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Tech fail!

August 15, 2024 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

No – this blog post is not about my shiny new computer – the which is humming away gently to itself whilst solving complex problems with one hand tied behind its back! In that department things are currently going well (though there is, of course, still plenty of opportunity for everything to go t*ts up!).

This is about a couple of other technology failures which caused one of us (The Girl) considerable inconvenience, and cost the other (me!) a packet of money.

Those who know me well – or who have hung around these pages long enough – will know that I drive a black Lexus SUV (a GX470). This splendid vehicle was no spring chicken when we purchased it shortly after our arrival in Canada. It dates from 2003 and is now, of course, getting on for a decade older than it was when we acquired it.

Now – I love the thing to bits and it has served me very well for a relatively modest outlay – helped by the fact that I don’t put that much mileage on it these days. Even so sometimes things do go wrong with it – and a little while back it started exhibiting a whining noise that had not featured before. I figured that I had better take it to our friendly local garage and get them to take a look.

I had to go downtown anyway a couple of days later, so I though I would stop by on the way back. As I drove cautiously back up the Pat Bay highway the whining noise was suddenly joined by an entire son et lumière of flashing warning lights. This did not look good. I had to queue for a while to turn left in the middle of the ongoing construction on the highway and had visions of the Lexus phuttering out on me – the which would have caused no end of problems at that particular spot.

Mercifully it kept going and I was able to pull into the garage forecourt. I turned everything off and went to find ‘the guy‘. When we came back to start the vehicle so that I could to demonstrate the issue there was no sign of life at all – not a click, not a whine, not even a grinding noise… nothing!

Oh well – if the thing is going to break down completely the forecourt of a garage is not a bad place for that to happen.

Apparently the battery had failed spectacularly (a dead open short) and the alternator (in trying to charge it) had burned itself out. Fortunately we were going away for a couple of days so it mattered not that the car was out of action until we returned.

Just before we left on our short trip (more on this later) The Girl was summoned on our return, to Kamloops (and beyond) – for her work. This would mean that after we got home on the Sunday she would fly out again on the Monday evening. Flying is routinely such a pain these days that the subsequent news during the day on Monday of delayed flights and suchlike did not come as a surprise. The Girl made it to Vancouver and then had to wait for a considerable time for her onward flight to Kamloops.

When it finally boarded it was already quite late. The plane taxied out to the runway, waited its turn and then lined up for takeoff. Throttles open and the turbojet surged down the tarmac…

…only for the pilot to abort the takeoff half way down! Now this sort of thing is definitely bad news! After returning to the gate and spending a lengthy period being assaulted by out-of-control kids and the sweltering heat (and having nothing to watch except the mechanics scratching their heads) the airline bowed to the inevitable and cancelled the flight. Cheap hotel rooms for all concerned and up early the next morning for another attempt.

Guess who was not impressed…!

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Distance learning

December 9, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I am, as I write the introduction to this post, invigilating the end-of-course exam for some thirty students (mostly of Environmental Science) who have this term been studying Computer Literacy.

I am doing so remotely here in the comfort and safely of my studio, which explains why I can be tapping away at a blog entry on the left-most screen whilst still monitoring progress and responding to any queries on the other two. There is something decidedly surreal about about the process.

Having said that – there is (and has been throughout) something decidedly surreal about the whole undertaking this term.

I feel as though I know some of these students a little, having assisted them a fair bit throughout the course, responding to questions and observations, sharing the odd joke… and, of course, they have listened to me quite a lot – maybe three hours a week.

We have – however – none of us met. I have spoken directly to some whilst trying to help them – but other than the few who have their pictures as avatars, I do not even know what most of them look like. Students prefer to communicate with lecturers by chat or email. At the most they may enable audio so that we can talk – but they don’t do video with staff (unless prevailed upon so to do) and frankly I don’t blame them. They do get to see me (should they so choose) as they voted at the start of the course for my camera to be on.

