thomas fitzgerald.net

Apologies for the extended period of web site outage this morning. Once again it is out of my control as my service provider has “issues” with their SQL database. It seems to be back up and running now.

It has been pointed out to me that having registration a requirement to post commentary is a big turn off for potential readers, and while I couldn’t agree more, it is an unfortunate side effect of the amount of spam that I get. I do have a spam filter on my blog but even with that I get a lot of comment spam. Much of this is due to having a couple of articles posted on digg. Anyway, I figured I would give it another try with the registration turned off so please let me know if you think having to register to post comments is a big pain or if you don’t mind. Hopefully if I’m not totally deluged I can leave it off. Fingers crossed.

I have started a new blog dedicated to life in Ireland. It covers all sorts of things from politics to coffee ! I home too make it a little more original than the typical Irish blog, so please check it out and subscribe to the RSS (once I get it running properly!) It’s at thisirishlife.com

Once again I’ve been crazy busy at work this last week and haven’t really had a chance to regularly blog. (mainly because I’ve been so tired once I got home). Anyway, with a bit of luck we’ll return to regularly scheduled services next week!

It’s every computer users worst nightmare: being caught without a recent backup when your hard drive dies. It’s one of those things, like car accidents, that you never think it can happen to you until it’s too late. Last night my external 500gb Maxtor One Touch drive died. The loud click clunk sound preceded a speedy demise that quickly rendered my drive useless, and of course I had no backup. Actually, in a way the drive was my backup. This sobering experience in the mortality of digital bits has led me to a new respect for the über anal people who backup and archive their data with military regularity. I think soon I too will become one of those people.

Initial shock over though, what lessons can one learn from such a traumatic experience? Well, first of all, never assume your data is safe. If anything is any way important to you have MULTIPLE backups. Of all the stuff I lost, probably the most frustrating was my aperture library. There was about two years of digital photographs in the library. Luckily I have been regularly uploading shots to flickr but, the raw originals are gone forever. I had nothing incredibly important on the disk, fortunately enough, as I am not a professional photographer, but there were a lot of good shots on there. The irony is, I had been about to start backing up the library. In future though, I will do what a lot of professionals do and burn two copies of every memory card i import onto dvd even before bringing the photos into aperture. Online storage utilities are another good idea worth considering, especially if you are a photographer, because even disks can get scratched and damaged. With online storage, the providers provide reliable mirrored and backed up storage.

Another thing I intend to do is buy two drives and have one periodically back up the other. This may sound excessive, but with the price of hard drives continually dropping I can now buy two drives for the price I paid for one. Western Digital’s “My Book” series of external hard disks are relatively inexpensive and have a good reputation, which leads me to some more advice I can give for people considering buying external storage: read user reviews of the drive before you buy it. I knew someone who had an older version of the drive I had bought, and recommended it, but online reviews would strongly disagree. It seems that the particular model I had purchased is prone to failure. It is a bit late to find this information out after your data is lost. Another sobering thought is that, even if your drive is under warrantee, most manufacturers will only repair or replace the mechanism. If you want your data recovered expect to pay upwards of €1000 or more (or $1000)

I hope someone can learn from my mistakes. the most important thing about data is to remember how fragile it is. It may seem indestructible, but it can be gone in the blink of an eye. Everyone tells you to back up, and you may think that you will get around to it some day, but if you keep putting it off, that day may be too late.

Apologies to those who added comments over the last few days only to have them consumed by the anti-spam features on this site. Unfortunately, comment spam is an absolute nightmare, and if I was to leave the filter off the site would be bombarded with offers for viagra and it’s multiple clone products. Anyway, I’ve restored them now so again, apologies.

After a somewhat turbulent two weeks moving house, I finally have internet connectivity again. Actually, turbulent doesn’t even begin to describe the pain and suffering one has to go through in Ireland when moving. Not from the hassle of finding an apartment, or even moving your stuff, but dealing with incredible incompetence when it comes to transferring and canceling utilities, getting broadband and dealing with cable television providers. I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries, but what a bloody nightmare.

Anyway, It all started when my landlord unceremoniously asked me to move out because he wanted the apartment back for himself. Of course rather than follow the official and legally required procedure for terminating a tenancy, he decided to ring me on a sunday afternoon and told me he wanted me out within a month. The details of this are a whole other story which I won’t go into. Luckily I found a nice new place quickly enough. That part was painless enough. What followed…not so much.

I handed back the keys and proceeded to cancel or re-direct various utility bills. I rang Eircom (telephone provider) to cancel my phone service. The informed me that because I had broadband with another company (BT Ireland).

So I rang BT Ireland.

“Please wait while we transfer you to another number - click - dial tone.”

Ring back and after repeated loops around their automated system eventually spoke to a human being. They agreed to cancel it. Said it would be cancelled within a few hours.

I ring Eircom back

“Im sorry sir - it’s not showing up here as cancelled, you’ll have to call your broadband provider and ask them to ring our wholesale department and confirm that it is cancelled.”

Ring back BT

“Oh, that may take up to 5 working days to go through”

AHHHHHHHHHH

So that was saga one. Eventually after repeated calls back and forth BT finally cancelled the broadband and Eircom finally terminated the account.

The ESB (Electricity Supply Board - Ireland’s national Electricity Supplier) were a little more difficult. I rang them up and did the usual dance to get through to a human. The agreed to cancel the account and asked me for a meter reading.

