Tag Archives: cloud

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Stalled. My quest for more weight loss has been stalled for almost two weeks. I haven’t made any changes from what has worked consistently for the last nine months, but I’ve spent the last 14 days losing and gaining the same pound and a half. I’m trying to be a good sport and going after the 200-pound goal the docs seem to want me to hit… But I’m already sitting at an 1800 calorie a day hard limit and frankly I like eating too much to go restricting that much further. I should also note that I’m prepared to garrote the first person who chimes in and says “you just need to exercise more.” Bugger directly off.

2. New computer day. Wednesday was new computer day at the office. Under most circumstances I’d say that was great. Except the new computer they’ve decided on is a desktop that will live permanently at the office while we take out laptops to live permanently at home. Instead of two work computers it means I now am signed for three separate pieces of equipment. It also means that in order to work between home and the office, I’ll be relying on “the cloud” properly being able to host two decades worth of work product instead of it living on my local drive and simply being backed up to the cloud. I’m not a fan of this for a lot of reasons. Color me curious to see what the response is going to be when our elderly laptops start dying off and someone has to be on the hook for machines that live at home being out of sight and out of mind.

3. Some weeks are busier than others. This one has felt like every time I knock something off my list of things to do, two or three more rise up to take its place. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it has certainly been obnoxious as this trend managed to cross all lines between work and home. It’s the first April in a very long time that hasn’t been entirely consumed by working as an advanced party and event planner. It seems that finally having chucked that one large thing over the side, maybe it’s just a natural effect that 57 small things have come along to eat up that white space on my calendar. 

Faith in the cloud…

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Storing data “in the cloud” is not exactly new. It’s the modern version of mainframes with dumb terminals repackaged to sound somehow more futuristic. For data intensive activities – lets say storing a master backup of my hard drive – having it reside in the cloud (i.e. renting space in someone else’s server farm) works well enough for most purposes.  It just hums along in the background making a faithful copy of everything I have stored on my home computer. The chances of that service and my computer both crapping out at the exact same time are remote enough to not cause a moment’s active worry.

With something like a password manager, though, you end up with a bit of a different story. For five hours today Lastpass, one of a handful of large and popular password managers, was offline. It’s probably not a crisis if you use relatively simple passwords, like 1-2-3-4-A-B-C-D. If you use this kind of service to manage a hundred or more passwords and each of those passwords is a unique 16+ character string, however, life is going to get inconvenient in a hurry if there happen to be sites you actively need to log in to on a daily basis. 

For five hours today Lastpass failed me and I was effectively locked out of sites I use regularly, but that require a daily log in. Some passwords I had to reset manually (while taking note of the new password to sync later with the application that’s nominally in charge of managing my passwords). Others I was locked out of completely while waiting for the systems people to bring their website back online.

No online service will ever have a 100% availability. That goes with the territory. As a paying customer, though, I do expect some basic communication from the company about what’s happening and what is being done to restore services, and more specifically an ETA on when we can expect the repair to be completed. Today, unless you went digging on Twitter, it was a resounding silence from Lastpass. Not an impressive bit of performance… and something that’s got me reevaluating the balance between the security of a paid professional management site versus just keeping everything on a damned spreadsheet so I can use it when I need it. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Instead of sending me an email saying my statement is available, how about you just email me the effing statement and save me half a dozen clicks, a password entry, and hunting around your site looking for my statement. I know you’re trying to drive traffic to your craptastic site so you can generate more ad revenue, but you’re using a really douchy and inconvenient method of making that happen… and that virtually guarantees that I won’t even consider buying whatever your marketing geniuses are trying to sell. Sure, the email notice is better than paper, but just barely.

2. The Cloud. About a year ago, we suffered through a veritable avalanche of reminders “Make Sure to back up your C: drive to the cloud.” This week we’re suffering from a flood of equal and opposite reminders to go clean up the files we’ve stored in the cloud, it’s taking up too much space on the server. Sigh. Yes, networked storage costs money, but its not that much money. And really, being able to revive a document you worked on three years ago that’s suddenly relevant again is pretty much priceless.