It is the lot of the teacher – of course – to meet transiently and then to wish good and prosperous lives to a constant succession of new faces. I guess it is one of the things that attracts people to teaching – the opportunity to make human contacts (and to give something useful and meaningful in return). Doing so without ever meeting face to face, however, seems somehow inadequate.

Given the alternatives in this horrid year I am not complaining. I can scarcely imagine how any of this (and a gazillion other things that we maybe take a little too much for granted) might have been effected at all some fifteen or twenty years ago – let alone back in the mists of time (as when I was a student, for example).

It may be going a little far to suggest that we are the fortunate ones.

“Tell that to the young people of today. They won’t believe you…”

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A sweeter sound

November 25, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“Recording studios are interesting; a lot of people say – and I agree – that you should have a lot of wood in a recording studio. It gets a kind of a sweeter sound”.

Paul Allen

I find that I am spending a great deal of time in my little studio these days. There is the music – of course; we are very busy trying to get our album finished and out into the world. I also use the studio for my teaching (and the preparation thereof) – which is all done over the Internet at the moment for COVID-19 reasons. To accommodate these multiple tasks the studio has slowly evolved since the days when it was first set up back in 2016 and I posted the first pictures of it to this forum.

This is what it used to look like:

And this is how it is now:

Nice new rug, don’t you think?

Now – you might think that having three screens is simply overkill. When I’m teaching, however, the conferencing/chat software that we use runs on the centre screen – the presentation (or any other resource) that I am teaching from runs on the left one and the third one is used for looking ahead in the materials, for trying things out or checking details in answer to student queries that come up during the class. A lot of multi-tasking goes on! During Lab sessions this third screen runs a remote desktop session on an machine in one of the College’s computer labs so that I can assist any students who are working there.

It is quite a juggling act – and towards the end of term it all gets pretty tiring.

Roll on Christmas, say I…

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WordPress update

August 20, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

I thought it only fair that I should add quick addendum to my previous missive on the difficulties of turning out blog content using WordPress 5.5 (the latest update at the time of writing) – should one be wedded (as am I) to the ‘Classic’ editor rather than whatever it is that WordPress want us to adopt now.

My complaint (should you have missed that message) was that the ‘Classic’ editor (which WordPress is trying to phase out) ceased to work after the recent upgrade to WordPress 5.5.

After further research online I have ascertained that the problem actually lies elsewhere – probably with one or more third party plugins that get referenced by the editor.

OK – now this is going to get a tiny bit technical, but I promise to keep it as simple as possible.

These older plugins had continued to work across previous upgrades because the WordPress build itself used to include a library called Jquery.Migrate – the purpose of which was to provide a mechanism for out of date code to continue to operate even if using deprecated methods. WordPress have now removed that library – hence the pain.

Some good-hearted folk from the Open-Source community have kindly and generously provided a workaround in the shape of a new plugin – Jquery.Migrate.Helper. This gets tools such a the Classic Editor working again – albeit with a constant background cacophony of warning messages.

WordPress seems to be determined to be shot of the whole affair, however, which doesn’t bode well for future upgrades… regardless of the veritable howls of protest from around the community.

Now – what else does that remind you of?

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WordPress woes

August 15, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I am not a happy bunny!

I consider myself to be a long-term user of WordPress – the platform on which this blog is constructed. I have used the software since establishing the blog in 2012, but have also built a number of websites on it and have cheerfully recommended the platform to others looking to establish any sort of web presence themselves.

I am – to put it mildly – a fan.

I am not – however – a fan of some of the things that they have done recently.

When one writes routinely and regularly – an activity which requires speed and accuracy – one demands that the tools that one uses do a good, efficient job without getting in the way of the creative process. Such folk – and particularly those who are growing a bit long in the tooth (such as I) – do not like their tools to change because that interrupts the process, disrupts the flow and requires an agonising re-learning period just at the point that one is trying to focus elsewhere – on that which is being created!

The editor that one uses (or used to use) in WordPress is fairly basic, but it is simple – not unlike using a word processor such as Word. It had its drawbacks but many of us loved it and knew intimately its various foibles.

