Remember to save to disk, and do so very often

oday in the evening (or earlier tonight) I was typing up a rather long article in Techrights, where I am the main editor.

As usual, what typically happens is, strands (or trains) of thoughts quickly become streams of words, and words add up to sentences, paragraphs, then a draft of an article. Then I go through the article, which tends to be coherent as it was typed in one go (after planning, having had some time to condition myself to put together a topic to write about in the ‘correct’ sequence), I correct typos, improve the wordings, add some more links etc. (where suitable and readily available)

I do this on a remote laptop connected over the LAN with Barrier, so if there’s a network glitch it can result in lost keystrokes and long repeated keystrokes.

Not for the first time, the latter happened when I pressed “undo” (ctrl+z), so it began undoing things I edited, in effect deleting amendments made for several minutes (far worse than when it happens with backspace as the cursor goes all over the place). Typically I’d be “hands-off” when that happens, then re-do what was omitted. This time, however, two things went wrong: 1) I did not keep “hands-off”, not long enough anyway; so I could not re-do all the way. 2) I did not press ctrl+s (save) for quite some time, so reverting back to the file on disk wasn’t a possibility either. I tried, I even did so from another laptop.

Shit!

I lost some work.

On the bright side: 1) I remembered more or less 80% or more of the changes that I made and could reconstruct a lot (with slight variation, imperfect replication, maybe even better the second time around). 2) not much was lost (either words or time). 3) it was only the editing/correcting pass, not the writing pass. 4) there was a lesson or wake-up call here. I should take advantage of it.

I will probably still take the risk of writing over Barrier, but I need to save to disk more often and be vastly more prudent/careful when undoing gets ‘jammed’. There should be a way to re-do (ctrl+shift+z) everything and, failing that, there’s a file on disk that maintains a recent copy, not what’s on the screen/buffer.

My editing skills typically use past experience (incidents) to reduce chance of loss/error, so my wife was surprised that it happened to me. Writing this blog post probably takes a lot more time than the time the incident ‘cost’ me.

I wonder if other people can relate to this.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this (over an hour already), so documenting to myself – and maybe to others too -what happened can be hopefully prove useful.

There is no perfect (error-proof) way to edit text, but there are ways to reduce the risk and the cost of mistakes/crashes.

I opened two tickets with Evri recently.

Both tickets had the same reply.

Both got the reply wrong.

One can only conclude that: 1) no actual person looked into them. 2) they send the same reply to everything.

What is the point contacting Evri if nobody reads and the replies are bots without any logic?

I am documenting below what the bot says to all or most tickets (identical words):

Exactly the same as the last.

wrote to Evri today, early in the morning to be more specific, opening a second ticket after they had made an error by automation. Finally, after a week, I received a reply. Only after opening two tickets and further chasing the first (unhandled) one.

However, it seems to be a template and it refers generally to a lost parcel incident, which isn’t even remotely what this was about! So I wonder if this too is a bot reply. Notice the generic (no name) signature:

Update

260817-046188

Hi Roy,

Thank you for your reply regarding parcel reference .

I’m sorry to hear your parcel still hasn’t been located and I have escalated this with the courier’s manager to be investigated and to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We will try to retrieve the parcel however at this stage it is likely the parcel is unfortunately lost.

I’m sorry that this has happened, we will liaise with the sender to inform them of this outcome. I would recommend you also contact them as it is within their gift to discuss next steps and consider the options available to you.

Once again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience regarding your parcel delivery.

Kind regards,
Evri Customer Services

From what I can gather, they send false bills to many people and hope that some fools will pay the false bills, knowing it would be cheaper than spending half an hour calling them and then spending a lot of money in phone bills (more than the “worth” of the false bill).

Just reading the above generic (and false) reply is itself further waste of time. It speaks of something that was not even reported!

Enshittification as standards lowered.

wrote about 10cc last night. It was a local band that reached international fame and had very creative number-one hits.

By 1974, they had a large enough portfolio to put on a good show on BBC. Despite it being 52 years old, the music has aged well and the talent extends from instruments to vocals (they have both). Earlier today my father agreed with me that music has gotten a lot worse and simpler – and not in the flattering sense of the word “simpler”. He too misses some of the old music.

This music is still available – for those who wish to access it.

We also spoke about the hospitality sector and how competitive it has become (again, not in the good sense of the word “competitive”). He told me that the health club he once managed had in it a member who was the mother of the owner of a local (nearby) hotel and a wide array of similar hotels worldwide. It’s now hard to compete with those “giants”. Back in the 90s the consolidation and ripoff that follows wasn’t so bad.

Prices of things will continue to soar, global warming will make life harder for many, and the media hardly even mentions climate change anymore.

The media too has been subjected to “consolidation”. A lot is now owners by the biggest polluters. Human civilisation does not matter to these people.

HE weather here has cooled down considerably, so I am back to drinking hot coffee and researching for upcoming articles.

This coming week I’ll stay indoors more; I expect writing capacity will hence increase.

y webhost since 2003 is having issues with bots, but it has blocked Tor instead. We’re working to undo this.

If raw Web stats are to be believed, the main domain (not subdomains) of schestowitz.com got a million visitors last month. AWStats isn’t good enough at classifying bots, so this is overly flattering and… just false.

The state of the Web (noise as traffic, humans being a minority of the whole) is truly worrying. It wasn’t like this in 2003.

I am really not happy with the direction the Internet has taken.

Incoming:

believe that of all months, at least here in the UK, August is the hottest (I could check to be sure). This year heatwaves began in May and even in April we had some hot days.

This is global warming. Maybe it’s “fun in the sun” sometimes, but what about the impact on agriculture, the price of water, and the safety of animals?

August in the UK seems like Spain several decades ago.