Category: technology

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Tackling the Chaos – the Saga Continues

I started yesterday talking about the latest part of the Google drive saga, with the discovery of the ‘Desktop’ folder, which was inside the ‘My computer’ folder, which was inside the ‘Computers’ folder. There were two other folders in the ‘My computer’ folder, one called ‘Documents’ and one called ‘Pictures’. I opened ‘Documents’ and it contained one other folder, called ‘Bridport’, which rang a vague bell, but when I opened it, it was empty. I tried drilling down through some of the folders in ‘Desktop’ too, and found that they were also empty.

It was very puzzling, but I went back to the list of files in descending order by size. At the top were some music files, which I didn’t want to delete because I regularly access them from my phone, but I had a go at deleting some of the photo files again. I started getting warning messages telling me that the files would be deleted ‘…from all devices…’ which spooked me a bit. Did this mean they would be deleted from my hard drive ‘Desktop’ as well? I decided to leave that until I could confirm that they were still there, and went back to copying all the photos from my phone to my computer and then deleting them from Google photos, and the ones from the latest phone backup from my phone into the ‘USB devices and SD cards folder’. This got the storage down to about 11GB again, and I left it at that.

The next day when I restarted the computer, the usual messages about my cloud space being 99% full came up. I opened Google Drive and went to the Desktop folder. Inside it was a complete list of the folders on my computer desktop, including the ‘Backup photos’ folder which I had specifically created to save the photos I’ve been downloading and deleting from Google Drive to save space. I opened it, and it contained files which I had created only the day before.

At this point, I need to explain how I organise the files on my computer. My virtual desktop is pretty similar to the state of my physical desktop (and you’ve seen photos of that). Although I am quite organised in having folders for important stuff: individual projects, my blog, poems, accounts, novel, etc etc, I create them on the Desktop and shove the lower folders and various files inside them – although I also have a tendency to save files to the desktop ‘temporarily’, so there are always quite a few odd documents or photos lying around which I don’t sort out, so that the whole thing becomes a bit of a mess, and I rely heavily on the ‘recently accessed files’.

And it seemed as if not just my phone, but all the files from my desktop (in other words, all the files I had put – and was continuing to put – on my terabyte of hard drive) were being automatically backed up to the 15gb of cloud space… tbc

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Tackling the… Whatever

Some days when I start writing without knowing what to say, it develops, and by the end I feel as though I’ve written something interesting – or at least not too shameful. Then there are days like yesterday when I start but stop half way through because I’m not getting anywhere and, honestly, I just can’t be arsed.

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

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Tackling the… What was the question?

I know that most of the things I worry about are unimportant. I know that the worst scenarios will probably never happen.

My attention bounces from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next ad infinitum, and I can’t retrace my steps to see how I got there, and I can’t see where it’s going, and the track of my thoughts goes round and back and crosses and intersects and spirals down then shoots off into another dimension and still I am no more secure in what I know, I have reached no conclusions, made no plans, discovered no revelations and… what was the question again?

So far today I have: dropped a match into a candle glass and left it to burn because the glass still contained wax but no wick and I thought the match would act as a wick, but minutes later there was a crack and bits of broken hot glass on the floor (fortunately the flame had gone out); then in the shower I picked up a bottle, saw the opening was at the bottom (the only indicator that usually works and I specifically noticed it), squeezed some of the contents onto my fingers, rubbed it into my hair and then realised it wasn’t lathering because it was conditioner, not shampoo. I’m not saying either of those actions was disastrous – on the contrary, they are both perfectly normal, and I cleared up the broken glass (when it was cool enough to touch) and thoroughly rinsed my hair before trying again and getting the right bottle this time. Oh, and I lost my reading glasses in between coming out of the spare room where I do my yoga and into the bedroom to get towels for the shower, and had another look in the spare room before finding them on the book shelves in the bedroom where I must have put them all of thirty seconds earlier. As I said, perfectly normal.

So where is this train of thought taking me? And is it anywhere that I – or you, my putative reader – would choose to go?

Once again, I stare at the clutter on my desk in search of inspiration ‘A tidy desk is the sign of a tidy mind.’ Evidently, the converse is also true, as mine perfectly depicts the state of my mind. The clear space in the centre front is where my phone was, which I had to move in order to take the photo. As soon as I brought it into this room, and within reach of the wifi, it sent me a message informing me that my data cannot be backed up because my cloud storage is full, and I need to upgrade it – the Magic Data Pot in action once again. I have now downloaded all my photos up to 2019 to my hard drive, and deleted them from the cloud and my phone. When the will to live returns, I’ll do the same for last year…

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Wenesday Morning

I was going to go to the shop, but slept in and didn’t get up till half past seven, so decided to skip my exercise routine and get dressed straight away. But when I looked at the shopping list, I thought: I’m not desperate for any of these things, I haven’t got enough milk to last the day but I’ve got some long-life in the cupboard, and whatever else I need will depend on what I’m going to eat over the next few days, and I can’t think about planning what I’m going to eat so I’ll leave it till tomorrow – except tomorrow I have to go to the doctor’s for half past eight to get a blood test to check on how my cholesterol’s doing – so better not have anything too cheesy for dinner tonight – and I guess I can go to the shop after the doctor’s, it will be a bit later than usual but hopefully not too busy.

But what am I going to have for dinner tonight, or the next few days? What’s in the freezer? It’s full of plastic boxes, and since the start of the year I’ve been making a list of what’s in there and tallies to tick things off, but there are no labels on the boxes so I have to guess. Because on alternate Saturdays (I have takeaway on the others) I make a casserole in the slow cooker, and put three quarters of it into plastic boxes and freeze them. But which is which? They look pretty much the same. This one has cannellini beans, I think that’s from before the time I started writing them down, and it’s either lamb hotpot or belly pork in cider. It’ll do.

The sun is shining and the dead heads of the hydrangea are looking at me through the window, the ones I didn’t cut back in the autumn. If I cut them now, will I cut off the new shoots as well so it doesn’t flower?

What to do? Make a cup of coffee, prepare porridge and put it in the microwave ready for later, and put away the things from the drainer because they must be dry by now. Like any other day. Then I’ll go on the computer and delete some more files, because the backup from the phone will be on there by now, or will be as soon as the phone’s connected to the wifi. And write? Or do I feel too shit to share?

When I get upstairs I remember I need to do the washing today, and it’s sunny, so I sit on the bed and think – what needs to go in and what am I going to forget and kick myself about later? Two pairs of ripped jeans should be in the bin, I forgot them last week and again today because the bin men have already gone.

Groundhog day all over again. Spring is coming, but what changes? At least I’m up and dressed.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 2 of …?

I think I might have solved the mystery of my magic-porridge-pot always-full Google drive.

I spent a lot of time on Sunday downloading photos to my hard drive and deleting emails from my Gmail account, and got the drive down to 75% full, only to get up yesterday and find that, once again, Google was screaming at me that my storage was 99% full and I needed to buy more space.

When I logged onto my Google Drive it showed me the standard folders I always have: Accounts, Crafts, mp3 files, Meditation and Poetry , with no ‘loose’ files (I sorted all those out ages ago, and only save things into those folders). But when I clicked on the link to ‘list files in descending size order’ I was shocked to find screen after screen full of other files, including lots of photos which I knew for a fact I’d deleted the day before. I clicked on one, and in a panel on the right of the screen titled ‘details’ I found out it was in a folder called ‘Huawei  P20 Lite’ (which is the name of my phone) – which didn’t appear in the list of folders I could see.

What had happened (I surmised) was that it had noticed that there was some space available on my Google drive, and decided to fill it by backing up everything from my phone.

I then had a look at the space on my phone, and found that I’d used 57GB out of a total of 64GB, of which 25GB was photos. I had photos on there from when I got this phone – in August 2018, and all the ones I’d taken since – which is a rather a lot. So, I spent most of yesterday morning deleting (again) files from my Google drive, and also deleting the older ones from my phone.

Now, you might ask yourself – as I asked myself – what possible justification can there be for supplying 15GB of free cloud space to back up a device which has up to 64GB capacity? – but a moment’s thought shows there’s a perfectly rational explanation, centred round that word ‘Free’ – Google is quite happy to supply me with more cloud space to backup my data, at £16/year for another 85GB. Now, admittedly that’s not a huge expense, but bear in mind that I already have over four times as much unoccupied space as that on the 1 Terabyte hard drive which came with my PC.

Not only that, but as I type this, my server has been merrily chugging away backing up the data from  my phone onto my Google drive yet again, and has just informed me that my storage has now gone from 77% to 88% full, so that soon I won’t be able to send or receive emails, and I might like to consider buying some more…

I mention all this partly because it took up a lot of yesterday, but also because it seems like a good metaphor… to be continued.

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Tackling the Chaos: Part 1 of …?

My Google Drive is permanently full, and has been for years (literally, in the literal sense, years). Every so often I purge some files, photos or emails and somehow it stumbles on, but I opened a new gmail account – I think it was in 2017 – which is what I mostly use for email these days. However, I still have the old one as there are people and organisations who have that as my email address (like the yahoo email which I’ve had for over twenty years to the best of my knowledge and which still gets lots of emails every day, but I don’t want to close because some contacts only have that address).

