Bloody, but unbowed!

I have (sort of, very nearly - touch wood!) restored my computer to full operability.

It has taken me more than three days of nail-biting, hair-tearing anguish, countless hours of rummaging around on online forums trying to find help.

I had discovered that the built-in 'system recovery' feature in Windows was no good to me, because it had - for some obscure reason - only bothered to save a single 'recovery point' during the six months I've had the computer, and this was somehow corrupted, and so unusable.

The computer's manufacturer, Dell, has bundled a device of its own called SyncUp in with the default software. This is apparently supposed to back up all your data online. But this, too, has not been working properly; it always breaks down within a few minutes of startup, and never manages to record a complete system image for backup & recovery purposes.

So, it looked like I was pretty thoroughly screwed. I had a computer that had developed fatal errors in its operating system, and I had no way to back it up.

Or did I? Checking through the 'Safe Mode' startup options again (And god, is that difficult to access! If you don't hit F7 or F8 at exactly the right milisecond, the damn computer just attempts a Normal Startup and locks up again. I must have been through this 20 or more times - maddening!), I stumbled upon a rather inconspicuous additional tool which was seemingly going to allow me restore to my factory defaults from the onboard memory using Dell's Data Safe facility. Now, I wasn't happy about resorting to the 'nuclear option' of turning the clock back six months, and I wasn't confident that the onboard memory wouldn't be corrupted somehow... but I didn't seem to have any choice. And at least I was being offered the opportunity to backup all my data first (I would have been happier if I'd had the option to back it up on an offboard drive, but the interface seemed to be telling me that it would create a secure partition on my onboard hard drive for this). I thought I'd give it a go.

And it worked! Oh frabjous day!!

Well, except that when I relaunched my computer, I had six months of Windows Updates to install, which rendered the thing useless for another dozen hours.

And when I was finally able to start using it again, I found that the Dell Data Safe program was unable to access the backup files it was supposed to have created in my emergency recovery folder. And, to add insult to injury, it seemed to be telling me that it couldn't perform a data restoration from such files unless I forked out $150 dollars for an upgrade! That is outright extortion. I was incensed.

My tour of the online forums this morning wasn't much help. I was led to several supposed freeware applications that promised to be able to access these .dsb files, but either they weren't so able, or they weren't really free. So, I wasted a lot of time installing and then uninstalling these recommended programs.

I also thought - ah, foolish naivety! - that Dell programs ought to have a fair degree of compatibility with the basic Windows programs supplied with their machine; so, I was disappointed that Microsoft's 'backup & restore' facility was also unable to do anything with these dratted .dsb files. In fact, it appeared not to be working at all: it seemed to freeze when I hit the 'browse' button to search a drive for usable backup files. I scoured the online forums about this too, turned up a number of hopefully proffered solutions, found none of them did any good.

All I did learn from these vain investigations is that Dell Data Safe is widely perceived to be completely fucking useless (one user complained that he'd paid for the upgrade, and still found he was unable to access his backup files), very, very frequently creating these problems where people can't restore backed up files - often because the files haven't been compressed correctly and have become corrupted. I also learned that the Windows 7 'backup & recovery' feature is even worse, that it just about never works, and this is a known problem which Microsoft has done nothing to rectify in the last three years.

Oh yes, and when I tried to contact Dell's Technical Support via online chat last night, I was told that they couldn't help me because they'd lost my product registration details. Not sure if this is to do with my computer resetting itself, and wiping any onboard stored data about me, or if Dell's customer database is on the fritz, but it looks as though my product records somehow defaulted to a previous state where they only had details for the retailer I bought it off, not for me. I didn't feel like going through the rigmarole of re-registering my product details at midnight. Indeed, it wasn't practicable - since all the product codes are in tiny writing, on a label which is on the underside of the computer (and upside down, if you try to look at it by simply tilting the keyboard forward - one of the most amazingly fucking stupid pieces of design I've ever come across!), you can't really get a look at them while you're using the computer (and I don't have any decent light in my study anyway, so was working just from the light of the screen!). I got in a grump and signed off.

When I tried again this morning, I couldn't access the online chat facility at all. I was invited to try to e-mail my complaint/query instead, and was then told I couldn't even do that, because my detected location did not match the location I was "registered" in. WTF??!! I travel a lot. I'm almost always using a VPN, anyway. So, the detected location of my computer is probably not its actual location. And last night you told me I wasn't "registered" anyway! My apparent location has never been a problem in the past (I've had to contact the tech support like this a couple of times before). And how can a shift in my apparent location from Virginia (where I bought the damn thing) to California (where my current proxy is) invalidate my access to customer support? It's just INSANE. 

