I had a high school teacher who managed to leave a shopping bag full of our term papers on a train and made us rewrite them all. That experience made me relatively vigilant with respect to keeping back-ups. But enough years of not having disasters have had me dropping my guard. Recently, my ISP was taken over by another company and, despite the emails that said this would be transparent to the user, the mail server vanished a couple of weeks ago. I probably lost a few days worth of mail and I know some friends got caught in it because of subsequent emails from them. I still need to update my address with some mailing lists and the like.
I've subsequently discovered that the web server is also gone. The web pages I had on that home page are pretty cobwebby, but I didn't particularly want to lose them. Fortunately, the shell access still works, so I've been doing an intense salvage operation while I still can. I'm not sure yet where I will rehost that material, though. The rant about Politics, Economics and the American League East will probably end up here. And, of course, the travel stuff will go on Xenophilia. (It is actually there, but not yet linked up from the front page.) At any rate, the whole thing is a pain and puts me back into ISP shopping mode, because of the way it was handled.
It also reminds me I should burn some backup CDs of photos I don't have anywhere but the hard drive of this machine. And I should really do something about making sure there is nothing I want on my old IBM 486 laptop, which hasn't been used in umpty ump years.
As for actually doing anything, this was a busy and somewhat frustrating week. The frustration came with driving into work on Wednesday so I could go out to an afternoon teleconference. The subject was "Lessons Learned" but, alas, one of the lessons they'd failed to learn had to do with actually coordinating the teleconference. I watched the technician fuss with VTC equipment for maybe 45 minutes. The real waste of time was the drive out to Chantilly and back, though. One plus is that I have finally decoded Rosslyn parking meters. See, parking in our building is a pain, because they park cars four deep and you inevitably have to wait for them to reshuffle a bunch to get yours out. And it costs six bucks, though I can get reimbursed for that. There are 12 hour meters, which make it cost the same if you're there all day and are cheaper if you're parking for just a few hours. The catch is how to tell a 12 hour meter from a 2 hour meter before you park and get out and look. I had this sudden epiphany and realized that the 12 hour meters are green, while the 2 hour meters are blue. There are also 1 hour meters (grey) and 6 hour meters (red). Not that I drive in all that often, but this is immensely useful for when I do.
The busy part was a couple of after work activities. After the frustration on Wednesday, I decided that I should just drive home and take the metro back in to work. That made it easier to go to a talk at National Geographic that evening on "The New Grand Tour." I was rather disappointed in the questions at the panel discussion, which seemed somewhat too basic to me. But, then, I've done an extended trip, while most of the audience obviously hadn't. The question I had (and didn't get called on to ask) had to do with a more basic premise. National Geographic has published an itinerary of a "new grand tour." But is that whole concept of "must see" places all that meaningful? True, their list is a lot broader than the 19th century European destinations. But once you start listing the destinations that you think every well-rounded person should be familiar with, you run the risk of narrowing the range of places they even consider.
The other after work excursion of the week was Monday night, when I went to the Library of Congress to hear Jack Gottlieb's talk, "Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish." This was about the Jewish roots of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood music. He was very entertaining, though not entirely convincing in some of his examples. For example, he traces a particular Torah trop (pattern of chanting) forward to Gregorian chant to Bach to Paul Simon. I did buy a copy of his book, so I'm obviously willing to listen more to his arguments.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel