25.10.14

Cash Flow?

Talking to Mrs W the other day about cash flow: something she'd neither heard of nor thought about. She came up with these names as she struggled to understand the concept:

Cash Slow
Cash Fly

Made me laugh!

DW

23.10.14

School Photo

We donated some English language books to Siri's old school yesterday and several teachers were dragooned into meeting us. That was good. We also went to see an English lesson in progress and I volunteered to talk to them ... I did that and learned something, Here is the photo they took to commemorate our visit! The Director and three English teachers ... What I learned was that they need my Kabul in the Classroom approach to teaching English! DW

When a Computer Dies ...

I arrived in Muscat on Saturday a couple of weeks ago. I had arrived via overnight flights so I went to bed to catch up on my sleep. I then spent a little time exploring the area around the hotel, talked to Mrs W and so on. Then just before I decided it was time to review my work for the following day, I connected my Galaxy camera to my MacBook Pro laptop and uploaded my latest photos. Then I decided to delete all photos on the camera as I had two backups of them. I started the process, using the computer's systems. The fans started working overtime: this has happened before and since I had an SSD and 8 Gb of RAM I was not worried. I had heard that whirring before. Then the laptop closed down. Let me cut a long story short: I was about 15 hours away from starting work, I had a meeting scheduled in about an hour from the melt down and it seemed to me that something had burned out in the Mac. I tried and tried to revive it as it is an expensive piece of equipment. I spent time on my phone gathering ideas from various computer disaster forums on the web. Nothing worked and nothing helped. The Tools of my Trade In my business, my computer is the tool of my trade: I cannot work without it. My course this week was Advanced Excel. I needed a computer. I had found an electronics shop in the department store next to the hotel earlier in the day so I went back and went back. I scanned the laptops they had for sale and the prices looked OK. NO Macs but that was fine for me. I bought this Toshiba Corei7 based computer. It looked fine and was a 64 bit systems running Windows 8. I have since upgraded to Windows 8.1 and that is better because W8 has a lengthy learning curve to get used to it. Now, all of my files were on that MacBook AND on my external HDD ... my 1Tb fail safe back up ... it failed too. I simply could not read it no matter what. I followed someone's advice and did a quick format of it and then downloaded some data recovery software and found everything ... all in code though so I really had little idea of what I was looking at. Then that failed too. I was completely alone. 12 hours to go. What on earth does one do now? They do not sell or support Apple products in Oman! The Cloud The Cloud is a wonderful thing and without gmail, dropbox and a few other online goodies I would have struggled to look credible on day one of my five day course. The upshot was that I found most of my materials but I know I had done a lot of work on upgrading the spreadsheet files from the resources that came with one of the books I use for some aspects of my Excel work. Gone ... I would have to re work them at some stage. Ten hours to go. I decided I would sleep and wake early as I normally do these days anyway. Especially if Mrs W is with me, I wake up around 5 and do my final prep then so that we can be together in the evenings after work. I woke at 3 am! Thai time 6 am ... that was fine for me. I started working with coffee in hand and everything went well. I put my day together and it went well. What About my Backup? The longer term problem is not solved: what about all of my files that seem to have gone from MscBook and external HDD? I know there is software that can help but I did not want to corrupt anything so I was wary and did nothing myself. It cost me a lot of time as I recreated my work but I felt better that way. I waited until I got home and knowing that we were going into the city on Monday waited until then ... there is an Apple shop there. We explained my plight and whilst they are only retail they kindly let me attach my SSD from my MacBook to one of the Macs and copy a few files over ... only a few but I was grateful for that. Tuesday, into town to the better IT shop there and they were flummoxed. Their initial efforts drew a blank. I showed them the software available and left them to it. Wednesday, they had opened my Mac SSD but could not open my newly, fully formatted 1Tb external HDD. There seems to be no end to this saga. I had decided I will spend no more money on the MacBook, having recently upgraded it to SSD and doubling its RAM. I know it would mean sending or taking it to Bangkok and who knows what they would find? So when I got home I looked for the copying software and installed it: it wouldn't work for me, telling me it couldn't find the disk format this software worked with. I found something else that supported several disk formats and I took a risk and bought it: not expensive but I bought it. Last night, then, almost two weeks after the system failure, I got most of my data files off the MacBook disk and as I type I have just uploaded all of my photos. Conclusions Several years ago I had two separate catastrophic failures and learned from them. I have at least three versions of just about every file I have created since then. I had my MacBook and two backup disks with me: my external HDD and my external MacBook timewarp back up disk. I lost the laptop and then I lost the external HDD and the timewarp back up was no use to me. I believed I was covered for all eventualities. I was wrong! What should I do differently? Make sure I use all cloud services in full from now on, that is the only thing I had not done properly. Lesson learned again! DW