In their wisdom WordPress decided to replace it. Many of us old farts immediately disliked the new tool – a very different beast called the Block Editor. WordPress claims that it is simple to use. Well – let me tell you – it ain’t! Now – I realise this is the equivalent of some teenager telling you that his new mobile device is ‘simple’ to use. That is because it is – to him! Not so the rest of us…

Fortunately – in this case WordPress relented slightly and allowed us old buggers to continue using the ‘Classic’ editor whilst the hip young things got on and did whatever the heck it was that they wanted to do. So that was OK – until the recent upgrade to WordPress 5.5. Now – though the Classic Editor is still visible and can still be opened – lots of bits of it don’t work anymore. It is for that reason that this post looks a mess – ‘cos I can’t access the tools that I am used to employing to format it properly. I can’t format the image – I can’t add tags – I can’t look at the page in raw text mode – I can’t tell how many words I have written…

In fact – I can’t at the moment tell what it is going to look like when published – so my apologies if it is simply unreadable!

Bah!

Not impressed!

 

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Closer than you think

July 17, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“The stars up there at night are closer than you think.”

Doug Dillon

‘Twas but a mere handful of posts back that I was bemoaning the sad fact that the Chanteuse and I had been unable to get on with recording the seemingly endless (hopefully!) sequence of songs that I am clearly engaged upon writing at the moment. The latest in a line of tragic circumstances (in this case one that affects everyone – the COVID-19 pandemic!) had put a stop to any prospects of two non-isolation-group souls singing with each other – thus rendering recording impossible…

…unless we could come up with some means of so doing that did not require us to be in the same room (or even the same building)! Well – clearly other people are doing just such things, so it must be possible. Indeed there is a plethora of different technical solutions to the problem, but at first glance nothing that met our preferred and exacting requirements.

What we really wanted to be able to do was to record the Chanteuse’s voice exactly the way that we normally do – with the exception of each being in our own homes rather than together in my little studio. This would involve my playing the track from my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) – the Chanteuse listening to it on headphones and singing the vocal part along with it – and my recording the resultant performance back into the DAW. I would then need to be able to play the ‘completed’ track back so that we could both listen critically to it.

Clearly the best way to effect such a seemingly complex technical trick – given that we don’t have the budget of an international broadcaster or major telecommunications company – was to use the InterWebNet. But how might that even be possible?

Well, the solution that I eventually found – after trying just about every alternative that we could reasonably afford – comes from a German company and is called SessionLinkPRO. It is a web application that works – joy of joy – using just Google’s Chrome web browser and has a splendidly simple but effective interface that enables two computers – one running the DAW software and the other equipped with an audio interface and studio microphone – to send and receive simultaneous digital audio streams at studio quality. Sweet!

We had our first online recording session this week, finishing off a track that we had started recording back at the beginning of March. Though SessionLinkPRO also offer video links if required we chose to work simply with audio and we were naturally a little worried at first that not being able to see each other – and the inevitable slight audio delay in the round-trip signal – might make the session awkward. We were, however, rapidly into our stride and in discussion afterwards decided that – since we don’t really look at each other whilst working anyway –  the task at hand was no more taxing than it normally is.

The proof of the pudding is that – having done the first mixes of the track concerned – it is virtually impossible to tell that different parts of the vocal were recorded at different times and in entirely different circumstances.

Kudos again to SessionLinkPRO – and should any gentle reader be interested in the technical details of the setup I would be happy to furnish them.

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Lucky break

July 3, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I have written before in these pages on the subject of luck, though my first posting on the subject was all the way back at the start of 2012. Later that same year I posted this item – entitled ‘Playing the Odds‘ – which posited the notion that much of what we consider to be good luck, or the consequence of remarkable fortune – or even of pure coincidence – actually often turns out to be considerable less so than it at first seems. You will have to go back and (re)read that article should you wish to explore further, as this current entry simply shrugs its shoulders and draws attention to another fortuitous happening – without drawing any conclusions at all therefrom.

