Hard disc.

Hard­ware- and soft­ware-relat­ed tech­ni­cal prob­lems have popped-up one after anoth­er for the last week in work­ing on this site. It all began on Tues­day, March 14, 2017 when I noticed I was hav­ing prob­lems with my back­up soft­ware for my Win­dows 10 desk­top com­put­er, which is the machine I use for most of the work on South­ern Mary­land Food & Drink. Trou­bleshoot­ing the back­up soft­ware led to find­ing my hard disc was full of bad sec­tors, mean­ing it was like­ly to fail soon­er than lat­er. It was also caus­ing pro­grams to respond slow­ly, as they were hav­ing trou­ble read­ing and writ­ing to the hard-dri­ve — a tech­ni­cal prob­lem I couldn’t read­i­ly fix myself.

On Wednes­day the 15^th I took the desk­top into a com­put­er-repair shop to get a new hard disc installed and all my files and pro­grams cloned to it. After drop­ping off the machine, I head­ed over to Blue Dyer Dis­till­ing Co. to video an inter­view with the founder and Mas­ter Dis­tiller Ryan Vier­heller. I had been there twice before. But those times were dur­ing vis­it­ing hours, when the space (a large, high-ceil­ing ware­house space in an indus­tri­al park) had a num­ber of vis­i­tors milling about. With just the two of us, the acoustics were not great for sound-record­ing, because of a large indus­tri­al fan run­ning in the back­ground.

Cam­era and clap­board.

Vier­heller was able to turn off the fan for a bit. Even­tu­al­ly, though, it had to kick-on again for the dis­till­ing process to con­tin­ue its prop­er course. The sound qual­i­ty on the record­ing, unfor­tu­nate­ly, went from OK to lousy — yes, anoth­er tech­ni­cal prob­lem. Now I’m work­ing on tran­scrib­ing the video into an inter­view. In the past, when I’ve been able to work with a pro­fes­sion­al video crew, there’d be one per­son run­ning the cam­era, anoth­er doing the sound, and all I had to wor­ry about was being the reporter. But as a one-man band, my resources are much more lim­it­ed, to say the least.

The com­put­er shop called me first thing on Fri­day morn­ing to let me know the machine was ready. When I got it home, it took a lit­tle fid­dling to get it all set­up and run­ning prop­er­ly, but the good news was that I wouldn’t have to re-install my pro­grams and files — they all got prop­er­ly trans­ferred. Next I had to get the back­up pro­gram run­ning again, so that my future work wouldn’t get lost. Along with the back-up to the cloud, I also have it set­up to make a mir­ror copy on an exter­nal hard-dri­ve. I called tech­ni­cal sup­port for the back­up soft­ware that I use and they did a remote-con­nec­tion to my com­put­er and pret­ty much set every­thing up for me, so that all looked to be in good shape.

Software technical problems

On Sat­ur­day morn­ing, I went to use the machine and all looked well and good. I logged into this site and began to check things out. I’ve used sev­er­al Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CMSs), such as Joom­la! and Dru­pal, but for this site I use the Word­Press CMS. In addi­tion to the pri­ma­ry soft­ware pack­age that is the CMS itself, you then have lots of dif­fer­ent add-on pieces of soft­ware that they call plug-ins. Every so often, a plug-in will get updat­ed, and you get a notice that you have an update to install, which is what I found await­ing me that morn­ing for a typog­ra­phy plug-in I use. I just clicked-on the update and off I went. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it turned out the update had a major bug in it and this site became incred­i­bly slow and pret­ty much unus­able — for hours. With help from my web-host­ing ser­vice, we even­tu­al­ly got things back under con­trol after about 5 hours. Basi­cal­ly, we had to shut-down that plug-in. I noti­fied the plug-in mak­ers of the prob­lem and wait­ed for them to fix it. They announced a fix with­in 24 hours, but I wait­ed until Mon­day to run the plug-in again, just to be sure addi­tion­al bugs hadn’t been intro­duced.

Using a tablet.

I found out about the fix when I checked things on Sun­day morn­ing from my iPad. Since things now seemed to be fine, I  head­ed into my office to get some work done, and found that my desk­top machine had crashed overnight and could no longer see its new hard disc in order to start-up. I knew that meant it had to go back to the shop on Mon­day morn­ing and in the mean­time, got out a lap­top to work on things (I can do some work on the iPad, but typ­ing is not it’s forte).

Where­upon I came across the next prob­lem: anoth­er plug-in was act­ing-up on this site (the plug-in that cre­at­ed the links to relat­ed sto­ries at the end of each arti­cle). It was using large amounts of the resources of the cen­tral-pro­cess­ing unit on my host com­put­er, again slow­ing things down. The day before, the tech­ni­cal sup­port folks at my web-host­ing ser­vice had point­ed to this oth­er plug-in as a pos­si­ble prob­lem dur­ing our trou­ble-shoot­ing ses­sions, but once we found the big prob­lem with the typog­ra­phy plug-in, we thought things were OK. What were the odds two plug-ins would go bad at the same time? It hap­pened. So I shut down the sec­ond plug-in and went in search of anoth­er to do the same job. I tried a cou­ple, but the first few didn’t seem to make very rel­e­vant links. On the third or fourth try, I final­ly found a replace­ment that seemed good for the job; it wasn’t a resource hog, and the relat­ed sto­ries links it cre­at­ed seemed to actu­al­ly be fair­ly well cho­sen. So, that’s what’s run­ning on the site now. Whew! For now, the tech­ni­cal prob­lems with this web­site seem to be solved.

Hardware problems resolved

Come Mon­day morn­ing, I drove over to the com­put­er shop. For­tu­nate­ly, the prob­lem was a fair­ly sim­ple one, and they were able to fix it while I wait­ed. I got the com­put­er home, set it up, and worked to get the back­ups run­ning again. As it turned out, the back­up to the cloud had been work­ing fine between Fri­day after­noon and Sat­ur­day night, but the local mir­ror back­up to an exter­nal disc hadn’t been work­ing. I got back on the phone with tech sup­port for that com­pa­ny and they again ini­ti­at­ed a remote-con­nec­tion, took over my machine, and after about 45 min­utes got things run­ning. As it turned out, they had to erase the old mir­rored files, for­mat the exter­nal dri­ve, and re-start the mir­ror­ing process from scratch. It took a lit­tle over 48 hours to com­plete the mir­ror­ing process, but since then all has been well.

After all this, if I thought knock­ing on wood, or cross­ing my fin­gers would help, I might do both. But I’m not super­sti­tious, so will just keep slog­ging away. Back to cre­at­ing food & drink con­tent! (Hope­ful­ly, with no help from the tech­ni­cal grem­lins.) ♦