Walt at Random

I rely on computers. I used to make my living from computers–as a systems analyst/designer/programmer. I still rely on computers for whatever little earned income I do have: Sure, I could write with a pen and notepad, but I wouldn’t even be able to read some of what I’d written, much less make it readily available to others.

That said…

It’s been a more interesting week than I’d really hoped for; I hope it’s settling down. These are all trivial little upsets and very much firstworldissues, but hey, this is a random blog.

Scene 1: The Toshiba comes unhinged

My wife has a Toshiba notebook that’s about 3.5 years old. She likes it just fine. Even when the case stopped closing fully, she lived with it. Until last Thursday, when the left hinge broke–that is, the screen section came out of the hinge. No way to get it back in.

The notebook still worked (and works), but that was clearly not a good sign, and from what little we could figure out, a fix would cost a little more than a new notebook.

So, after a little checking, off we went to Office Depot–not nearly as convenient as OfficeMax, but after my experience with the local OM not living up to its own promises, I’m not shopping there–so my wife could try out various notebooks, keyboard feel & touchpad characteristics being very important to her. Oh, and since the old notebook had a 14″ 4×3 screen, she probably needed a 17″ screen to get the same vertical resolution (since nearly all contemporary notebooks have 16×9 screens).

She found a unit that was to her liking–another Toshiba, as it happens, on sale at a really excellent price. That solved one outstanding issue: When she’d move from Vista to Windows 7. And, since I’d been ready to move to Office2010 soon anyway, it made sense to get Office2010 for both of us at the same time–there’s a new-machine discount, and OD offered to load her copy as a free extra.

Scene 2: I decide to upgrade to Office2010

My wife still hasn’t actually moved to the new notebook–she spends a lot of time on her primary online interest (Unclaimed Persons, a closed volunteer group currently using Facebook that assists coroners in locating next of kin for those who die without someone to claim the body: a great pursuit for a retired librarian!), and the weekend had various other issues. Maybe today; maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I upgraded to Office2010. Which brought me up short on one thing. I was using Office2007, but still using Access2003, since I didn’t lay out the big bucks for the full Professional version of Office2007. (Remember when Office Pro was bundled with computers?) And, unlike Office2007, Office2010 just won’t install when it sees what it considers a damaged version of an earlier Office.

So…

Scene 3: Undoing Access and Finishing the Upgrade

I was really only using Access for two fairly simple little databases and one slightly more complex one–one for a summary budget of household expenses by major categories, one for a list of books & authors to use when getting books at the local PL (so I didn’t get the same title twice), and one–the slightly more complex one–a summary database of wines, helpful when shopping for new vintages.

None of these could possibly justify laying out the money for Access.

I exported the primary tables (two for Books, two for Expenses, three for Wines) as Excel spreadsheets, figuring I could work with those if necessary. And I thought OpenOffice–which I won’t use instead of Word, but which I had–might provide an acceptable substitute.

Then I deleted what was left of Office2003 and installed Office2010. (Unlike earlier versions, there’s no “upgrade version”–and, at some point, I think that’s sensible. When you’re upgrading from an upgraded version of an upgraded version…well, sooner or later, you’re not going to be able to prove you ever owned the original. I think my original was either Office2000 or OfficeXP.)

The install went fine. I haven’t explored the nuances of Word2010 and Excel2010 much yet; I do like the new File/Backstage replacement for the frankly failed “hide print & file options under an Office icon” button, and I’m aware that there are some interesting typographical options in Word if I actually had any OpenType typefaces with suitable extensions. (Oh, and having the Styles list display as a simple list instead of attempting to show the formatting: What a sensible step back!)

All in all, I think I’ll like it just fine. Later this week, maybe, I’ll explore a bit more to see what typefaces besides CalifornianFB have been added, whether I want to use them, and what else is new and interesting. (I accepted a default installation. I’m never sure whether that’s the right choice…)

Step 4: Trying to use OO Base as a Replacement for Access

Actually, that’s not quite right. I did do an initial attempt–creating .ODB files that link to the MSOffice .MDB files–and verified (a) that I could open all three databases, (b) that the reports had either disappeared or turned into tables, (c) that cross-table linkages had disappeared in the process.

Before attempting to resolve those issues, it was suggested that I switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. After discussing the reasoning, I concluded that just having less to do with Larry Ellison was reason enough, so I downloaded LibreOffice 3.3, deleted OpenOffice, and tried again.

Yesterday, despite some frustrations, I managed to build a report for the Expenses database that provides the same summary by category and grand total that’s the whole reason for having the database. It’s not as pretty and it was clunky to build, but it works. What I cannot get to work, so far at least: having the “category” column within the Expenses table limited to, and prompted by, values within the Expense Category table, a linkage that was in the Access database. Maybe it’s because this particular Base database is really acting as a connector to the .MDB database, but there seems to be no way to do this, at least within existing tables.

I can live with that, at least for this table.

Before lunch today, I made a typical every-three-weeks library run to take back three books and get three more–as usual, one non-genre fiction, one genre fiction (mystery this time, since it was SF/fantasy last), one nonfiction. For nonfiction, I’m cheating: the library had a book on OpenOffice 3. Aha! Maybe that will help.

Then came home and, after lunch, sat down to work on this. When I’d gone to put the computer in Sleep mode before running the errands and having lunch, I got a Windows Update, which meant shutting it down entirely. That’s OK.

Step 5: Something goes very wrong–fortunately, temporarily

Turned the computer back on. The background came up, as did all five items in the tray (W7 is much better than Vista in this regard), all six icons on the toolbar (some standard, some I’ve added), all 29 shortcuts and icons on the desktop (which I really should trim some day, but I guess 29 isn’t terrible).

