We lost the web.

At the end of December, our Internet access went dark. There was enough bandwidth to handle very basic email but rendering even a simple web page took several minutes. Often the browser would just quit as the bits would take too long to come down.

We really have no options where we live. It is either Xplornet or nothing. And we were forced to move from the service we had been using for the past 3 years to a new platform. Technically, we are not yet connected to this new platform. But it is working now.

It was interesting to see how we fared without the Internet — or should I say with very limited Internet access.

Managing the Blog

Keeping this site current was almost impossible. I generally have far too many things going on during the day to take time to update the blog from an Internet connection at work. I usually write my posts at night and schedule them for release the next day. I was pretty much prevented from doing either.

Managing money and investments

Managing our money and managing our investments has become an online activity. Particularly the latter. Keeping track of our spending, trading securities and performing analytics all required a reliable and relatively speedy Internet connection. I was unable to access our online banking services and our online broker services.

Planning travel

I travel a fair amount on business and pleasure. We had several bookings that we needed to make: Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Seattle, New York City. I also needed to arrange for rewards travel and book flights. I could get by with the telephone for the hotel bookings — although the New York City trip required more research. But Aeroplan charges a fee to book over the phone. I was able to get by on my iPad with a 3G connection. Although not much faster and certainly not all that reliable in terms of where we live, I managed to book the flights to New York and Seattle on the iPad. I literally willed the iPad connection to stay up as Aeroplan went into a prolonged state of “now processing your flight”.

Keeping current

As we are out in the country, we are outside the reach of traditional mainstream newspapers. I read several newspapers online: Globe and Mail, National Post, Washington Post, New York Times. I also scan my reader for the other news sources that I follow. I keep current with quite a few blogs. Without the Internet, I was quickly escorted into the dark ages. I started watching CNN.

Staying connected

Social media, email, planning and organizing projects with other people. I had to connect with people face-to-face to let them know that I was without the Internet and that I might not be able to be as responsive as normal. As a society, we have changed our expectations about the way we connect and the speed of that connection.

This dependency on the Internet is not necessarily a bad thing. I was just surprised at how significant it was to have such limited access to the Internet. The web has become so tightly woven into my life. So much so that when it was taken away, my life was impacted.

I hope this post helps save someone a few hours of frustration trying to update their Drobo Second Gen to firmware 1.4.1 using FireWire.

I ordered my second generation Drobo on Friday the 13th. It was on sale from the Drobo store for half price and I received the unit within two days of placing the order.

Opening the Drobo packaging was a lot of fun. They created a nice experience and the unit was obviously packaged with care and thought. Very similar to opening the packaging of an Apple product.

Unfortunately that is where the similarity ended. Whenever I have turned on an Apple product, it just works.  When I turned the Drobo on, all I could see were red lights. My 3TB hard drives had failed. All of them.

It did not take me long to determine that the Drobo required a firmware update. Asking Google “does Drobo support 3TB drives” led me here. Okay, the firmware — version 1.4.1 — was released in October of last year. Not sure why my machine had a much older firmware version as I only received it two days ago but sure. Let’s get it updated and get the 3TB hard drives online.

Using the Drobo dashboard, I downloaded the firmware patch and applied the update.

“Update successful.” the Drobo machine informed me. “I will need to reboot for the changes to take effect.”

“Reboot away.” I replied.

Reboot unsuccessful. Red lights. Hard drive failure.

I love problem-solving. I always follow the same process. Which basically means I repeat the same set of steps. I hope for a different outcome. I’m not sure why. But generally, every time I follow the same set of steps I usually get the exact same result. And the Drobo did not let me down. Red lights. Always red. After downloading the firmware update several more times and rebooting the Drobo several more times, I concluded that a firmware release was not going to fix the problem.

Maybe all of the drives were bad?

Doubtful.

I searched the support pages again and found a post that suggested a manual update. Download the firmware file. Unzip the firmware file. Load the Drobo Dashboard. Control-click the “update firmware” section and select the downloaded firmware file. Apply the firmare update.

Reboot unsuccessful. Red Lights. Hard drive failure.

As I enjoy my conventional approach to problem-solving, I repeated the same set of steps several more times. And I achieved the exact same result several more times. And the Drobo did not let me down. Red lights. Always red.

Okay. What on earth is going on? Oh, yes. Repeating the same set of steps expecting a different outcome is a poor problem-solving process. Maybe I should think about a different approach.

It then dawned on me that there may be a way to check to see if the firmware had actually changed. I found a section on Drobo Dashboard called “status”. It gave the serial number of the Drobo and it gave the firmware version: 1.3.7. Huh? I had downloaded and applied the 1.4.1 firmware update no less than a dozen times.

I went back to the Drobo site and downloaded the release notes for the firmware update. I came across this little gem buried deep in the commentary:

Fixed Drobo firmware update failure when Drobo is connected via FireWire

Sigh. The Drobo was connected to my Mac via FireWire. I could have repeated the firmware update thousands of times without a change in outcome. Drobo does not apply firmware updates when connected via FireWire. At least not prior to this firmware update.

I connected the Drobo via USB to my Mac. Applied the firmware update.

After four hours, I had green lights.

Not a great first impression.

That said, the Drobo is now working fine and backing up my data. But really, shipping out new machines with old firmware? No mention on the support pages that you cannot use FireWire to update your old firmware until after you update to the new firmware?