I am deeply, deeply pissed off with Dell right now. I am getting the impression from my survey of online complaints that their laptops are notoriously, disastrously unstable when running Windows 7. I fear I'm going to encounter these problems again and again. And I really don't expect a fairly expensive computer to conk out on me after less than six months of use. If I'd known in June what I know now, I never would have bought the thing. And I don't think I'm ever going to buy a Dell product again.

But wait, it's not ALL gloom. I did manage to restore my computer eventually.

Yes, I discovered that hidden among the sub-folders in the 'Emergency Recovery' folder that had been created for me, there lurks a little .exe file that launches a 'Recovery Wizard' which allows you to restore all the other compressed files in the folder.

Well, most of them. Most of the program files seem to have fallen by the wayside somehow - which is a HUGE pain in the arse.

But at least my Operating System seems to be doing its thing normally again. For now.

So, tomorrow, I might be able to do some blogging again. If I can be bothered. After all this hassle, I really just feel as if I want to SLEEP for the rest of the week.

Is blogging dead?

Well, perhaps not dead, but it's certainly not healthy. Many - most - of the blogs that I've enjoyed reading over the past six or seven years have lapsed into very infrequent posting or have been abandoned altogether. And I've decided to quit the game myself very soon.

I suspect one of the factors that's leading some blog writers to lose enthusiasm for the activity is the death of commenting. Many people like the sense of community that can build up around a popular blog, the lively conversations that might develop between groups of regular readers. For some bloggers, I think, this is one of their main motivations. That seems to have disappeared almost everywhere. Even on the most popular blogs I follow, comments have become much rarer. The comment threads on my own two blogs were often quite busy in my first couple of years of writing them, but now I often go for two or three weeks at a time without getting a single response.

A shift to 'microblog' platforms like Twitter has often been blamed for the decline of true blogging, but I'm not convinced of that. In the early days, at any rate, there seemed to be a symbiotic relationship between blogging and microblogging, with many bloggers successfully using Twitter to promote their blogs to a wider audience, and lots of people using the new channel to share links to blog posts they'd enjoyed.

If the rise of Twitter et al is now taking time and attention away from proper blogs, I feel that this is not itself the true culprit, but simply a further symptom of the underlying problem. I'm convinced that what is killing blogging is the shift to using mobile devices.

I remember that when Blackberries first started becoming popular around ten years ago, I could tell which of my friends had got them because they stopped replying to e-mail - EVER. And usually they were quite oblivious of the fact. I believe that - if we have good habits about dealing with e-mail, and usually respond to messages promptly, immediately - we become accustomed to equating reading an e-mail to replying to it; if we've read your message, we assume we must have replied to it, we convince ourselves that we did so. But with a Blackberry - and all mobile devices, to a greater or lesser extent - it's too darned fiddly to write at any length; and so people read their e-mails, thought about replying but omitted to do so, and then deluded themselves into thinking that they had replied. And communication broke down. That was The Curse of the Blackberry.

On a mobile device, even a tablet computer, writing is off-puttingly difficult. Hence, if most people today are accessing the Internet and reading blogs on a mobile device, they are not going to be leaving comments any more.

Moreover, I am convinced that the wider use of mobile devices compromises the level of someone's engagement with online content - reduces the attention span, makes interaction more fleeting and superficial. Reading something on a mobile device, even a tablet computer, is difficult (and, if someone is accessing the Internet while out and about, there is going to be more distraction in the environment around them, their attention is going to be less exclusively focused on what they're looking at onscreen): people are not going to read extended articles via a mobile device. I suspect reading something more than a couple of hundred words long is going to tax the eyes and the stamina of most people. And if people are now doing most of their online browsing via mobile devices, I fear these habits of shorter, shallower engagement with content will persist even when they are browsing on a PC.

It's not just blogging. The Internet - as we have known it for the past decade or so - is dead. Or dying, anyway.

I find that very sad. It is one of the reasons that I will refuse to have anything to do with smartphones or other mobile devices.

More exasperation with Chinese television

For the last few years Beijing TV's sports channel has bought the rights to show some of the English Premier League football games live. Not that many, unfortunately. Usually only one or two per weekend; and often not the biggest match-ups, because they are often allocated midday kick-off times which clash with early evening games in the domestic premier league here. (I suspect most Chinese football fans would rather watch a top English game than their domestic league, but BTV is not going to pander to consumer demand!)

Still, I've got the opportunity to watch occasional footie in the comfort of my own home. I shouldn't complain. 