Clicked on FireFox. The little circle spun for a couple of seconds. Then nothing. Did same for Windows2010. Same non-result. Well, let’s open TaskManager…whoops, same result.

Restarted the system. No luck.

Powered down. If it had come up one more time with the same results, I would have hit F10 during startup and gone to the previous restore point. Fortunately, the third time was the charm. Slowly, at first, programs came to life. Everything seems back to normal now. (Well, I haven’t tried *everything*–but if non-MS programs, MS contemporary programs, and 15-year old programs all work, chances are it’s good.)

So, then, taking the book in hand and trying to modify tables to use links…

No luck. Maybe I’m dense, maybe I’ll try again later, but so far, it looks as though compatibility with MSAccess databases is limited. That’s no great surprise.

In one case–the most complex database, probably not for very good reasons–it turned out to be most sensible to combine the exported Excel tables into a new and simpler Excel database, which–among other things–allows me to use typefaces I like while entering and updating data (I can’t see how to change LO Base’s table typography; again, maybe I’m missing something). In the case of the expense database, losing the category prompt list is a nuisance but not fatal. In the case of the books database–well, it never really amounted to anything anyway.

So there’s an afternoon pretty much shot, with no real progress…but hey, I could afford to waste an afternoon.

Step 6: Profit!

I know, that’s supposed to be Step 3 or Step 4, and in this case it’s nonsense–almost. If one proposed project is approved, I’ll need OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and I’m pleased to see that its import of Word files is a whole lot better than it used to be (last time I tried this, OO threw away major portions of style-based formatting).

Otherwise? Back to writing, browsing, being grumpy on FriendFeed, virtual slot poker, all that good stuff. And maybe reading the OO book in more detail and seeing what I’m missing. Which is probably that I can only *add* a new field that’s based on a set of values from another table, not *restore* a table linkage lost in the so-so “compatibility.”

Hmm. My Gateway notebook–my only computer, used as a two-screen setup with my old-but-beautiful Sony 19″ 4×3 LCD display–is probably 2.5 or 3 years old. Hope it holds up a little longer…

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a story on the National Day of Unplugging, which is from sundown today to sundown tomorrow (Saturday).

It’s in the Business section, with a big picture of Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of 23andme Inc. and Sergey Brin’s wife. Wojcicki “sometimes carries four cell phones, sleeps with a BlackBerry on her pillow and finds herself instant messaging people sitting next to her.”

The reporter seems to think that everyone is as addicted as she seems to be: “Consider how increasingly rare it is to get through a conversation or a meal without someone glancing at their phone.” Really? We took my brother & sister-in-law out to dinner last night (at a casual Italian place), the place was nearly full, and I don’t believe I saw one cell phone in use at any table in our vicinity–certainly not ours. Yes, I do see some people at some lunch places making a point of placing their phones on the table so they’re always in touch. I wouldn’t voluntarily dine or converse with these folks.

Wojcicki “hopes to institute the tradition weekly around the household” and says “It’s really about achieving balance and spending some time where you’re really just connected with the environment and the people around you.”

So during Sabbath (yes, the NDU was created by a group “focused on updating Jewish traditions to make them more relevant to modern life”) you’ll take 24 precious hours away from Your Precious in all its connecting glory. And think you’ve achieved balance?

I’m not having it. Oh, it’s quite likely that I won’t be on a cell phone between sundown tonight and sundown Saturday: That’s true most days. But I’ll almost certainly use email and FriendFeed and look at other online sources as appropriate. Never during a meal, to be sure, and never during a conversation, and not while we’re out enjoying the real world, and not when we’re watching TV, and not when I’m reading.

That’s called balance: making an appropriate place for interruptive technology and keeping it in its place. Period. Except for emergencies–and, you know, you’d be surprised how few true emergencies there are in most people’s lives.

Hey, if declaring a National Day gets that Blackberry off your pillow for one night, I guess that’s progress. But don’t tell me it’s balance, and don’t confuse taking an occasional timeout with achieving some form of sensible balance.

Here’s an honest question that may reflect my lack of intimate current knowledge of the formal library literature:

Has anyone studied the actual use of social networks by public libraries other than those with high-profile spokespeople/advocates? Better yet, has anyone done so on a scale broad enough to be anything more than anecdata?

I’m asking not because I assume the results would be “not much of any use” but, actually, the opposite: I’m beginning to suspect there’s a lot of real-world l0w-key adoption that we don’t hear about.

Why? Anecdata, of course. I was reducing the 16,000 words of Cites & Insights 11:2 to a 2,000-word Online column and found myself adding new material—and wondering what I’d find locally.

Just for fun, I thought I’d see what elements of 2.0 technologies I could locate at three well-used local public libraries—the one I use now and the two I used previously. None of these have high profiles nationally; all are reasonably but not lavishly funded; all are in a region where use of social networking and other “2.0″ tools should be predictably high. All three communities are roughly the same size (70,000-75,000 population).

The library I use now, Livermore Public Library, has had the same director for more than two decades. She has a blog—but doesn’t use it all that often, with nine posts in the three years since it began. (One post speaks to the nonsense you hear sometimes from doomcryers about most people not wanting or using public library services: In a local survey, 81% of respondents reported using LPL—and they rated service quality at 79 on a 100-point scale, a very high result.) There’s also a teen blog—but it’s only had three posts in its one-year life. LPL also has a Facebook page with a fairly steady stream of updates on LPL programs (seven updates in the last two weeks) “liked” by 550 people and a Twitter feed with 172 followers, with 905 tweets to date. How many of those 172 followers are actual Livermore residents interested in library issues? That’s a tougher question. There’s also a mobile catalog, a version of LPL’s catalog stripped down to a bare all-text minimum. All in all, a reasonable showing for a library with high usage and budgetary problems that stem entirely from city budgetary problems.

Mountain View Public Library devotes most of a straightforward home page to a catalog search box and set of current events—but there’s also a “Social Networking” icon that leads to a surprising wealth of items, some oddly identified (e.g., the library’s blog is identified as Blogspot rather than by its name). The library blog appears to serve as the source of the home page’s center strip; it’s entirely official announcements and book reviews and has ten posts in the past 3.5 months. A Teen Blog began in April 2010 and had 45 posts during 2010. There’s also a Delicious page with the library’s bookmarks (189 in all), a Facebook page with 285 people Liking it and 15 items in the past month—and another TeenZone Facebook page with 37 people liking it, clear evidence of teen patron involvement but relatively few recent updates; a Flickr photostream with 93 photos; two Twitter streams, a general one having 311 followers (and itself following 169 other streams!) and a fairly steady stream of tweets and a much smaller teen stream (33 followers, 88 tweets); and—unusually—a Yelp link, where you’ll find 89 reviews for the library. (Based on those reviews, MVPL is doing quite a few things right!) All in all, an impressive showing.

Like Livermore, Redwood City Public Library has a slideshow current-even element on its home page which can be either great or annoying. The front page doesn’t link directly to any blogs—but does have Facebook and Twitter icons. The Facebook page has 295 people Liking it and four updates in the last two weeks; the Twitter stream has 124 followers and 123 tweets—four of them within the last two weeks. In fact, RCPL had one of the earliest public library blogs, Liblog, beginning in 2002—but its URL now links directly to the library’s home page.

Conclusion? All of these libraries are using social networks with varying effectiveness. None of them makes a big deal of their usage. That may be as it should be.

The story you are about to read is true. The names are not changed, since nobody here is guilty. This is a story about resourcefulness, panic and the little things the web really is good for–and that mean “death of the web” (as in “no searching, just destinations”) predictions are stupid.

The setup

As I’ve noted previously, when we bought our new/old house back in May 2009, we agreed to take the Samsung refrigerator that was already there and leave our not-very-old refrigerator in our old house, because the Samsung looked like it would meet our needs better and all three parties in the two transactions would win from this agreement.

The previous owners passed on most installation and user handbooks on most of the add-ons in the new house. The refrigerator was an exception: no manual.

The refrigerator–a bottom-freezer non-French-door unit–is reasonably basic: No water dispenser in the door, and if there is/was an icemaker, it’s not plumbed and doesn’t operate. That’s what we wanted. One high-tech feature: A panel on the freezer door that shows the temperature in the freezer and refrigerator and has some controls. We didn’t necessarily want that, but it couldn’t hurt. We left the settings at 2F freezer, 38F refrigerator.

One feature we didn’t realize at the time: The refrigerator was shallow by today’s standards, only about 27″ deep.

The panic

A couple of weeks ago, my wife heard a beeping from the refrigerator (two beeps, repeated every couple of minutes). I heard it too. She thought the refrigerator door might have been slightly ajar; we made sure it was fully closed.

The beeps continued. And there was no light when we opened the door.

Then we noticed that the refrigerator temperature was creeping up, to 39, then to 40, then to 41…

Arggh. We’d just bought $20 worth of organic chicken breasts, there was $35 worth of salmon in the freezer, plus all the usual refrigerated and frozen foods…

We called the local appliance store that we’ve already learned to trust. They said “Samsung? We don’t repair Samsung: It’s impossible to get parts.” They also gave us the 1-800 number for a national agency that does repair Samsung refrigerators. Called that number; they said it would be $75 to come out and provide an estimate, plus the actual cost of repair, and the earliest they could send somebody out was the following afternoon. We didn’t schedule an appointment…

Called my brother (who’s lived in our new hometown for 50+ years) to see whether he might have a dorm refrigerator he could lend us, which would let us keep the most vital stuff chilled while we worked out a replacement. Otherwise, we thought, we might have to go buy one… We thought the old one was about 8 years old, in which case a newer one might use less power…although the old one did have an EnergyStar mark, those standards change over time.

Turned out he actually had a brand-new 10cf. refrigerator/freezer, purchased for the expansion to his house that’s going on (which includes a kitchenette). He was able to bring it over (with help from a friend); we found a place for it and plugged it in to start chilling. By now, the refrigerator was up to 45 or higher (but the freezer was still at 2F, which told us *something*–namely, that the compressor was working, but the fan to distribute cold air to the refrigerator wasn’t).

We moved food into the smaller unit (after it was cold enough to do so) and went over to the appliance store to see what a new refrigerator/freezer would cost and how soon we could get one delivered. (We’d also seen the mfr. plate on the Samsung and realized it was six years old, not eight years–so it should have another 8-10 years ahead of it.) After some discussion (with great people at the store, who don’t work on commission), we found:

• We’d have trouble buying a new unit that would fit: The unit’s in an open area that’s about 30″ deep–and with any of the regular new units, that would result in the door handle being at least 5″-8″ out from the framed area, so far out that it would impede traffic into the kitchen and look really terrible. We could go for a “cabinet unit,” but those cost a fortune ($2,500 and up), you’re pretty much obliged to get a side-by-side with the door icemaker/water dispenser we really don’t want, and the vegetable bins are relatively small–significant because my wife gets a large quantity of vegetables once a week at the farmer’s market.
• The salesperson suggested unplugging the unit, letting it sit for 15-20 minutes, and plugging it back in, on the possibility that something in the electronics might be off and would reset itself.

The process

We went home and tried that. It didn’t work.

But my wife, the expert reference librarian (and former library director–unlike me, she does have an MLS), did some careful searching online, while I did some clumsy searching. I managed to find the manual for the Samsung (online), and found that the only alarm was an open-door alarm. Aha! Apparently the refrigerator was convinced that the refrigerator door was open–and possibly had stopped supplying cold air because, you know, what’s the point?

My wife found a chat room where, it turned out, a number of other people had had a similar problem–and one of them had found a possible solution. Namely, that the problem was the door sensor, one of two plunger switches on a little panel next to the hinges (one plunger for the refrigerator door, one for the freezer). This person also said how you could remove the panel–and that, with the switches unplugged, the Samsung would default to “doors are closed” instead of the “door is open” it was reading.

What could it hurt?

Before we called the national agency back, we tried it. A flathead screwdriver did pop off the little panel, and–with some strain–we could remove the little harness that plugged into the back of the panel. We did so, closed the doors again, plugged in the refrigerator, and…

It worked. Oh, no lights, to be sure, since those are turned on and off by the same door sensor, but the refrigerator started cooling back down.

The follow-up

OK, so we had it working, sort of…but it made sense to replace the door sensors, sooner or later. Would we have to pay $75+ to do that?

More searching…

Samsung doesn’t offer parts on its website, at least not the public-facing part. But there was another site, Samsungparts.com….

The part was $11.95. Including shipping and handling, it was about $21 total (the company has a physical presence in California, so 9.75% sales tax was part of the deal).

I ordered the part.

About a week later, I realized that I didn’t really know much about Samsungparts.com. Oh, sure, the ordering process was over an https:// secure link, and they had credit-card authorization, but how much does that really tell you? We’d had one credit card replaced last year due to fraud (caught by the credit-card company), and changing the numbers on autopay setups is always a hassle…

I checked the credit card account online: Not only wasn’t there some big unexpected charge, the $21 or so hadn’t even been charged yet.

Perhaps another week later, I got email: The part had been backordered, but had now shipped. The email included a tracking number (USPS Priority Mail). The source address also included a parent company I thought I’d heard of (but I was probably wrong: it’s a very small company). The credit card charge showed up the next day: the company didn’t charge until the part was shipped. Score one.

Three-four days later, the box arrived. We rolled out the refrigerator, unplugged it, fished out the wiring harness, plugged it in to the new switch/sensor panel (which could only be done one way, fortunately), pushed the new panel into place, closed the door, waited 15 minutes, plugged it in…

And we once again have lights when the doors are open, along with proper refrigeration. For a total repair cost of $21, not, say, $95 or so…

The morals

1. The web is a great place to find missing owner’s manuals. We already knew that.
2. With a lot of luck and some skillful searching, the web can be a good place to diagnose and repair odd problems–although it can also be a dangerous place to do so. (In this case, there were enough people who’d had the same problem and found the same solution, or took the advice, that we were reasonably confident.)
3. The web allows small companies to have big presences, and for third parties to step in when a manufacturer’s not willing to deal directly with consumers. (Samsung doesn’t appear to sell parts to individuals. The third-party company appears to be a tiny three-person operation, a true small business–but they’re a national supplier with a solid web presence.)
4. On the other hand: If the refrigerator wasn’t too smart for its own good, we would have had a soft failure: Failure of a door sensor wouldn’t cause the refrigerator to stop operating. Funny thing: If your car’s “check for malfunction” light comes on, the engine doesn’t stop operating.
5. On the other hand: There is no way in hell that a refrigerator door sensor should fail after six years. It’s a push-down switch, a trivially simple part, and given that the design makes it critical to the operation of the refrigerator…

Objectively, you could look at this and say “Why didn’t you find out about the problem before you went to all the trouble of finding a temporary refrigerator, two people having to bring it over, two people having to take it back…?”

Because the thought of spoiling food (did I mention that this happened within two hours after grocery shopping?) tends to push one towards immediate action, not screwing around on the web for a couple of hours.

Happy New Year’s, and may your refrigerator door sensors all work well.

Maybe we need blunt reminders from time to time of things we should know but some of us forget:

• Free is a tricky business model: When you’re not paying for something directly, it’s useful to consider whether you see indirect means of support (Gmail’s ads, Google & Bing ads…actually, “ads” are going to be the most common answer). If not, best not to place too much faith in the ongoing existence of the wonderful thing you’re using for free.
• Clouds dissipate: Sold on the cloud model of computing? Really? Do you actually know where your cloudy data is being stored–and who’s paying for that storage?
• A name no more identifies a reality than a map always describes the territory: When services are sold or acquired, they can change realities suddenly and disconcertingly. The name may be the same, but the reality may be quite different.

Personal examples

I got hit with two reminders this week, which–taken in tandem–could be interpreted as a sign from The Internet Gods saying “Time to shut down Cites & Insights; the party’s over.” I’m not interpreting them that way, since neither reminder has anything to do with me personally. As for the “free” issue…well, you know, that’s a different discussion.

First example: Bloglines

Its owners told us a few months ago that they were planning to shut down Bloglines, which I’ve used for years as the way to keep up with 500 or so liblogs–which, along with a few dozen other blogs, serve as key sources for most of the stuff I write about.

I exported my feed list and imported it into Google Reader. I was not as happy with Google Reader as I had been with Bloglines.

Then the owners told us that somebody was buying Bloglines, and it would continue. Hooray! I went back to using Bloglines.

This week, the new owners forced us to migrate to The New and Improved Bloglines.

Blecch.

The new version has all the “ooh, let’s make this look very live” Java stuff that bothered me a little about Google Reader–but with some twists all its own:

• It apparently stopped recognizing that you’d read things. Go back a day later, and it would start showing the same items. Over and over…and the numbers would keep mounting up as you tried to read them.
• There seems to be no way to alphabetize or otherwise organize feeds–or at least none I could find.
• About the third time I tried to clean things up, Bloglines just plain hung Firefox–so badly that I couldn’t even close the window without shutting down the system and doing a Forced Quit on Firefox. I have never had to do a Forced Quit in Windows 7, and maybe once in all the time I used Vista. Somehow, I don’t believe that Firefox has suddenly become unstable software.

So I’ve deleted the Bloglines bookmark in Firefox, restored Google Reader to its position (actually, I never took it away) and just finished going through the hundreds of unread posts (I didn’t just mark all read without glancing at them, as that would miss a day or so of posts). The minor infelicities of Google Reader are as nothing compared to the degraded nature of Bloglines.

Of course, it’s still a freebie…

Second example: Delicious

Most of Cites & Insights is based on synthesis and commentary, relying on posts and articles from other people. Until 2009, I just printed out posts and articles I thought I’d want to use later–and, at some point, changed to printing out “leadsheets” (just the first page).

After trying out Delicious, I decided to save some paper (and some money–paper’s cheap and recyclable, but inkjet ink is expensive) by tagging items in Delicious, using it as a virtual file cabinet. I’m a “bad user” of Delicious, since many of my tags are C&I-specific, not much use to other users (e.g., “miw,” “tqt,” “mbp,” “sn-twitter”). Delicious’ overview also helps me discover when I have more than enough items to consider a writeup, or so many that I need to subdivide them. As of now, I think I have around 1,200 items in Delicious.

As you may have heard, Yahoo! is shutting down Delicious. They haven’t said exactly when, and there’s always the possibility that it will be sold to some other company, but that’s the current state.

A number of sources have provided lists of Delicious alternatives. Phil Bradley’s done a fine writeup, and I’d suggest that post as a good starting point.

For now, I’ve started a Diigo account. Since I’d already exported my Delicious file (yesterday), the Diigo import-from-Delicious directions were easy (they basically boil down to: 1. Export the file in Delicious. 2. Import it here. 3. Wait for us to process it.) Since my library hasn’t been processed yet, I don’t know what it will look like and whether I’ll be happy with it. I have managed to move a Diigo bookmark button up to the single toolbar I prefer to have visible, although it appears that I need to click it twice to actually add tags to a bookmark (the whole point of bookmarking!). I may be missing a setting.

And, of course, I hope that I’ll remember to export the Diigo bookmarks once a quarter or once a month or so. Will I?

Ah, it’s so easy to trust the cloud and the wonders of freedom…

Not directly related, but…

At the moment, C&I has no direct or indirect support. I’m hoping that will change.

In addition to the Paypal donations that could be a direct form of support (total to date since providing that option: $240.00), indirect forms include buying the limited edition disContent: The Complete Collection or, if you think liblog studies are worthwhile, buying The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010.

You could also, to be sure, buy the 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, or 2006 paperback versions of C&I itself.

To date, three of the 100 potential copies of disContent: The Complete Collection have been sold–none in December.

To date, exactly one copy (a download, not a printed book) of The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010 has been sold–necessarily in December, since that’s when it appeared.

Or, you know, you could just tell me directly that you regard C&I and the liblog research as worthless, as in “not worth spending any money on.” Or, more optimistically, “it should all be free, it’s up to somebody else to pay for it.” For now, I’m not listening to indirect messages of this sort. It’s December, and things tend to look better in the new year.

The first time I held a hard disk in my hands–well, a removable device that contained a hard disk–was around 1977, when we installed a Datapoint multiterminal system in UC Berkeley’s serial processing department. (I wrote the timesharing monitor and data entry software and oversaw the system; that’s indirectly how I met my wife, so I count it among my greatest successes.) The removable disk was a 12″ round Winchester cartridge, maybe two inches tall (my memory is vague), and I believe each cartridge cost several hundred dollars. I believe it held 10 megabytes, but it might have been 40. It was a well-priced miracle, as was the Datapoint in general (running three terminals off a “minicomputer” that was a Z80 at 2MHz with 128K RAM, but also with Datapoint’s remarkable Databus operating system and ARCnet network).

If you had suggested to me at that point that I would some day not only use but own a one terabyte hard disk system, I would probably have laughed (you might have had to explain what a terabyte was first).

Coming forward to 1984-1986

I started writing what became “Common Sense Personal Computing” in Library Hi Tech in 1985, and published Common Sense Personal Computing: A Handbook for Professionals in 1986. In the first article in that extended series, I tried to suggest comparable system prices for a variety of personal computers, an interesting task since so many computers at the time were priced without needed peripherals. The article was based on June-July 1984 prices: that was when IBM dropped its prices by about 25% and Apple “finally dropped the IIe price to a plausible level.”

If you’ve forgotten or are too young to remember PCs in 1984, many of them didn’t have hard disks at all–including the IBM PC itself, which sold for $3,000 to $4,000 once you included a monochrome monitor and two 360K diskette drives (along with a 4.77mHz 8088, 128K RAM, a display adapter, and a dot matrix printer). That IBM PC ran “PC-DOS,” IBM’s version of MS-DOS–and cost just about the same as an Apple IIe + CP/M card ($3,000 to $3,600 with a 1.25mHz 6502, 128K RAM and two 140K diskette drives, an Apple monitor, Gemini dot matrix printer and some software–but a chunk of that money was for the “CP/M card,” a more powerful Z80A computer on a card with its own RAM). Remember the early Compaq “portable” computers? $3,500 to $4,000 for a 4.77mHz 8088 with 128K RAM and a built-in 9″ monochrome screen–and, yep, two 360K diskette drives.

Ah, but I did have two systems that make it possible to estimate what a hard disk actually cost. The Morrow MD2 with 4mHz Z80A, 64K RAM, two 184K diskette drives, 12″ display, the Star Gemini dot matrix printer I was quoting as part of most of these systems and a whole bunch of high-quality software (WordStar, LogiCalc, Correct-It [back then, spellcheckers were separate programs], Personal Pearl database, PILOT and two BASICs) cost $1,460 to $1.720. But there was also the Morrow MD11 (my second PC, actually), which differed in two ways: It had 128K RAM…and it had a huge 11MB hard disk (and a single 360K diskette). It also cost $3,300–at least $1,600 more. I’m guessing that at least $1,000 of that was for the hard disk. So let’s say $90/megabyte for a slow internal hard disk in 1984.

By 1986, you could buy an internal 20MB hard disk for as little as $600, although most name-brand drives went for $800 or more; an external 20MB drive would run around $900. So let’s say $30/megabyte for internal, $45/megabyte external. (At that point, ads for IBM PCs showed around a $400 differential between those with 10MB hard disks and those that had two diskette drives, or $40/megabyte.)

By 1989, you could buy a Seagate ST251-1 40MB drive for $439–internal disks were already down to $11/megabyte.

Remember, these are megabytes. A 1TB drive has the same capacity as 25,000–twenty-five thousand–40MB drives.

(Almost since the beginning, hard drive capacities have been quoted in decimal form. A 1TB drive is “actually” about 930 gigabytes, if by “gigabyte” you mean 1,024 megabytes, where a megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes and a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. And of course there was at one point a class action lawsuit over the “missing” capacity in hard disks.)

Here it is almost 2011…

OK, admittedly this was a Black Friday price, but still: Western Digital WD Elements 1TB Portable Hard Disk, WDBABV001BBK. One terabyte of NTSF-formatted disk space with a USB 2.0 connector, powered by the USB port (no power cord or external power supply). 5400RPM. No bloatware, so you get the full 1TB.

At Target. $69.

The beast is 3″ wide, 4.4″ long, 0.7″deep. Amazon says it weighs 12oz; I’d have guessed a little lighter. It came in the best packaging I’ve seen for this kind of device: Cardboard box not much bigger than the drive, two tiny plastic protectors at either end, and a plastic bag–probably less than an ounce of packaging, and both the cardboard and the little protectors are recyclable. The high-security seal? A peel-off circle. No muss, no fuss, one minute to open and one more to install.

It’s sitting here on my desk (I did a full image backup yesterday: took maybe half an hour; Windows7 includes System Image Backup software in all versions; now I only have 850GB available). It’s a cute little box. And it has ONE TERABYTE of storage. Which cost me $0.0757 per gigabyte or .00757 cents per megabyte, if you include sales tax (9.75% here). Oh, and Target printed out a $10-off-on-$100-purchase coupon, good for the next couple of weeks, so you could say this only cost $65 including sales tax. That does include the case and the circuitry for USB-powered operation.

I dunno. Maybe I’m getting old. This seems like a miracle. It’s also, to be sure, a whole lot more disk space than I’m likely to need unless I start doing a lot of photography or video editing–I mean, if I wiped out all the Windows checkpoints, I’d probably have 175GB free on my 250GB notebook hard disk. (All of my data files, excluding the MP3 files I could always rerip from CD, fit quite nicely in a 3.7GB backup on an 8GB flash drive. Text and spreadsheets just don’t use much storage space.)

But there it is: in 21 years, the price for hard disk storage dropped from $11/megabyte to $0.000757/megabyte. Put another way, 11 years ago disk storage cost 145 thousand times as much as it does now.

But that’s wrong–in two ways

It’s wrong first because portable (USB-powered) hard disks are inherently more expensive than wall-powered external drives and internal drives.

My brother was at the same Target a couple of hours earlier. He picked up the last of 39 Western Digital 2TB external hard disks. For the same price: $69 (not $69.99, but $69). So he was getting storage, including tax, for less than four one-thousandths of a cent per megabyte.

Yes, those are Black Friday prices–but a quick look online shows that you can buy a WD external 2TB hard disk for as little as $89, or a higher-speed 1.5TB internal hard drive for $70 (all drives are Western Digital for consistency, and the $70 is from Amazon)–so that’s somewhere between 4.4 and 4.6 cents per gigabyte, or less than five one-thousandths of a cent per megabyte.

It’s also wrong, of course, because you can’t buy a one-megabyte drive for five one-thousandths of a cent or a one-gigabyte drive for a nickel. The cheapest hard disk I found at Amazon was $37, an 80GB 7200RPM Western Digital; Fry’s had nothing under $40. Basically, you’re still going to pay $30 or more for an internal drive and probably $40 or more for an external drive.

Still, it’s amazing to think of a price change of 140,000:1 in just over two decades–for a disk that’s probably quieter (it seems to be silent) and faster than that 40GB disk was in 1989.

If you didn’t read the original post, you should–if nothing else, for context.

Here’s what’s happened since then:

• The autorenew clearly didn’t take.
• Today, down to her last two days, she went through the Renew process this time–and managed to take the right set of links, yielding a $40 renewal rather than a $70 renewal.
• She clicked on the “Download” link…

What should have happened

Given that she has an up-to-date subscription, the link should have updated some settings in her McAfee Internet Security, maybe taking 30 seconds tops.

What did happen

First we got a sizable download.

Then that download uninstalled all existing McAfee software. Slowly.

Then it started a 122MB download. With nothing else on our DSL, that took about 30 minutes…

Followed by various nonsense, followed by a Restart request.

After restarting, it started installing (I may have the order wrong here; let’s just say we’re at about the 1 hour 15 minute mark here…) with, of course, Windows Security popping up a warning about security setting issues.

Eventually–I’d say after about 90 minutes–there was a McAfee shortcut, the McAfee blob back in the tray, and a screen telling us it was starting various services. Until it got to “starting anti-spam”–which would seem somewhat useless since she doesn’t use Outlook or any PC-based mail system (and Gmail has its own excellent spam filter).

And the little animated swirl kept spinning. And spinning. For 10 minutes or more, there was disk activity–for what would seem to be at most a 1-minute job. Then the disk activity stopped, but the little swirl kept spinning.

Exit capabilities: None. Response to a right-click on the toolbar icon: None. Response to any keys or mouse clicks: None. The computer was apparently hung.

I logged on to McAfee on my system, brought up chat, and got into another fruitless session, with the bot (or, I suppose, conceivably person) on the other end telling me to forward her email (on her frozen system) to verify that she’d renewed and apparently ignoring any input from me.

At this point, we were well over two hours into a renewal update. Two hours, to do what should have been a code change at most.

What she finally did

A cold reboot–that is, forcing the computer to turn itself off (holding down the power switch–nothing else had any effect, given McAfee’s marvelous ability to take over the entire computer), turning it back on, letting Windows finish its “abnormal shutdown” routine…

After opening the Windows Security Manager and letting it fix settings, she seems to be fine. McAfee now gives the right termination date (a year from now). She’s fully protected (maybe over-protected: It’s possible that both McAfee and Windows firewalls, and McAfee antivirus and Windows Defender, are operating, but she knows what to do if she gets apparent slow downs).

And neither of us is, how you say, real happy with the competence shown in McAfee’s renewal operation, updating, or other indications of software excellence.

For me? I’ve turned off autorenew. Some time before my subscription expires, I’ll download Microsoft Security Essentials (and uninstall McAfee). If that turns out to be inadequate, I’ll buy something else…or, if I’m feeling masochistic, I can always add myself to her 3-user Internet Security subscription.

I don’t know if this is a farce, a comedy, or a tragedy…

Background

When my wife purchased her Toshiba notebook (three years ago), it came with McAfee Internet Security preloaded.

When I purchased my Gateway notebook (two years ago), it came with McAfee Total Security preloaded.

We both auto-renewed for a year (I think). McAfee was obtrusive at times–the update process is the only thing I know that seems able to use 100% of both cores in my Core 2 Duo, hanging the machine until it finishes–but had, for a while, top ratings. More recently? Not so much.

Foreground

My wife’s one-user McAfee Internet Security license expires in a few days. She deliberately turned off autorenew. My three-user McAfee Total Security license expires in January. I had autorenew on.

But my wife’s doing volunteer work that requires her to visit sites that I might not choose to visit. She needs topnotch online security more than I do. So…

Well, I thought, there should be an easy way to add her to my Total Security license, so her software gets upgraded; I’ll pay the autorenew rate for both machines.

Not so easy, as it turns out. After struggling to make sense of McAfee’s online support, the only answer was for her to TOTALLY UNINSTALL her protection, leaving her computer wholly unprotected, then download Total Security after going to my McAfee page. Of course, if anything went wrong with the download, well, she’d be totally unprotected–the instructions required her to wholly remove the software before doing the new install. Provide a code so she could simply attach to my license? Nah, that would be too logical.

Well, OK. Thinking about it, and the likelihood that we’ll upgrade her notebook in the next year or so, maybe she should go ahead and renew her McAfee. I’d turn off my autorenewal and switch to Microsoft Security Essentials instead…and if that seemed inadequate, I’d definitely be able to buy a new copy of Norton, McAfee, AVG or something else for $40 or less (as opposed to the $80 McAfee wanted to autorenew my Total Security).

The chaos

My wife–who has two masters degrees, who taught computer programming at one point, who is a first-rate analyst–followed McAfee’s instructions for renewal. And wound up with an about-to-expire existing subscription and a new one-year/three-user subscription, which she’d need to download. For $70.

Huh?

So she went to technical support…an online chat, similar to the one I’d endured, but worse.

After wasting half an hour or so, she got the new subscription canceled and refunded (I’ll check the credit card account online to make sure that’s actually happened, and she does have a confirmation number).

She found a different “renewal” link on the account page. But, whoops, it seems to go to an order for a one-year subscription, not a renewal…although this time, it’s $40, not $70, and it’s a three-user subscription. Nahh…

Now, she’s turned autorenew back on. Will it actually autorenew, since she only has a few days? If not…well, if she does the renewal, it seems as though it requires her to download the product again. And avoiding all that hassle is the only reason she was willing to pay the higher price.

To sum up:

• The link in McAfee’s email explicitly leads to the wrong place, adding a second subscription for the same software.
• So far, we’ve been unable to find a route that actually allows you to do something that is, explicitly, continuing your subscription for another year…except by having a standing autorenew.
• McAfee seems to want twice as much to renew a subscription as they do for a new one…maybe, or maybe not, depending on which set of links you follow.
• Oh, did I mention that it seems to regard her fully valid Visa card has expired? It would take a new Mastercard number but not, apparently, a new Visa number.

The outcome

I don’t actually know yet. We’re hoping the autorenew takes. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what to do. I know I can go buy an actual physical copy (CD and all) of Total Security for $40 if I do it by Saturday. I know she has a lot better things to do with her time.

And I know this: If McAfee has screwed up their renewal, pricing, link and other structures this badly, it leaves me in considerable doubt that their computer protection is as top-notch as they claim.

(I’ll add this: We used Norton for years, but at some point it became too intrusive. Norton never, never, ever had this kind of renewal incompetence associated with it.)

Postscript

If someone from McAfee feels offended by this, there’s a simple solution: You need to provide us–my wife, who I can put you in contact with–with a straightforward working procedure by which her subscription continues to be valid for another year, without having to download the whole damn package once again. Seems like that should be simple. It’s called renewal: You may have heard of the concept. Or not.

For some reason, I woke up in the middle of the night wondering about this:

• How many CD players do you have in your house/do you own?
• How many FM radios do you have in your house/do you own?

Those are four questions, not two. Let me add definitions:

• CD player: Device capable of playing a CDAD “Red Book” audio disc. (Thus includes PC CD drives, DVD drives, Blu-ray drives.)
• FM radio: Device capable of receiving broadcast FM and making it audible in some form.

The second actually hit me first, because I was thinking “it’s odd that we don’t have a radio in our house”–then, when I did a quick mental inventory, came up with what I *think* is the answer(s): Five in the house, seven that we own.

Huh? Well, there’s a crank-powered emergency radio. That’s one. (That is: It has a hand crank for real emergencies, also a little LED flashlight. We don’t listen to cranks on it, unless you count the Tappit Brothers.) But there’s also a boombox in the garage. That’s two. (And it plays CDs as well.) Oh, but I also got a silly little radio as a premium with a magazine subscription–it’s tiny and tinny, but it works. That’s three.

Four and five? The 8GB Sansa Fuze that I use as an MP3 player these days has a great FM tuner–but then, so does the 2GB Sansa Express that I used to use, even though that one was clumsy to use.

Six and seven, probably obvious (and also constitute CD players two and three): Car radios.

Only noteworthy because I think most folks would regard us as having very little in the way of consumer electronics. One TV (technically, zero TVs at the moment), no iAnythings, a little tiny stereo system…oops, wait:

Make that six and eight. The Denon stereo (with a malfunctioning CD door) also includes an FM tuner. I’d forgotten that, since we never used it. And that’s a fourth CD player, even if it’s barely functional.

This is surprisingly difficult. Now, what about CD players. I think I count eight and ten, of which five are DVD-capable. (TEN optical drives in this low-tech household? Good Gaia!)

Besides the four already mentioned, there are DVD burners in each of our budget notebook computers (#5 and #6, also DVD #1 and #2). I had a neat little $15 CD portable that I used before getting a Sansa (#7). Because we love the Denon’s sound and fixing the door would cost $200, we’re using a cheap Sony DVD player as a CD front-end (try finding a non-DVD CD player that has a track display and costs less than $1,000…), so that’s #8 (and DVD #3). Oh, and the freebie DVD player we got during a Safeway post-remodeling grand opening and have been using as our only DVD player for a couple of years (#9, and DVD #4). And the big luxury–the $129 Blu-ray player we just picked up to go with the TV that will shortly replace our 13-year-old TV (which has been Freecycled to another household, not junked).

That’s us–and this really is a low-tech household…no teenagers, no DVR, no second TV in the bedroom, third in the kitchen, fourth in the…whatever.

How about you? Can you even count the number of optical drives you own? The number of FM tuners? (And now Big Media thinks your cell phone should have a mandatory FM tuner, ‘cuz, you know, otherwise there’s no way for you to listen to the radio…)

No big moral here. Just an oddity: Things do accumulate. Remember when household lasers were rare and expensive devices? Maybe not; most readers may not be that old.

Enough procrastination. Back to the OA project.

In the Interesting & Peculiar Products section of the new Cites & Insights, discussing the prospects for 500GB optical discs, I question an assertion that the real-world lifespan of optical media is “well under ten years” and note that “I have 25-year-old CDs that work perfectly.”

A reader says that her eight-year-old CD-Rs are unreadable and questions what I’m saying…and says industry estimates are about ten years.

So here’s a clarification:

• The paragraph I was questioning specifically said “mass-market physical medium”–by which I assumed pressed/pre-recorded media, not recordable media.
• My context was 25-year-old audio CDs (pressed audio CDs)–and every one of the (prerecorded) CDs I purchased two decades ago still works perfectly.
• While there are special archival optical media, I can’t speak to life estimates for recordable media–although I do have (audio) CD-Rs that are still readable after eight years, that’s anecdata.
• I would also note that the paragraph I questioned said people wanting long-term archiving would stick with magtape. Permanence of magtape ain’t so hot either…

Meanwhile: I am not an expert on archival media (and other than ink or properly-fused toner on acid-free paper and *maybe* high-quality microfilm, I don’t know of any), and my casual comment should under no circumstances be assumed to be a guarantee that the DVD-R you burn today will be readable in 25 years.