I have not grumbled of late in these postings about the pandemic-related difficulties of sourcing all manner of essential requisites – toilet roll (in the early days), disinfectant wipes (ongoing), bleach and other such important and protective items. That is because it is clearly unacceptable so to do in circumstances such as these; there being many who are considerably worse off than are we and whose need is considerably greater.

I have also certainly not complained about the impossibility of acquiring such important items as a decent webcam! Now – you may rightly cavil at regarding such things in the same light as PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), but the fact is that shortly after the lock-down was announced across the world, supplies of such useful devices (required in particular, of course, for video-conferencing) dried up completely. It became impossible to acquire such things anywhere, with delivery dates being marked as ‘unknown’ and prices in online stores being hiked by 300% – 400% (outrageous!). Such are the ‘laws’ of supply and demand.

Now – I have a really old webcam, but the quality is poor and – though it meets my needs for doing online exercise classes – it is an inadequate tool for delivering decent online lectures (such as I will be required to do in the autumn). I tinkered around trying using the cameras on my mobile devices (which may be effected by using such cool software tools as ‘DroidCam’) but whereas these solutions do work reasonably well it is never a good idea to use a device for multiple purposes. It might seem efficient so to do but in practice having to constantly reconfigure and reconnect the gadgets inevitably leads to occasions when things do not work properly, or one runs into a simple conflict of requirements.

I was thus delighted when the Chair of my department announced to us all by email that she was going to try to source some webcams. When I replied wishing her fortune in so doing I inadvertently sent the email to all recipients. I immediately received a reply from someone who – whilst not wanting to be bothered with my (irrelevant to him) message – did want to let me know that he had seen the very device that I was after for sale on Amazon. I looked – and sure enough there was just the webcam I wanted, available in two days (via Prime) and at the original price. Naturally I immediately ordered one and was delighted to receive it the quoted number of days thereafter – on a Sunday!

I figured that supplies must simply be moving again, but when I looked a few days later the prices has soared again to unreasonable hights and the devices were again in short supply.

What to make of this good fortune? Had I not accidentally ‘replied to all’ I would not now have my chosen webcam – at my preferred price…

Lucky! Lucky! Lucky!

 

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Good grief!

June 19, 2020 in Life in England | Permalink

I have refrained from making public comments regarding the world-wide handling of the COVID-19 pandemic because – with certain blatantly dishonourable exceptions (not to mention a small number of highly honourable ones) most nations and their governments have been muddling through in a reasonable fashion, given the severity and unprecedented nature of the crisis with which we are all are faced.

For Canada Justin Trudeau is considered to have had a reasonably good pandemic thus far, but here in British Columbia the real star is our Provincial Health Officer – Bonnie Henry – whose handling of the crisis has been beyond reproach… transparent, clear and rational.

One reason for maintaining an embarrassed silence with regard to other nations is that my mother country and its bizarre government – whilst having no trouble talking the talk (way too much in most cases) has proved almost uniquely incapable of walking the walk – tripping over its own clown shoes and falling flat on its face at every opportunity.

I have bitten my tongue at most of it, but hot on the heels of yesterday’s schooling of our mendacious Prime Minister and his entire cabinet by a Premiership footballer (yes – you read that correctly!) on the subject of free school lunches for disadvantaged children, comes the latest in the sorry saga of the UK’s Tracking and Testing program. Today’s announcement concerned the much touted tracing App that has been in development since March – the which was intended to alert individuals if they have been in close proximity to someone who is later discovered to have tested positive for the virus. This is about technology (which is, after all, my field) and I feel driven to comment!

When the Tracing and Tracking program was announced back in mists of time with the usual exaggerated fanfare it was described as “world beating”. We would, naturally, have settled for something that just worked – but you take what you can get!

One of the important elements of the program – or so it was claimed at the time – was to have been the App. Now, similar Apps have been – or are currently being – developed across the world. There are two basic models for this tool. One works purely locally to the device on which it has been installed which, if it comes into close proximity to another device belonging to a virus sufferer, alerts the user and advises the best course of action. The second version has a similar functionality, but is also tied into a centralised database, so that all sorts of information may be collected (for what purpose?).

