It's been One of THOSE Weeks

I spent the weekend doing what I could with my pony, Chip.  We battled Navicular Syndrome with him for several years & I knew the end was coming.  My wife, Marg, scheduled the vet & knacker for Monday.  I went to work & he was gone by the time I got home, but the new fish pond had lost half its water.  It was a tough way to start the week.

Bummed out over Chip, the fish pond problem was icing on the cake.  I spent weeks & $200 building it just a couple of months ago.  After an hour of searching, I might have fixed a tiny leak in one place & corralled some splash as the water rolled down the front of the fairy princess, but I wasn't sure I'd found the problem.  Frustrating!

Tuesday was better; I found my wife's Aunt Irene.  Yeah, we'd lost her.

Irene is 85 years old & lives in Wisconsin.  She has no family save for her 2 nephews & her niece, my wife.  Since Irene lives so far away, I've only met her a few times & the boys haven't kept in touch at all.  We called & wrote back & forth half a dozen times a year, but we're not really close.  We thought we knew who her 'friend' (social worker) was, but found out that we didn't when our last letter came back as undeliverable.

How do you find an old relative?  Social Services & Jane, the manager of her independent living apartment building, couldn't give us any information due to HIPA.  It insures our privacy - too well in this case.  Apparently we're not on the right list.  Jane swore she passed a couple of messages along for us, but we never heard from Irene.  Adult Protection Services, the ombudsman, & even the police wouldn't help.  It's not their job.  They suggested hiring a private detective. Instead, I googled all the nursing & assisted living homes in the area.  There are 30 & I called each in turn as if I expected them to put her on the phone.

Number 25 told me she was at lunch!  I asked the nurse to have Irene call us.  When I got home, I found that the fish pond was still full!  Things were looking up.

Wednesday started with lost emails.  Email started out as a simple texting system with no security & is now an immense kludge.  I filter out 90% of the emails & users still complain about getting too much spam.  Users expect email to work perfectly every time, but I wonder why it works at all - quite a difference in expectations.  It's a small company & my boss is good at marketing.  Usually that's a plus since he leaves me alone.  When things like this come up, it can be frustrating for all concerned, though.

I didn't get a call back from Irene & tried calling her again.  She was at breakfast this time.  We were suspicious, so Marg tried a couple more times & managed to speak to Irene briefly.  We know she's alive, but she didn't know who Marg was.  Sigh.

That night, we looked at a 6 year old Halflinger, a possible replacement for Chip.  It's not a breed that I'm familiar with, but he seemed as calm as advertised from the ground.  The seller offered to let my daughter, Erin, ride him bareback.  There was no mounting block so my son-in-law gave my daughter a leg up while the seller held the reins.  Erin went up too high, the pony moved forward, & Erin came down on the pony's kidneys.  The pony bolted over top the seller with Erin flopping around on her belly as she went over his rump.  Erin bounced back up, but we didn't get a test ride since the seller was skinned up, bruised, & quite put out.  Oh well.

Thankfully, Thursday has been uneventful so far.  I hope it stays that way.  I really need a boring rest of the week.

Digital Rights Management (a.k.a., We Hate Our Customers)

The good news is that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is going away.  The music industry has proven that it isn't needed & they're making plenty of money.  So why are some ebook & audiobook producers still punishing their customers?

An author complained to me when their expensive, older CD player wouldn't play a few new CDs because they were locked by DRM.  They thought it was unfair for the recording industry to lock them out like that, but they still support DRM on their own works.  It doesn't bother them that their own customers might have to buy a new copy of a book because they changed devices or lost license files, but it bothers me.

If I purchase a book, I shouldn't have to worry about dealing with disparate, proprietary licenses every time I change my PC, phone, MP3 player, ereader, or whatever.  I have thousands of books from dozens of publishers, many now defunct.  I started reading ebooks a couple of decades ago, so I've seen many devices come & go.  Most had proprietary formats & licensing that is no longer supported.  Sony wanted me to buy ebooks for my reader from their store, but I couldn't get Adobe Digital Editions (the DRM software they used) & the Sony software to work together on my computer.  It was a well known problem & after several evenings of frustration, I quit trying & I'm fairly computer savvy.  Computers are what I do for a living.  Is that any way to treat a customer?