3. Dogs. Most of the time, dogs are perfectly happy leading their lives of sleeping, eating, going outside, and repeating ad infinitum until the end of days. Every now and then, though, they decide to change things up… for absolutely no apparent reason. Or maybe it’s just me who can’t figure out why a dog would come into the kitchen after spending half an hour outside, grin at you (and yes, I’m quite sure she grinned), and drop an enormous deuce on the floor. I love these dogs like most people love their kids… but sometimes I’m amazed that anyone puts up with having the little heathens living in their home.

First impressions…

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First impressions count for alot and I can say that right out of the box, the new iPad has made a good one. The new display is absolutely remarkable. Hands down the highest resolution screen I have in the house at the moment. It makes everything else look bad in comparison. It is slightly heavier and thicker than the iPad 2, but not so much that you’d notice unless you were holding them side by side. Changing apps is snappy and the processor seems to have more than enough horsepower for anything I’ve thrown at it yet. I’ll save you the laborious description of speed tests and just say that yes, it’s fast. Unfortunately, I still have to go to Baltimore before I can try it out using a LTE/4G signal (thanks, AT&T). From what I’ve seen so far, the place where the new iPad is really going to excel is in the screen. I mean it really is something to see.

As I’m restoring from my old iPad, one thing I do notice is that the 16GB size may not be sufficient if you’re someone with a ridiculously large music library or if you want to travel with more than one or two movies on your divice. With 1500 songs and 40 apps loaded, I’m down to just a touch over 6GB of memory left. If you’re going to stream video rather than store it on your iPad, 16BG appears to be sufficient, though. If you’re worried about memory, I’d say the extra $100 to bump to a 32GB unit is probably money well spent. For me, 16 should be more than enough as I’m making a concerted effort to do more and more OTA syncing with the cloud and storing fewer and fewer things myself.

As usual, build quality is solid and it feels natural in your hands. I don’t think anyone would expect anything less. Needless to say, I’m still playing. I think Apple has delivered a good solid upgrade to the iPad family. Is it a game changer? No. No it’s not. Is it still a damned impressive piece of electronic wizardry? Yes. Yes it is.

Recommendation: It’s probably not a “must have” upgrade from iPad 2, but the retina screen makes it a damned attractive machine for movies and reading. I heard one guy describing it as a “glowing piece of paper” and I guess that’s just about right. Even at close range, there is no pixillation. Nice job, Apple. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more, uh, research to do.

Diagnosis…

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Tech problems don’t usually sneak up on me. That’s one of the perks of keeping up an, uh, “aggressive” pace on upgrades. For the last three or four months I was completely perplexed by the cause of my laptop slowing to a crawl. I ran diagnostics on diagnostics and kept coming up with the general result that the system was clean. Unfortunately, I overlooked the most basic issue of all. It seems I have been asking my 2008 model laptop to run at 2012 efficiency with a scant 2GB of onboard RAM. Woops. That’s really something I should have caught as soon as things started bogging down on me. Total amateur mistake. Then again, it’s been a good long time since I’d kept a computer for four years that it wasn’t an issue I usually ran into.

The problem is solved and all is again right with the world. I can run Chrome, Word, and iTunes all at the same time without everything grinding to an agonizingly painful halt. There’s a sexy new piece of kit sitting on my desk serving up content to every other device jacked into my home network. It’s a happy thing. It was a purchase I wanted to make anyway, but the sorry state of affairs with my underpowered laptop gave me enough of a nudge to let me justify all out replacement (at least in my own slightly warped mind).

I haven’t quite decided what to do with the laptop yet. Picking up a RAM upgrade would probably run about $50 and would easily buy it another 2-3 years of life as a backup or secondary machine to use when I don’t need to be tethered to the desk. Then again, that’s mostly the role the iPad fills now. I guess the question I’m going to have to ask myself is if I even have a need for a laptop anymore or with almost everything headed for the cloud is it a form factor that has outlived its usefulness?