“We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome one day.” — Spiritual
Hello friends and thank you for being here. We hope you enjoy the day before yesterday’s news. It wasn’t available for you yesterday because the geniuses at the hosting provider allowed data to be lost, which in this business is the Cardinal Sin. Losing data is the capitol crime, beyond all other. Digital murder is a separate category, way beyond mere homicide. Homicide only kills the body, Losing Data kills the soul. It is personality extinction for all eternity.
I’m thinking of doing some kind of a Star Wars parody where the Little Political Blog That Could meets up with pirates in cyberspace, because that is pretty much what has happened here. I will be Han Solo, of course. Murfster is perfect for Chewbacca, the way he screamed — and rightfully so — that his stories were gone. Michelle, being an Aussie, has the same accent as C3PO so that works. I guess that leaves Jason to play Luke Skywalker. This could get entertaining indeed. Whatever Jason’s assets, technical knowledge is not one of them and this ain’t like dusting crops, believe me.
And we have intrepid souls from every culture on this planet reading the blog, thank you God for this blessing, although none of you have fish heads or wear oxygen helmets that I know of.
To give you the flavor of how this “conversation” with the hosting provider, Bluehost, has gone, here’s the exchange from just this morning.
Bluehost:
From your previous email, I understand how frustrating it is to lose the recent posts from the website, and those missing posts have to be restored from the backup. I have checked the backup available for the hosting account and I have only restored the website database politizo_WPVZY from the backup of December 02, 2021. Once the database has been restored, I have checked the WordPress dashboard and I’m happy to notice that the missing posts have got restored. Before restoring the database, I could only see 6 posts from December on the WordPress dashboard. But now after the restoration, I could see 12 posts from December on the WordPress dashboard of the site. Please confirm this on your end.
Ursula:
I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. The six posts from yesterday that you and I spoke about are still gone.Â
The question as I said to you is, “Are they gone forever? Or can they be restored?”ÂÂYour response to me was to tell me that you had stopped doing backups. At that point I lost it emotionally and began screaming.Â
I told you that I would just go ahead and take the hit because I feared that if you tried to restore any more data you would just destroy today’s data, or tomorrow’s or who knows what.ÂÂMy final request to you was to just try to not crash the site for a few days until I can go hire another provider and get away from the unrelenting torture that is attempting to do business with Bluehost. I don’t know if there is a web hosting provider in Hell, but you people will do until the real thing comes along.Â
Good day.Â
Suggested title “It came from Cyberspace”
That’s good. I may write this. The insanity that has been occasioned by the people I’ve dealt with is unreal. They are pirates. The last guy I fired didn’t look at the site for over two weeks, that’s what the problem was. The guy I have now does a daily backup and I have drilled it into him, “You have one job. Keep us live on the internet.” The cosmic irony is that he’s doing his job and now I have pirates from someplace else bedeviling me.
I probablty gave my age away by that suggestion (I still remember ‘It came from Outer Space’ a looooong time ago).
But, hammered into me from the days when I was struggling with binary and hexadecimal instruction sets the rule was “Back up, Back up and then Back up” (anyone who used a Z80 based computer and casssette tape streaming learnt very early on that it took ages to retype all those hexadecimal numbers)
Too bad there isn’t something like Angi’s list for web hosts. I don’t know if places like Cnet could provide that sort of info.
It’s not just the web host, it’s the entire picture. The routine maintenance work has to be done. The changing of different things on the site has to be done competently. If you do a plug in for one thing you have to make sure you don’t screw up five other things. This is the stuff you learn when you do this daily. I’ve have to learn it all the hard way, unfortunately.
Tech we come to depend on will occasionally bite us in the rear – Just a reminder that we can end back in the stone age with only two sticks for comfort.
Might cheer you up to know that you problems are peanuts compared with what Greenland has to deal with. Everything is basically shut down since the power plant in Nuuk croaked and the backup isn’t equipped to run anything but what was once the bare essentials say back in 1970. People can’t pay with their credit cards, can’t withdraw cash from dead cash machines, they essentially have to take canned goods in the stores and run. Most will also have to find a wood stove or wear a big coat, or both. Oh and no cell service. They might have to deal with all of that for weeks. We’re talking 40-50.000 people.
I will read that story soon. My heart goes out to those people. The entire day and most of yesterday has been consumed with this. We depend on technology. For example, I don’t think most young people could function without a GPS. In my day we had map books and we got around the entire country that way, even drove to Canada and Mexico. Nowadays, kids learning to drive don’t learn to get the kind of instructions that older people had to in order to function. I know I could not have moved to another city last year with the ease I have if I didn’t have a GPS holding my hand all the way.
I’ve seen young folks that can’t follow verbal directions, because they are are so dependent on GPS. That’s a little crazy to me.
I’m a map reader. Hate the noise and distraction of that voice telling me to turn left in 20 feet and such. I have a sense of direction, something that a friend of mine seems to no long have due to her dependence on GPS. Tech can be great, but it’s always on my mind to try to be somewhat prepared for when the grid goes down, because someday it will.
“Michelle, being an Aussie, has the same accent as R2D2 so that works.”
Ursula, I think you meant she has the same accent as C3PO (although the actor who voiced him is English–born in Salisbury–and an English accent isn’t quite the same as an Aussie accent; they’re similar but not the same). R2D2 “spoke” in beeps, boops and whistles.
You’re absolutely right. She will have to be Mops3PO. You can tell how tired I am to make a mistake like that.
Much sympathy, Ursula ✊
Did you get to recover the 3? that disappeared? One had “queen of Canada” in the title, for example; or have they been recycled & updated into other posts?
(BTW it’s hom*i*cide, at least if it’s not a particular kind of hate crime!)
I have screwed up this blog right and left. It is unconscionable for a law school grad to misspell homicide. What a day. WRT to the pieces you mention, they’ve been destroyed.