DRM doesn't protect the producer against pirating, just punishes the customer.  If it can be viewed or played, a DRM-free copy can be made.  If an appropriate utility isn't already on the computer, it's easy to download one.  Most are free & often easier to use than the licensing schemes.  Besides, if it is a hassle to use when & where I please, I'll buy elsewhere.

I've always had plenty of ebooks to read.  Gutenberg.org & The Internet Archive (archive.org) have over a million books for free.  Baen (www.baen.com) gives away many of their older books in multiple formats.  It's a smart move.  That's where I found the first Honor Harrington book & I wound up buying a dozen more new.  Baen & Weber made money.  There are other authors I like who have their work tied up by DRM, so I usually just buy their used, paper books.  Neither they nor their publishers see a dime.  I don't mind supporting an author, but I do mind supporting DRM.

I'm a huge audiobook fan, but I won't buy from Audible & I don't need to.  I belong to three local libraries that have about 10,000 audiobooks that are in MP3 format (no DRM) & I don't even need to go to the library.  Blackstone Audio's books are also DRM-free & I buy their books frequently through downpour.com.  Librivox.org & Archive.org have thousands of free audiobooks that are out of copyright & worth listening to.

In other words, I don't have the time to read all the available books.  There are millions of books out there with over a million new books published annually.  If a person reads 150 books per year for 65 years, they'll read about 10,000 books (1% of 1 million).  It's obvious that an author's biggest problem is getting a reader's attention.  If their books make it to a pirate site, they should consider it a badge of honor.  Most books aren't even worth stealing any more.

It's NOT A Backup Solution

YOU SHOULD BACKUP YOUR FILES!  I'll bet your eyes are already glazing over.  We all know it & some of us do it, but it's BORING.  The only exciting part is that butt-clenching moment when you realize you just lost a file you've spent hours working on or all your pictures disappeared & you don't have any good way to get them back.  Then the excitement is replaced by black despair.

Restoring is the objective.  You want a restore solution.  Backing up is just a means to an end.  I'll cover some for Windows.

If I lose that file I worked on for hours by carelessly deleting it or even its directory, it shouldn't be a problem.  The Recycle Bin should have it.  If not, there should be a previous version.  Right click on the directory that held it, left click on 'Properties', & again on the 'Previous Versions' tab.  You should see a bunch.  Check one of your document directories now.  If you don't see any previous versions, enable it.  Google how for your version of Windows.

You need a computer that is working & can read the files to restore to, of course.  You might have to rebuild a machine from scratch, patch it to a working level, & finally restore the files or you might have to buy a new one.  Either one can take a while, so keeping a working spare around isn't a bad idea.  A Windows 7 machine I rebuilt recently needed a gigabyte of patches & I needed a second PC because the network connection wouldn't work until I downloaded new drivers.  I lost count of the number of times I rebooted it.  Even with a good fiber connection & fairly constant attention, it took me 2 days, so it's worth spending some time to make sure bare metal restores are easy to do.  You can create Windows Recovery Disks & use its backup, but that's what took me 2 days.  It was all the user had & it was better than nothing.

I use Clonezilla (It's free!) to make an image of my PC once a year or so.  It's not the easiest program to use, but there's a lot of FAQs out there to help the novice.  I recommend making a disk image & an image of each partition.  If a replacement disk is even 1 byte smaller, the disk image often won't restore, but the partition images usually will.  I update only the Windows partition image every year or so.  That means at most I have a year of patches to install & changed files to copy over.

At home, I have a couple of 3tb (terrabyte) USB drives to store most of my files, including the Clonezilla images & backup files from my C:\ drive.  I backup with Allways Sync.  Selected files on the C:\ drive are copied to USB drive 1 (USB1) with all modifications & deletions every night.  Another job copies all files from USB1 to USB2 once a week, but doesn't modify or delete existing files, just creates new ones if there is any difference.  USB2 is kind of a mess & has a lot of duplication, but that's OK.  There's plenty of extra room & it's an added level of protection.  Once a week, Scandisk runs on the USB drives & I check for errors.  (A bad error will show as weird directories.)  If I see anything that looks ugly, I'll buy another drive & retire the old one.  I don't wipe it, but keep it in the closet, just in case.