“What?”
“I’m sorry sir, you need to have a meter reading to cancel your account”
“Well, can you arrange that?”
“No, you need to do it yourself.”
“But I no longer have access to the apartment”
“Well sir you’ll need a meter reading”

AHHHHHHHHH

So I contact my landlord and ask him to get a meter reading. He says he’ll do it as soon as he can. One week later and several angry text messages and emails and he still hasn’t gotten around to it. It should be noted that he is claiming that he can’t return my security deposit until he has confirmed that all bills have been cancelled but at the same time is preventing me from canceling my bills. In fairness he had suggested that I take a meter reading before I left “for my own benefit” But there is no meter in the house, it is somewhere in the bowels of the apartment complex. Had I known that it was required to cancel the bill I would certainly have perused it. Anyway, I still haven’t managed to cancel my electricity.

Transferring my TV service seemed painless enough. I guess that should have been my first indication of trouble ahead. (The cable TV provider in Dublin is NTL, a name that sends chills down the spine of anyone who has had dealings with them.) When I moved into my new place the connection was working. I just plugged in my set top box and tv and had reception straight off. I called them to confirm the change of address and they were very polite and facilitating. The sent out an engineer to confirm everything was working and even gave me a new set top box. Three days later the TV is cut off.

Repeated calls to NTL follow the same pattern. They claim there is nothing wrong, that we haven’t been disconnected and that a technical support person will ring back. No one ever does. It should be noted that minutes before being disconnected, an engineer from NTL buzzed our intercom and asked to be let into the complex for “routine maintenance” It seems obvious to me that they have only just managed to get around to disconnecting the connection of the previous tenants, with the engineers who handle disconnects clearly not talking to the ones who handle connections. The scary thing is, this is a well reported phenomenon with NTL in Dublin, and yet they can continue to ignore their customers support requests, even denying that there is a problem despite the fact that we clearly have no TV (What, do they not believe us or something). It’s been several days of constantly calling them and getting ignored and still no TV all the while I am being billed for a service I do not have.

So that’s mostly the story. I haven’t been posting very much lately and that’s pretty much why. The only good news was that my new broadband was connected without too much pain. It just took a week and a half, but It’s working fine now and pretty speedy. My only problem is with the paltry mac support. They (Eircom) give a free wireless modem with the service but in the set up instructions it says “Mac users are recommended to connect tot he modem via a wired ethernet connection” Merely because someone is too lazy to write mac software that generates the WEP key like the windows version. You could be forgiven for passing this off as typical lack of mac support were it not for the fact that Eircom’s retail stores exclusively sell Macs.

Idiots.

I am in the process of moving house, so I have been a little distracted when it comes to posting on the blog. Unfortunately I may be without broadband too for a few weeks because of the ridiculous length of time it takes to organize in Ireland. So apologies to regular readers if the site is a little sporadic for the next while.

Regular readers will know that I have been having some “issues” with my service provider, Media Temple. I switched to their Grid Server hosting plan not so long ago because my previous hosts could not withstand a Digg surge. Since then however, Media Temple’s grid server has had numerous outages, particularly with their SQL server. There have been numerous outages that have left this site unreachable.

Having said that I have to give them credit where credit’s due. They have worked very hard to resolve the issues and have communicated the work in progress extensively on their blog. But more importantly, a recent article I wrote made it to Digg’s front page and the site didn’t even stutter, so hats off to the engineers. I still think they should have waited till the service was fully working before bringing it online but it still has the potential to be great if running properly.

What makes Media Temple’s service different, is that rather than a single server shared among various sites, there is a huge cluster of smaller computers that share the load, and dynamically balance that load as it ebbs and flows. Their own page explains it much more eloquently than I can right now.

Once again my “wonderful” hosting provider is having serious issues with their server. All I can do is apologize. If they haven’t provided some kind of resolution to these ongoing issues I will be moving providers at the end of the month.

This image is becoming my own personal nightmare. I have to say, I’m absolutely disgusted at the service from Media Temple. The database server was down for nearly 4 hours this evening and despite numerous attempts to contact their supposed 24-hour support staff I have yet to receive a response. The system seems to be back up but for how long remains to be seen. This makes it extremely difficult to run a successful blog and grow your traffic if half the time your site is unavailable. And it’s not like they are a cheap service either. I switched to media temple a while ago because my old service provider couldn’t handle the heavy loads when a story gets picked up on digg. If anyone has any recommendations on a good hosting provider please let me know. I hate to have to move again, but I feel I have no choice at this stage.

My hosting provider Media Temple is continuing to have problems with their database server on their Grid Server system, It’s annoying, but the Grid Server has the potential to be a great service if they can stabilize these issues. So for the moment, apologies if there are issues accessing this site. It’s out of my control.

It seems that my site is not displaying properly on Internet explorer 6 on Windows. The sidebar doesn’t appear till after all the posts. It displays properly in every other browser, so that’s why I haven’t noticed it for so long. Im working on a fix. It seems to be a common problem with people who use the K2 wordpress theme, and I’ve yet to find a reliable fix. I don’t have a PC to check it on full time either, so once again, apologies. I will do my best to address the problem as soon as I can.

It’s almost time for Christmas!!!! Happy Christmas Eve everyone. Hope all your shopping is done without too much frustration! Now begins a day of wrapping! p.s. I got the cool banner image from iStock Photo - I’d have taken one myself but that was way too much trouble! (”and you call yourself a photographer”)