This weekend BTV was showing the Chelsea v Arsenal match. Nice. Not live, mind you - because the game between Beijing and Changchun (we lost, miserably, at home) was given priority; but a full recorded rerun was shown immediately after the local game.

I think there was another complete re-rerun at some point today as well. (And probably on several more occasions through the coming week; they like to make the most from the fees they've paid, our Chinese TV stations.) I dipped into the channel several times at random this morning, hoping perhaps they might have another game to show in full as well. NO.

Or at least some highlights of the other games played yesterday - because there were a whopping 29 goals scored in Saturday's 8 Premiership fixtures. NO. They only showed the goals from the Chelsea v Arsenal game I'd already seen.

Now, BTV does have the rights to show highlights of all the Premiership games. (I'd kind of expect that to come automatically bundled with the live game package they've bought.) And it seems unlikely that the English Football Association would place restrictions on when those highlights can be shown (really, is there any value to them in insisting that a highlights reel can't be shown until later in the week?). BTV does have one or more weekly Premiership review shows with all of the week's goals (I just saw one on Friday). But apparently they are unable or unwilling to provide one over the weekend - WTF??

[And, of course, when they do finally show full highlights of all the games, they spoil the suspense for anyone who's been avoiding checking the results by displaying the final score on screen from the outset of each game!]

Blogger STOLE this post

My apologies to regular and casual readers of this site.

I usually begin the week with a wise and/or witty quotation. I often spend hours scouring the Net - or my private library - for suitable candidates. At the start of each month, I usually try to come up with such a 'bon mot' myself.

Because these posts, though usually very short, are amongst the most labour-intensive things I produce for my blogs, I like to try to prepare batches of them for some weeks or months in advance. A few months back, I spent the best part of a day compiling ALL of these 'bon mot' posts on both of my blogs for the rest of the year.

Then, last week, Blogger gremlins deleted ALL of my 'scheduled' posts. (Well, at least here on Froogville. If they'd destroyed all of my pre-baked goodies over on Barstool Blues as well, I would be even more distraught.)

So, no 'Bon mot for the week' today, I'm afraid. 

I am still in mourning for my murdered babies.

And until I see some sort of acknowledgement that Blogger has become aware of the problem and taken steps to fix it, I don't feel much inclined to post any more at all - and certainly not to pre-schedule anything.

I HATE you, Blogger.

And worse and worse and worse....

Yesterday, Blogger impetuously deleted all of my scheduled posts from here on Froogville. There were quite a lot of them, as I had spent several hours preparing in advance my 'Bon mot for the week' series for the rest of the year. And, of course, bloody Blogger has NO CUSTOMER FEEDBACK mechanism, so I can't get any help from them on this bizarre and evil glitch. All they have - which is just even more annoying - is an invitation to set up a BBS forum on your problem; since this is almost impossible for me to find my way back to, I am fairly damn certain that no-one else is going to see it or contribute a solution. [Still, I suppose it could have been even worse. During my summer vacation, I was sometimes preparing nearly all posts for a week or two ahead, to cover for periods of no Internet connectivity, including a bunch of music posts over on The Barstool - which sometimes take hours to compile, just for one post!]

Then my cable TV feed froze.

Now, Yahoo Mail has gone down (for quite an extended period, even though I'm now - finally - on my VPN, and thus getting a more stable, less interfered-with connection).

I have so much SHIT to deal with at the moment that I actually made a to-do list this morning (something I usually hate). Most of the items on it were complaints or fixing problems: three different banks and an international money transfer service and my VPN provider and Microsoft and Dell were due to be on the receiving end of my wrath. But all of that's rather on hold while I have no f***ing e-mail!

Oh yeah, and my printer just died.

Icing on the cake - we're suffering a late resurgence (hopefully a last gasp!) of the smoggy 90% humidity that blights most of the Beijing summer (but is usually dissipating by late August).... so, I haven't been able to sleep much either for the last few days. 

There's nothing for me to do at home, but it's too sweaty and polluted to think of setting foot outside. Oh, it's LOVELY to be back in Beijing, all right!!!

Here's one I missed: coffee shops!

In my rant the other week against all the recent innovations in modern living that I most loathe, I got into a bit of a groove on IT-related things, and omitted to consider broader aspects of fashion and commerce. And thus I overlooked one of my biggest bugbears of all - the coffee shop.

I can see this might be one of my harder pet hates to justify. With Twitter and smartphones and so on, there are a good many people - substantial minorities, at the every least - who share my 'Luddite' stance. But everyone LOVES coffee shops, right? How else could they have become so popular, so ubiquitous in the last 20 years? Certainly the resistant minority, I would suppose, is much, much smaller.