The giant tech corporations, Apple and Google, have collaborated to produce a tool that follows the first, distributed model. Unsurprisingly the great majority of nations have plumped for this solution, since the backing and technical expertise of such behemoths is not to be sniffed at. Of those nations that did not do so immediately many have subsequently changed course and gone that route.

Concerns regarding data privacy were raised about the UK’s choice and computer scientists and other commentators warned back in April that the chosen solution would almost certainly prove impossible to engineer successfully on the platforms for which it would be required (iPhones and Android devices). The UK government – determined to to have its centralised database solution – announced (and subsequently abandoned) a succession of launch dates throughout May and early June. Rumour spread over the past few days that the App would not be ready until winter, further adding to the delay in the full implementation of the Track and Trace program, the which is vital if the UK economy is to re-open successfully.

Today’s (entirely predictable) announcement told of the final total abandonment of the UK government App (which the Health Minister tried to blame on Apple!) and the adoption instead of the Apple/Google offering with which most nations have already been working for the last three months.

I’m sorry – but you simply couldn’t make this stuff up. These people are supposed to have kept the UK and its citizens safe from the pandemic – rather than allowing it to become one of the worst hit countries in the world. They will shortly also have the responsibility of ensuring that the disaster that is Brexit does not deal the economy a terminal blow.

Good luck with that one!

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All change

March 15, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Ooooooo-kay!

So – it has been most interesting – and not a little nervous making – watching the walls slowly pressing in towards us. This was not how it was meant to be.

I am of course referring to the ongoing and increasingly immediate COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

It has been hard enough watching the headless chickens (however much one might acknowledge their anxieties) stripping the stores of comestibles, but it is sometimes difficult not to roll one’s eyes. As reports filtered back to me of frantic hordes in Costco loading up their outsized trolleys with toilet paper and emptying the racks in the process I was eyeing up shelves groaning with said same items in our local store.

Of more immediate concern has been the situation at the College. There are but three weeks or so of this term remaining – and I do not teach in the summer term. As governments and authorities have taken each faltering and uncertain step towards total social isolation – shutdown in any other language – so the odds have been shrinking of us getting to the end of term without having to step back from classroom teaching.

Well – now that point has been reached. The College remains open but there is a ban on face to face teaching. What this means is that we have to find alternative methods of delivering classroom teaching materials, running lab sessions and assignments and of handling the all important examinations.

The College is well enough equipped with appropriate technology. We have a slightly eccentric but quite usable learning platform and tools for creating and disseminating distance learning materials. The issue is not with the technology. The problem is with the time and effort that must now be put into converting materials meant for face to face delivery in the lecture theatre to online only form. Given that I had still to finish the necessary items for the last few lectures of this new(ish) course anyway I now have double the work to do.

The likelihood is that not everything will run smoothly. Mistakes will be made. Things will go awry. As the students’ education is at stake – for which they have, of course, paid not insubstantial fees – such things matter.

Finger firmly crossed on all fronts? Here we go…!

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Technology? Bah!

August 12, 2019 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

So…

Yesterday I posted an item enthusing about Vancouver band – ‘The Fugitives‘ – who we saw live last week at Brentwood Bay.

I included in my post a link to a YouTube clip of a live performance of the band’s excellent track – ‘No Words‘ – with a strong recommendation to the gentle reader to view same. I also included a link to the band’s website.

Both of these links were automatically rendered in a satisfactory manner on the blog itself – the latter as a hyperlink and the former – rather pleasingly – as an embedded YouTube clip.

Rather elegant I thought…

However – for those who read these posts by email digest – whereas the hyperlink appeared in its usual manner the YouTube clip simply did not feature at all, rendering my reference thereto particularly pointless.

My apologies to email readers. If you follow this link you will find the video to which I referred.

Second time lucky!

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