You think I'm crazy, don't you?  Just remember that a new USB drive is less than $100 & I buy a new one every few years.  Allways Sync cost $25 & I buy a new copy for each computer.  You probably spent more at Starbucks today than I spend on my restore solution in a month.  I spend it because I've learned the hard way just how badly it hurts to lose files.

I've been saving various pictures, documents, & other portable files for over 30 years.  I still have a copy of the gun control topic in the Jerry Pournelle RoundTable on GEnie which I grabbed with my Atari using Aladdin & a 1200 baud modem.  (If you get that, you're a nerd. If you don't, here is a quick explanation.) I'm not trying to prove that I'm a pack rat, but that I have a lot of old, unique files that are impossible to replicate & that brings up two other issues.

The first is file integrity.  Files aren't always copied &/or stored reliably.  As a drive fails, it can corrupt a file.  That corruption can look like a modification which is then propagated to the backup files.  Drive space is cheap.  Losing a beloved photo is not, thus the messy, oversized USB2 drive.

The second is proprietary file formats.  Switching from the Atari to a PC was a good learning experience.  No programs & few file formats transferred between them.  Even Microsoft files haven't transferred over the years.  My first PC had DOS 3.1.  I doubt it had any programs in common with my Windows 10 machine & I'm not going to update the format of all my files every few years, so I store files in generic, well supported formats.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes also have limited lives, but I'll discuss that can of worms in a separate post.

The cloud is handy for quick, portable access, but it's not a restore solution nor is it completely trustworthy.  How long would it take to restore a terrabyte of data over your Internet connection?  Don't forget to factor in throttling over 10gb or whatever your monthly limit is. 

Worse,  your files may not be secure & I don't just mean from hacking, but from the service itself.  Apple wound up deleting a lot of privately owned music once & Amazon has deleted entire user accounts along with all their files.  It isn't likely to happen to you or me, but I don't want to take the chance.

Anyway, that's what 'back up' is all about - planning for future retrieval of files either singly or enmasse.  It's not hard to do, but it means regularly thinking about the process from the flip side.  How hard will it be to restore this file if I need to?  How accessible will it be in 5 or 10 years?

I've Got Wood!

My neighbor bought the house across the street about a decade ago.  His parents rented it when he was a kid & he had a lot of fond memories, especially of the big maple in the side yard.  Back then it had three trunks.  The one his swing used to hang on was gone when he moved in & shortly thereafter, a second trunk came down.  A couple of weeks ago, a storm knocked down the final trunk & he gave me 4 big pieces.  They're almost two feet in diameter, so I've been turning some nice, big bowls plus a bunch of little ones out of it.

My big lathe (I have 4.) has a 24 inch swing, but the biggest bowl I've ever turned was just under 22 inches when dry.  It's tough to cut & mount such a big piece.  They're heavy & often have voids, cracks, & other flaws that only become apparent after I've put in hours of work.  I found a 16d nail buried deep inside one of my neighbor's maple pieces.  That was quite a surprise which cost me over an hour to pry it out & put a new edge on my gouge.  Remounting & shaping the bowl cost it an inch in diameter, too.  Still, when everything works out, the results are stunning mostly due to the natural beauty of the wood.

When I first started turning, I was too cheap to buy wood to practice with, so I used chunks out of the firewood pile.  Even my clunky first attempts couldn't hide just how pretty the grain was.  It was unique & gorgeous!  Oak has a distinct grain, but it wasn't until I turned a bowl that I found how the grain could contrast to the rays within the wood to create a bullseye that draws the attention.  Osage Orange is so hard & tight grained that it almost doesn't need finishing.  I occasionally find odd coloration in the wood, too.  There's a fungus that gets in some woods like Box Elder which is a bright red, but more often there are shades of brown like ambrosia maple.