But I most emphatically do NOT love coffee shops, and here are some of the reasons why.

I am not a coffee snob

I like coffee. I'm curious about it. I appreciate the good stuff once in a while. But it's never become a major obsession with me. I don't have that restless desire to be trying out new styles and varieties all the time.

'Instant' is good enough for me, most of the time

So, the antithesis of a coffee snob, in fact. We love things that were comforting elements of our childhood; and I came from a very modest background, a family with very unsophisticated tastes. We always drank instant coffee in my house, and thus I still find it perfectly enjoyable. (Although I'm really more of a tea man.)

I'm thrifty

Coffee in coffee shops is obscenely expensive - compared to the cost of making it (even the good stuff) for yourself at home.

The chief joy of 'good coffee', for me, is not drinking it... but making it

On the odd occasion when I do fancy treating myself to a really good cup of coffee, I'd far rather make it for myself, regardless of cost considerations. It's the ritual of preparation, and the gorgeous smell permeating your apartment for hours afterwards that make it such a potent pleasure - rather than the drinking, which is over in a few minutes.

I've never understood the supposed social dimension of coffee shops

I loved Frasier and Friends, the two best American sitcoms of the late '90s; but I couldn't help wondering if they received covert sponsorship from Starbucks. Even though they were largely set in what appeared to be small independent coffee shops, it was likely to be the great franchise behemoth that would most benefit from the further popularisation of the coffee shop idea. That idea might already have been well-entrenched - nearing saturation? - in the States, but in the UK, and around the rest of the world, it was only just taking off; and I suspect the success of these two shows made no small contribution to that. But to me it was a complete mystery: why would people want to - or be able to?? - 'hang out' during the day? If they did, why would they not go to a bar or a restaurant instead? And WHY would they choose to drink coffee to accompany their conversation - caffeine having way more of the diuretic property of alcohol but none of the desirable effects of relaxation and disinhibition? Does not compute. I don't want to spend an hour or two watching my friends get progressively more wired while my bladder fills up.

Haven't you got no homes to go to?

In a country like China, where people don't do much socialising at home, and often, indeed, do not have much of a 'home' to do any socialising in, coffee shops (along with McDonald's) have been ecstatically welcomed, especially by the young, as a comfortable place to spend time, whether with friends or alone. Unfortunately, this tends to make them even less attractive to a foreigner, as the IKEA syndrome takes effect -  Chinese punters taking up residence all day long (without buying anything, if they can get away with it), making loud telephone calls, watching noisy films on their computers, taking their shoes off to air their feet, taking a snooze for an hour or two...

They're so bloody twee

I have some kind of psychological allergy to soft furnishings. I would never decorate my own home in the way that coffee shops are typically decorated. I do not find coffee shops 'comfortable' because I am constantly fighting to master my aesthetic nausea.

I prefer bars!

If I'm meeting friends for a chat, I prefer a dark interior to a light one, hardwood fittings to soft cushions, alcohol to caffeine, and a range of proper foods on offer rather than just muffins and cheesecakes. That's my idea of 'cosy'. One of my great problems in China has been that most Chinese 'bars' go for the coffee shop aesthetic, and thus have no appeal for me (or to most other Westerners, I think). A more global problem, I suspect, may be that the spread of the coffee shop phenomenon is damaging the bar trade; people who are hanging out in coffee shops (even if it's mostly in the daytime) are not hanging out in bars (even in the evening). That's a very worrying trend for someone who loves bars as much as I do!

And of course... Starbucks is an evil empire

The numerous competitor chains and the little indie outfits are no more appealing to me in terms of their basic offering, but the market leader is achieving a global domination that is truly scary. Resist now, while you still can!

List of the Month - Rejecting the 'modern'

One of the things about being away from one's homeland for so long - haven't lived here for ten years, haven't even visited in three - is that it brings home especially forcefully how much things have changed in the last decade or so. Almost everyone, even my Luddite friend The Bookbinder, now has a 'smartphone' (with the result that it now seems to be impossible to buy pay-as-you-go credit for calls only; all the credit plans are based on megabytes of Internet usage, with a certain number of calls and/or text messages thrown in for 'free' - which actually makes things very economical for me). Everyone now has a multi-channel digital TV package and a flat screen. Though no-one I know in the UK uses Twitter, amongst the younger generation and in the media it seems to have become quite important. And so on.

I continue to get by quite happily without any of this stuff. And I think I always will do. I do not see any of these things as genuine improvements to modern life. Their supposed advantages are trivial, superfluous - and offset by their more negative consequences.

