deeper thoughts

Here you’ll find posts about big ideas, interesting words, or introspective imaginings. This is a big bucket of writing that might be a little bit navel-gazing, but at the heart of any personal, blog-for-the-fun-of-it blog is a place where the author can write about personally interesting topics that may not necessarily appeal to every reader.

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Sylvan

This language of mine is so filled with clever words meant to precisely describe many things. Other words have meanings that are soft, fluid and flexible that they are used to describe concepts so vast as to make the boundaries of those definitions fuzzy and flexible.

To me, sylvan feels like on of those words.

SILL - vann

Living in or simply relating to the woods.

To me, growing up this word had a fuzzy meaning that was almost opposite of it’s actual definition.

Sylvan meant a trip to the beach.

Not a great beach.

Yet a twenty minute drive from my house was a large prairie pond called Sylvan Lake. On a summer Saturday we’d drive out, swim in the shallow, muddy water, wander the path along the town, and eat candy or ice cream.

Or later, “Want to go to Sylvan this weekend?” As a teenager with driving license this was a epic getaway far away and out of town.

The shores of Sylvan Lake, the lake, is not devoid of trees by any means and I imagine now, knowing the definition of its alias, that once long ago it was revealed by explorers and granted a name because it was a huge lake in the middle of a woods. Today it is but a dent in the vast agricultural Canadian prairies, an impression in the otherwise rolling flat lands that happens to contain water, support a small town, and attract city folks for their weekend getaways.

I’ve since travelled to many beaches touching many lakes, rivers, oceans, and warm blue seas. It still echoes back to my youth when I hear this word, yes.

But my association with this word has mostly reverted to moments more like the photo in this post: the quiet of the woods, the majesty of a living forest, and the peace that comes from walking among the trees.

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Tech Help: Fixing a Photographer’s Nightmare

I turned on my computer this meta Monday morning and was greeted with the following message in the black and white boot screen:

WARNING: Please back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent and cause unpredictable fail.

It seems that my life never fails to present me with timely topics to write about.

But you ask, why am I writing about computer tech problems on a cast iron blog?

If you are an outdoors guy like me or just love to take photos and video of your travel adventures, chances are you too have gigabytes of media stored in fragile spaces.

Yet, all of this epic computer fail wasn’t necessarily a surprise.

When I built myself a new computer a few years ago I had salvaged my data backup drive from my old machine. It was a two terabyte drive that also happened to be where I stored all my photos and my music library. I popped it out of the old and dropped it into the new, and voila… all my media were on the new computer. Yet over the last couple weeks, working from home from this machine, some odd noises have been emitting from the big black box and I’ve been a terrible techie and basically ignored the early warning signs.

Imminent hard drive failure warnings are something like a stage four cancer diagnosis for your computer. You don’t deal with that stuff tomorrow… you act. Today.

Now, to be clear, I do have a cloud backup of all those photos in case of an epic emergency like a fire or a flood, and local backups scattered across old hard drives and such, but my core library is… well, was this drive.

I write “was” because as of this morning that first action step was to immediately start to move all that data to a newer drive…. all seven hundred plus gigabytes of what I hadn’t copied already. (The music files are up next and that’s also nearly a terabyte of data I need to contend with!) All in all, I’m looking at about six hours of data migration today in a race against the ticking timebomb of my hard drive giving up and deciding not to work anymore. A race against a fragile piece of equipment which I need to push to its very limits by copying every last byte of data it has stored inside it. A recipe for a technical nightmare.

Cue the epic action movie soundtrack:

Hard Drives are not Cast Iron…

They are the exact opposite actually… temporary, fragile, and mysterious in their operation. Even so, I use the former every day to share my love of the latter.

So, if you got here by Googling and are mid-panic and wondering how to deal with this kind of error yourself, here’s my advice:

First, stop whatever else you are doing and get that data off the failing hard drive. Put it on another hard disk in your machine. Put it on an external drive. Drag it onto another computer. Move it to memory cards. Push it to USB sticks. Write it onto recordable media like DVDs or even CDs if that’s what you have handy. Whatever you can do to save all those precious files, particularly files you don’t have other copies of, cannot replace, or would be time consuming or expensive to restore. Save as much data as you can first.

Second, figure out a backup solution (or two). Backup external hard drives are fairly inexpensive these days and even a hundred bucks to store a decade worth of photos and video is a relatively small investment to protect your memories and work. Free cloud storage products are hard to find anymore, but if you don’t mind paying a hundred bucks a year you can store a lot of data with Apple or Google or Dropbox or any of a dozen reputable companies who will keep your data safe in their datacentres. Watch for fees for things often called “data egress” which means you pay extra to download those files when you need them back.

