Pointless Work

During the infamous 27-year gig my group provided the IT infrastructure including desktop

software and hardware, telecommunications, support, etc.  The general opinion of the 'C' level people was that we were expensive.  Now we were remarkably lean in staff costs, a fraction of industry standards, and I think we did a yeoman's job.  During my tenure everything ran despite the lack of support.  Following my departure the obvious has failed...network downtime and application deployment late and far above budget forecasts.  The real cost is the loss of intellectual capital and motivation.  It's a tsunami just over the horizon.  The real test is 1) what happens when the power goes off? and 2) what happens when the intellectual capital is gone?  Electronics and software without electricity is magnetic encoding slowly eroding.

During this transition to another kind of work there have been many diversions.  When I find a few (I tried to spell 'few' as 'fue' just  now) I know that the next work involves work that lasts.  My goal is to produce work that continues even when the electricity goes off.

Two recent events have reinforced this perspective.

I ordered a novel by Elizabeth Strout which I will enjoy and remember as long as I'm able to remember things. On a shelf, the book will wait for my first or second reading for years. I'll probably lose the electronic version with the next Kindle upgrade. Additionally I ordered a backup charger for my phone which will certainly fail within the next couple of years and which I will probably throw away or certainly forget within the same 24 months.  The charger works for my iPhone 5.  Already I own two car charges for the 'i' thing and at least two wall chargers.  None of those work for my older iPhone 4 which I use for non-phone things.  My wife also has an iPhone 4 but it's always without charge.  I could have bought a supplemental charger for her phone but that would require that someone charge the supplemental charger.  That would be me and it would also involve more adapters.

The second reinforcement started with "I can't get the computer to work!" Midnight is a good

 time to troubleshoot an aging box. USB drives are notoriously prone to failure w/o warning. Never start a plumbing projects on SAT afternoon and never get your screwdrivers out at midnight. Await at 6 AM the carbonated caffeine drink got me started on diagnostic work. Once again cheap Chinese junk with a US brand name caused me to ponder the future of world. By 7:30 I'd ordered a new PC and was on my way to retrieve it w/ another caffeine drink in hand. Believe it or not, thirty people were waiting at the door of Micro Center. Where is my IBM Selectric?

Now the new PC is running.  There was a good backup from mid-July and a recent upload to "the cloud" (www.dropbox.com) with a few critical files.  Still it seemed prudent to attempt a recovery.  Pulling the drive from the PC I found my direct IDE USB and power cables and attempted to read the disk...nothing.  Contemplating bad tools I tested the cables on two other drives and all was good.  Later I brought the drive with me to the small business where there is a computer hack guy in an adjoining office.  With the offer of a reasonable barter he hooked up his cables and the drive powered up.

For whatever reason I failed to say "copy that" and I'm sure his assumption was that I did not know how to hook up a drive and it was all fine.  Later at home the drive powered up.  I copied about 30% of the contents and then the infamous "grrrrrr" and "thunk" apparently defined the Seagate Barracuda drive's end of life.  What did I expect from a ten year old drive made in China?

In the midst of all this attempts at ressurection I ordered a new identical drive on eBay for $20 which I planned to put back in the USB enclosure.  Of course when it arrived my failure to read all the details made the SATA connectors rather than IDE jump into the portion of my brain that makes mistakes.  Attempting to dig our of this I ordered two replacement Seagate Barracuda IDE drives on eBay for what I'd spent on one drive a couple of days earlier.  Staring at the SATA drive I also ordered a $25 USB SATA drive enclosure.   Given my propensity to use cloud backup solutions (e.g.  www.backblaze.com & www.mozy.com ) I'm not sure what I'm going to do with two or three USB drives.  Perhaps this was all an attempt to undo my lack of a good backup since July.

Regardless of you backup, nothing electronic is lasting.  Who's going to know your passwords or pay your domain and cloud bills when you are ...