Green (just cut, wet) wood is the easiest to turn & there isn't much dust, but it takes more time to finish.  The wood roughens as it dries & every tool mark pops.  They can be difficult to scrape or sand out.  The bowls deform too, but that can be a plus.  Wood shrinks most radially, some across the tangent, & almost not at all along its length, but each piece varies a lot depending on the species, knots, heart or sap wood & even the time of year. I try to turn so the orientation, shape, & thickness of the finished piece let the wood change itself into neat shapes as it dries without cracking.  I succeed fairly often now after only 15+ years of practice.

It's amazing how many different species of wood I can find locally.  I grew up on a farm & have been a woodworker most of my life, so I thought I knew something about wood.  Then I started turning & realized I didn't know much even about those I'd used all my life.  I started collecting pieces & turn an egg out of each.  An egg shows off the grain in every orientation & shows how the wood deforms as it dries.  I have over 75 unique eggs now.

I've pretty much stuck with turning green, found wood & rarely run low.  Not only do I have a small woods on the farm, but I often turn bowls for neighbors & coworkers.  If they give me enough wood to turn a few bowls, I give them one for free which is a great keepsake & conversation piece.  Occasionally I sell them & it helps pay for my hobby, but I hate that part, so most are given away as gifts.

The Damn Goats!

 
Buttercup & Rosie look so cute & peaceful lying on their house, but they're sneaky like that.  They lull us into a sense of false security as they wait to take advantage of any slip.  While they're not particularly smart, they are cunning, curious, & persistent.  They're also very athletic.  Their house is 4 feet tall, twice their height, but they jump up there constantly.  When they get into our back yard, they'll stand straight up on their hind legs to clean out the bird feeders, if they don't tear them down with their teeth.  They also tend to prune any plant that is least likely to survive it.  They're kind of a walking application of Murphy's Law on the world around them.

Why do we even have goats?  My wife, Marg, used to collect animals.  It was great for our children growing up with all sorts, but she strained our budget on too many occasions.  She's always hated goats for some reason, so every time she mentioned getting another animal, I threatened to get a goat.  It worked for decades, but eventually I had to put up or shut up.  Besides, I like goats.  They're ornery & fun.


I didn't just buy the first goat I could find, though.  They're social, so I wanted at least two fairly small, hornless ones.  (Yes, horns can be removed & I've seen it done several ways.  Sometimes it lasts, but I won't do it.  Google it if you have a hard heart & a strong stomach.)  I didn't care much about their sex, though.  Does would be great, but I can turn a buck into a wether.  The few bucks I've known were all too aggressive & smelled like a filthy urinal.

It was difficult to find the goats I wanted.  Most goats have horns & they're curious critters that stick their entire heads in places where they have no business.  Their nimble lips & sharp teeth cause enough problems without adding a set of sharp hooks into the mix.  Horns are like a level-up monster card.  They'll pull off boards or hang themselves up in fences.  Worse, they could stab or cut the horses as they wander under their bellies & between their legs which they do frequently.  Plain head butts hurt enough without them, too.

I finally found a gal nearby who had a Pymy buck & was given a Nubian doe.  He was 18" tall & she was twice his height, but lust found a way.  About 6 months later, she wound up with a pair of Kinder does for sale.  (A goat cycles every 3 weeks & it takes 5 months for gestation.)  Pygmies have horns & are used for both meat & milk, but Nubians are one of the hornless, dairy breeds.  Since horns follow the maternal line, Rosie & Buttercup were hornless & cheap.  Perfect!

My daughter wanted goat's milk, but that never happened.  I'm the only one who knows how to milk a goat or cow & I already get up at 4:30am.  I don't think I could handle getting up any earlier, especially on cold winter mornings.  My biggest fear was babies, though.  I'm not sure anything is cuter than a kid.  Selling or eating them after they've bounced their way into your heart is tough.  I could manage either, but I don't think the girls could for all that Marg says that the 'damn goats' are all mine.   She obviously likes them more than she lets on because she hasn't killed them yet.

Last weekend, one of the girls forgot to latch the gate into the grooming area & they slipped in to chew the leather up on all the whips.  Why?!!!  They don't eat meat or need the salt.  We have salt blocks all over, but that's typical behavior from them.  I thought we'd be eating goat for dinner, but Marg laughed about it.  I'm still waiting for the bill for new crops, though.  Goats are cheap to buy, but pretty expensive to keep.