Third, don’t mess around with broken drives. Get that old hard drive out of your system and replace it. There are lots of software programs that claim to fix or restore failing drives, but too often these are temporary fixes at best, fixes that give you time to nab your data before it’s done for good.

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A Blogging Good Anniversary

I occasionally allude to an interesting-to-me fact: I’ve been posting my thoughts online in the form of blogs for a long time.

To give that claim some context, as of today I have been a blogger for twenty years.

That’s right.

On April 20, 2001, twenty years ago to today, I posted my first dispatch post from a hot little apartment in metro Vancouver shortly after moving there for a post-university job.

I don’t want to sour this post in any way with recollections of why I shelved that blog or mourning all the other little temporary websites that lived for a time online before fading into the obscurity of a backup file on my computer. Needless to say, the digital road from there to here has been long, rewarding, introspective, emotional, and likely worn out more than one keyboard.

I’ve been read by lot of people for too many reasons to list.

I’ve been scraped by content farms stealing my words and photos.

I’ve been recognized by media and linked from news articles.

I’ve been hacked.

I’ve been awarded for words, design, and concept.

I’ve been undermined by people I had trusted for things I’d written in good faith.

I’ve told stories.

I’ve had regrets.

I’ve corrected mistakes.

I’ve learned, grown, shared, and opened myself up.

Literally millions of words have appeared online at times, and as many of those words as I have cared to keep are safely archived and privately backed up in safe digital spaces for my personal future reference.

If you have been reading and enjoying this blog, thanks. It is the latest in now-twenty years of efforts to share my words and thoughts and creative soul online. It has been a big part of my life, mostly for good, and always interesting… well, at least for me.

It has been an outlet and an inspiration to step out of a pandemic-based rut (an even more significant thing to say today as my age-group eligibility for a vaccine starts this morning!)

I write and post, and I write therefore I am. And while this blog may still be young and new, for me personally this is a blogging good anniversary worth pausing to blog about.

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Douglas Fir

Look up but watch where you’re going.

On a recent trip to the mountains I was reminded of the diversity of the forest and the interesting world of trees. I may not work in the field, but I have a four year university degree in biology which included more ecology, botany, and entomology coursework than any normal lifespan should have to contain.

Even though it didn’t turn into a job, those four years earned me an immovable respect for the natural world and a firmly entrenched fascination with the diversity of living things.

I was looking up at the trees, but not really watching where I was going.

Of the many of varieties of trees I was looking at, and among the dozens of species that make up the mountain forests, there is one that has held my interest for a very long time: the mighty and curiously-named Douglas Fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. It has held my interest not because it is necessarily an interesting tree, which it probably is in its own right, but because when I learned about this tree as a kid my best friend’s name was “Doug” and I always felt a bit jealous that he had his own tree.

Yet, the Douglas fir was most definitely not named after my school chum, Doug. It was in fact named after a nineteenth century Scottish botanist and explorer named David Douglas. He is credited (in the narrow bandwidth of European science) with first cultivating the fir which would later bear his name. He did this in his twenties. In his twenties!

I certainly did not discover or cultivate much of interest in my twenties. Though in my thirties I helped cultivate a daughter who is now a teenager and who is anxiously contemplating her future education. We spent nearly an hour last night having a heart-to-heart conversation, me trying to bear witness to her struggles to find a meaningful life path, and also empathize through recounting my plight of squandering a university education in an interesting field for which I still have passion but most definitely no career.

She is young and still looking up at those millions of trees in the forest and their possibilities.

I’m getting older and often watching my feet, trying to remember to look up occasional and admire that world around me.

Look up.

David Douglas died under mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty five, but the officially documented cause was still interesting. Like a cartoon villain in a Gilligan’s Island rerun, he fell into a trap hole on a Hawaiian island and was mauled to death by an angry bull while his dog watched from the edge the pit. I suppose it could be said he, being a young and ambitious guy, spent a lot of time looking up at the trees and what was under his feet ultimately got him in the end.

The moral of the story is that if you’re always looking up at the trees someone might name one of those trees after you forever securing your legacy… but also don’t be surprised if you fall into a hole to your immediate doom.

The parenting lesson is that I need to give my teenage daughter the ability to look up and admire those trees, take her to the forest (both literal and metaphorical) but that I also need to be a good dad and keep my eyes on the ground for her. Maybe those four years of university weren’t a waste of time after all.