That part is a big fail.

With Xplornet, we are accustomed to frequent interruptions of service — generally an Internet experience that can best be described as slow, unreliable and expensive. I continue to hope that one day we will have an alternative in our rural area.

On Friday of last week, Lorraine told me that the Internet was down again. Not uncommon. Usually it is just symptomatic of an oversubscribed tower and, with everyone home for the holidays, I just assumed that the service would come back.

It did not.

We have been unplugged since then. After spending a few hours with Xplornet’s support line — I loved the greeting message: “please note that we are experiencing higher than normal volume of service calls” — we have to wait for an onsite service call. As we are traveling, it means no Internet for at least a couple of weeks. At least not from home. And my oldest son, who is back at home, is not too happy about the lack of Internet access.

I am in Montreal right now — in the lobby of the Loews Hotel Vogue — jacked into Loews free WiFi service. I will try to make arrangements for the onsite visit to happen as soon as possible.

Frankly, I am a bit surprised as to how dependent we have become on being connected. As we are traveling to Montreal and then on to Quebec city, even the most simple of tasks, like booking and confirming hotels, online banking, managing investments, all become somewhat more challenging when there is not an Internet connection.

Fortunately, we will be back online later today once we arrive in Quebec city. We’ll be frozen as the temperatures have dipped into the Arctic zone but if my fingers can still function, I will have an Internet browser back up in the hotel room.

The Humble Indie Bundle offers a unique way to sell a product: pay what you want.

This massive load of game drops seven new cross-platform, DRM-free games down your digital chimney. Bandage your fingertips and prepare your mind for the challenges of Super Meat Boy, Shank, Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, and NightSky HD. If you pay more than the average price on the site, you’ll get Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+ too!

If you bought all these games separately, it would cost about $100. But, as per the Humble Indie Bundle tradition — you set the price! You can designate part of your purchase price to make much-needed winter contributions to the American Red Cross and the Child’s Play Charity.

So far over 300,000 people have paid about $1.6 million for the bundle at an average purchase price of just over $5. A great deal that adds up.

A friend passed me a link to the following video of time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011. They used one of my favourite cameras, the Nikon D3S. Amazing images.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

I think he may be on to something:

“You listen to those old records we grew up with and they are just so good. There was another thing happening at the time, and it was total focus. We don’t have that anymore — our whole landscape has changed because of society’s compulsion to be fully connected at all times. We’re constantly on our cell phones — talking, reading and sending emails, texting, checking our Facebook pages, and tweeting. There’s no longer a time, like we had back then, when you’re completely focused on your work. And when we went home, we immediately played music on our stereo. We didn’t have a computer to run to. We didn’t even have, at one point, a message machine to check! There was so much less involvement with networking and constantly responding to people. There was nothing but the music.

When you listen back to those records, they are phenomenal, and it’s obvious the musicians were thinking about nothing but the music. Sure, today we can do many more things with Pro Tools — we’ve got a lot more channels and many more sounds — but it actually takes far longer to make a record. That’s because our focus is fragmented all over the place. If you took all that time we waste playing with our gadgets and applied it to the music, would the product be better? In my estimation, absolutely. That’s one of the many things that have changed in this business.

Back then, we were playing more. That’s what you spent your time on — your instrument. Also, there was an absolute focus on the project when you were in the studio. None of the other musicians were answering their cell phones, or texting and tweeting. Everybody was more involved in the project — paying attention to the tracks, commenting and reacting to the music. Listening back to records from that era, you ask yourself, how come there aren’t any records like this today?”

Al Di Meola

Via

It did not start out that way.

My experience with computing began with an old TWX-35 teleprinter — also known as a 35 ASR teletype. I was in grade nine and we used the device to connect to a timeshared computer located at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I used to code IITRAN programs. Very simple IITRAN programs. But I was hooked. And technology became a big part of my life.

My first home computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.

This was quite the machine. A 3.25MHz Zilog Z-80A microprocessor with 1 kilobyte of RAM. Capable of driving a TV set with 22×32 characters of text. I used a cassette deck to save my programs. It had a built-in BASIC interpreter. I wrote my first word processing program on this platform. Amazing technology.

Then I moved up to a TI-99/4A.

This machine used a 3MHz Texas Instruments microprocess — the TI TMS9900 — and provided 16 kilobytes of RAM with 192×256, 16-colour graphics.

Then came the Apple II clones. I had a few of these machines. I ran two processors, the Motorola 6502 and the Zilog Z-80A. The former was required to run the Apple software and the latter I used to run CP/M. Primarily to run a word processor known as WordStar.

When the first Mac came out back in 1984, I was working on software projects for the Lisa. And I began to build out applications for the Mac. I remember bringing the Mac home. Such an amazing experience right out of the box. So much so that I went ahead and became an authorized Apple developer.

Over the years I built up my career largely on the basis of software engineering and managing Information Technology. Windows and Intel PCs were a dominant factor in the corporate world. Until recently. MacBooks, iPads, iPhones. All of them can now be found within most larger corporate environments. And I am fortunate to be able to work on Apple products.

I have been very engaged with technology since my early teens. Much of the technology fell into the category of “tools”. Apple’s technology was different. They brought enjoyment to using a tool.

With the passing of Steve Jobs, I hope that experience will continue.

Such sad news. He was an amazing man.