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.

People In Love, probably not easy to find anymore (rare).

hen musicians could play not just an instrument but several instruments and also had good vocals the melodies were more complex and therefore better, on average. Not dancing and “showing flash”.

Too much this past week

aining or catching water now that summer is over (depending on which calendar) is OK, but we really needed that water last month for agriculture, gardens etc.

It has rained a lot lately, but it does not make up for the long drought (climate collapse) which impoverished many plants and animals.

Matt Hemmings from United Utilities Group PLC says “Every Drop Counts” in corporate PR communications this week. “We wanted to get in touch to say a big thank you for helping us save water during the recent hot, dry weather, and to share an update on our water resources as we head into autumn. While we’ve seen some welcome rain recently, and there’s more in the forecast, our reservoirs still need a lot more to recover fully.”

Based on what they previously said, at no point was there a critical water shortage in Manchester area. I know some places in France virtually “ran out of water”.

When will climate action be taken seriously???

3 years pass by just like that

y laptop is just one week away now from 1,000 days of uptime:

 uptime
 12:54:06 up 993 days,  4:06,  3 users,  load average: 8.19, 8.70, 7.92

Knock on wood, “1000 days” soon!

Meanwhile, we’ve taken advantage of the holidays to do a lot of exercise and at one point I went to a gym, seeing that I can still ‘fullstack’ all the equipment there. What makes it more special than before is my age.

How time flies.

This makes no sense.

reat! So statCounter altered what it is measuring and thus, overnight, it puts Windows like 10-15% higher than days ago. Maybe it’s time to rely on Clownflare’s data more. At least it’s more consistent over time.

Or maybe… wait a few more days for statCounter to sort out the data and make things more consistent.

Coming out shortly.

oday the new statistics from statCounter should come out. Maybe hours from now. I am very interested in them. I am eager to see if there’s an upward trend in GNU/Linux usage as seen by the data they collect.

We’re going through an important transitionary period.

When time has little effect

he incredible thing about 10cc is that these people still perform. They’ve performed since the 1960s (before 10cc was formed). They possess the same qualities: still the same skills on musical instruments and virtually the same voice (no smoking, one might assume). Less than a decade ago they sounded the same, as people in comments too point out.

I wish I can do the same in my 70s (hopefully 80s) as I did in my 20s.