted.  Therefore this category has a very close, almost symbiotic relationship with the hate category.  This is something us techs learn early - need is a slippery slope to hate.

If we are very lucky, we can sometimes be involved in the want.  Want almost requires a smidgen of love in order to exist - these two have a close relationship, but it would be a stretch to say they share the same symbiotic connection as need and hate.  No, want (or craving) and love (or lust) are connected but can still be somewhat exclusive.

On even rarer occasions, a technician/techie/IT guy will find themselves thrust into the love category.   This is the holy grail of IT support - love.  At this point, people almost irrationally heap as much love on the tech themselves rather than the technology they have really developed the crush for.  But we will take anything we can get.

But sadly, it is hate were we languish for most of our days.  If not for peoples hate, whether their hate of technology, or a hate of wanting to learn a purposeful way or approaching it, we would not be technicians.

It would be easy of us to hate the hate.  We are always there, it is not always fun.

But this blog aims to show a love of the hate is possible.  People hate.  And rage.  And swear.  And get frustrated.  But the job of a technician, a good technician that is, is to first and foremost remain calm.  In my book, fixing a specific problem for someone still comes a huge second place to remaining calm, aware and zen-like during the process of that fixing.

In fact, as we will discover on the pages of this blog, the two (fixing problems and remaining calm) are more related than many suspect...