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued

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Apostrophes

I spent my last half hour in bed this morning thinking about apostrophes, and how simple the rules are, and why do so many people have a problem with them, and how can I explain them to people? Actually, I’ve been thinking about it pretty much ever since, and still am.

Because the rules really aren’t that difficult, but I’m just terrible at explaining things, and that’s why I couldn’t be a teacher.

The first, and most common, reason for using an apostrophe is to show contraction – where some letters have been left out: aren’t, I’m, couldn’t.

The other reason (yes, there are only two), is to show possession: Fred’s brother, the cat’s whiskers. And the only part of this which is tricky is that for words that don’t end in S, you add ‘S, but for words that do end in S, it’s usual to put the apostrophe after the S. So, a maid who works for a lady is a lady’s maid, but a college for ladies is a ladies’ college. That’s it.

Most of the confusion comes from the tendency these days for people to throw an apostrophe at any word that ends in S (usually plurals) whether or not the context is to do with indicating possession. They don’t even do it consistently – like a chip shop advertising: fish, chips and pea’s. Why does peas warrant an apostrophe but not chips? They both end in S. Do they think peas is different because it has a vowel before the S? In which case, what about pies and pizza’s? Or even pie’s and pizzas?  

But oh for the days when only the signs outside fish and chip shops – or greengrocers – were affected. These days it happens everywhere – anything you read, not just on the internet but everywhere. There must have been three generations of English teachers since I learnt this 60 years ago, and somewhere down the line the transmission has broken down. And it makes me want to weep every time I see it.

I understand about language having to change, and I break ‘the rules’ in ways that would horrify my teachers, but I do it consciously, consistently, knowing the effect I want to achieve, what’s important and what isn’t. But this has no logic to it, no reason, no consistency. Why bother at all? Why not just abolish apostrophes altogether, as e e cummings did with capital letters, rather than chuck them in whenever you feel like it for no reason whatsoever?

Incidentally, a few paragraphs back, the mighty Word has inscribed a blue squiggly line under my use of it’s in it’s usual (and just did it again). It’s trying to tell me I need to use its – which I would, if I was showing possession. But I’m not. It’s is a contraction for it is, and interestingly it hasn’t underlined it that time.

Yes, I grant you that is the one time when apostrophe might become confusing. But it’s not that hard.

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Lost Photos

Today my computer informs me that:

There is insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t ‘requested’ any special font, I’ve just opened Word as I do every morning. I close the message, and the usual one about my cloud storage being full. The blank page appears in ‘draft’ format – the right-most of the format icons on the bottom tool bar. I click on the left-hand icon, which is apparently called ‘print view’, and the page appears in the normal format. This is the second time this has happened lately.

I check, just in case, on File Explorer, and note that my hard drive has 718 GB free out of 918 GB – in other words, oodles of spare capacity. I should really do something about the cloud space though, delete some more photos from Google photos, but it will only fill up again – it’s been like this since at least before I got my current phone, which regularly reminds me how many weeks it is since it’s been able to backup to the cloud – well over two years’ worth, if I remember correctly.

Speaking of which, I mentioned the other day that it was surprising that my rotating desk top photos didn’t include any from the last part of my journey. I decided to correct that, and had a look in the ‘Europe 2012’ file on my external hard drive, when I had a shock. This drive holds the contents of the old hard drive of my original laptop, made for me before I went travelling by an IT guy (met through those networking breakfasts) who advised me on a replacement laptop. He offered to take the old laptop off my hands and put the drive into a casing for an external hard drive, so I could keep all the data from the original laptop, and also use it as a backup drive. When I was travelling I backed up my photos, notes and blog posts onto it, and I still have it attached to my current PC, which is where I found the desk tops file. The shock came when I realised I didn’t have any folders at all for the later places: my last few days in Norway, then Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels. Nor did I have any backups of the ones taken in the following years including all the ones I took when I lived in Prague.

Those photos should all be on the laptop I used in those years, until the beginning of 2015, just before I moved here, when I got a new one (the one I spilt coffee over and replaced with this PC in 2017). Fortunately I still have that laptop which I took travelling, the one I call my Old, Old laptop. I’ve seen it – and had it working – in the last year. I’ve been looking for it for two days (well, on and off). It must be in this study somewhere…

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Home to Roost

In my study, but once again, Microsoft decided it needed to reconfigure my version of Office, so I had to wait. I spent the time picking some more books to go downstairs on the new shelves, and looking for more yarn to match the cardigan (or maybe it will be a blanket) I started crocheting two days ago, when I realised the fair isle jumper was going to be too tight, so I gave up on it till I decide whether I’m going to pull it back to the armpits and do it again, or leave it unfinished like so many other things I’ve started in my life.


Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.


By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.


Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.


In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.


The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell