Saturday, April 30 2011

Smoking Ruins

This will not end well . . .

Ahh, computers: what did we use for excuses before they were invented?

I'm travelling in Ontario this week, visiting some of our retail partners and doing some store planning. I don't get out here often enough, and it's great to see what's happening in one of our largest markets. I also managed a very nice dinner with Colin and Craig, my chums from Wine Sense. It's their 20th anniversary in business, and we had a planning meeting here in St. Catherines, which is very convenient to the Hilldbrand Winery. Dinner at the winery restaurant was pretty darn fine, and a good time was had by all.

But clouds were following me. Last week my login for my Windows laptop went crufty on me, and I couldn't sort it out so I resorted to some fixes: logging on as an administrator. I was very busy however, and didn't have time to send the machine off for fixing. I did some final work on my presentation for this weekend's Fermenter's Guild of Ontario conference on the plane, logged off and napped over Manitoba.

When I opened up my laptop on Tuesday, it was a Windows-powered doorstop: nothin'. After two days of travel I wound up at company HQ where I dropped it off to Mavis in our IT department. She's a giant-brained wizard of computing, so I had high hopes.

Sigh.

It's so broken it can't be salvaged. New four years ago, it was thousands of dollars. Today you get one as powerful free in your Crackerjack box. The hard drive is a smoking ruin, the keyboard is shot (wow, turns out you type a half-million words a year and the keys get worn out!) and the tech is completely obsolete. None of this, however, compensates for the fact that a) my last back-up was three weeks ago and b) that back-up is in British Columbia.

Well done, Mr. Vandergrift

Which means I'm spending the rest of the weekend putting together a presentation out of thin air. I do have some material on the company server, but not the stuff relevant to what I'm talking about this week (Quality Results in the Wine On Premise). Problem is, I have a lot of presentations and graphics and such, which occupy many gigabytes of space. Our company policy is not to clutter that servers with trifles, so I keep my backups on not one, but two separate drives (one at work, one at home: I'm cautious, just unlucky) where I can't get at 'em.

But, I can't be sad. Mavis fixed me up with a loaner (who ever anticipates getting great service, clear explanations and even sympathy from an IT encounter? I was so pleasantly surprised) and while eventually I'll get a newer laptop, the real silver lining is that it gives me the opportunity to rebuild my computer files and take only the good stuff. Starting with a new leaf, I'm going to keep the new one ship-shape and shiny from here on in.

Plus, I'm going to buy a 64 gig USB drive and back the dang thing up every night and keep the key in my pocket at all times. This isn't happening to me again!

Off to London, Ontario: if you're coming, see you there and you can buy me a drink, if I'm not locked in my room making a presentation.

Posted by Techno Tim AT 7:53AM

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