So, for the new 'List of the Month', here are the...

Innovations I will never embrace

Personal Stereos

I did once have one of the early Sony Walkman cassette players. I took it on my round-the-world backpacking trip in the '90s, as the only means of giving myself some access to music (though mostly via the radio; I only brought 4 or 5 tapes with me). And I wouldn't usually take it out with me: I didn't feel the need, and was afraid of losing it. I just kept it in my room, to listen to occasionally before turning in for the night. Even when I was doing a lot of Greyhound journeys in the States, I found I didn't want to try to listen to music while travelling: there was far too much else to pay attention to. The technology, I suppose has got better now: earphones do a more thorough job of blocking out ambient noise and minimizing the bleed-out of their own noise into the surrounding environment. But these continue to be serious problems: the tinny buzz (at best) emanating from personal stereo earphones can be a huge annoyance to anyone else in the immediate vicinity; and the sound quality for the user is fairly abysmal (a problem compounded by the vogue for digital downloading and file compression: MP4 etc. doesn't even sound as good as a cassette, and cassettes were pretty dreadful). But quite apart from the fact that it's a lousy music experience and potentially irritating for bystanders, it's the fundamentally anti-social nature of personal stereo use which most offends me - WHY are you making this (partial, futile) attempt to isolate yourself from the rest of humanity and from the world around you?? The big problem with this - as has been emphatically demonstrated with mobile phone use by drivers - is that when you're not listening to the world around you, you're not paying attention to it with your other senses either: people who use personal stereos when cycling or walking down the street fully deserve to become road death statistics.

Smartphones

I really like the recent counterpart coinage 'dumbphone'. I am proud to be a 'dumbphone' user! It is quite bad enough that the ubiquity of mobile phones now tempts us to take or make calls (or, even worse, use SMS) when we're out in company; the additional allure of the Internet is altogether too much for most people to deal with. I am too enslaved by the Internet as it is; when I go out, I want to leave it behind. I suppose having access to my e-mail while out and about might occasionally be "convenient", but it's something I'm happy to get by without. The essence of e-mail is the trade-off between time-lag in reply (you have to accept that people might not see it straight away, might not be able to respond for a while, might not deal with your message until the next working day) and the ability to produce a more considered and more substantial response. You can't reply properly to e-mail on a phone anyway (when Blackberries first broke big 8 or 10 years ago, I could tell which of my friends had got them because they stopped replying to e-mail [usually without noticing that they had done so!]); if you need a short but quick response, use SMS instead. What else is a 'smartphone' supposedly good for? I came across an 'app' in the States recently that helped you locate taxis; a lot of people seemed to find that quite useful (in a locale where taxis were not thick on the ground; it wouldn't apply in a major city), but... a well-run taxi despatcher ought to be able to give you the same information in a phone call - where is the real improvement in your service experience? I suppose map services might be quite useful sometimes; but I have a long-standing affection for paper maps; and I figure that if ever I'm really lost, it's likely to be out in the wilderness where there's no phone reception anyway. That gizmo that identifies snatches of music for you can be quite fun too, but... it does cut short the jocular arguments about what the song might have been, and encourages the atrophy of your memory; and if a song really gets under your skin that much, a snatch of the lyric will enable you to identify it on the Internet when you get back home. The main impact of smartphones has been to truncate conversations by knee-jerk resort to Internet research whenever somebody raises a point of which they are uncertain or which is doubted by others - this is tiresome and anti-social. I tolerated this as an amusing and occasionally "useful" novelty for a while, but now I will have no part of it.

Tablet computers

An awkward and pointless half-way house between smartphones and personal computers: a little too large to be truly convenient and portable and not offering any significant advantage over an Internet-capable phone, but far less useful than a not-much-bigger notebook computer. I use a computer primarily for writing, and a tablet is bugger-all use there. Even doing Internet searches is a pain-in-the-arse on those touch-screen keyboards. People are buying tablets because they're 'cool', not because they're actually any bloody use for anything.

E-readers

I have ranted about this before. Reading a book off a screen is an irksome and unsatisfying experience, and probably very bad for the eyes. The tactile qualities of a book make reading a far more ritualistic and immersive experience. Moreover, as with all of these personal electronic devices above, an e-reader is rather too easy to lose (or tempting to steal), and rather a lot of hassle and expense to replace. (I don't think I've ever lost a book. The few times when I have carelessly left one behind in a bar or a restaurant, it's been handed in and I've been able to recover it the next day. I doubt if that often happens with an abandoned Kindle.)

Multi-channel TV

I suppose we don't have any alternative these days - other than to voluntarily restrict ourselves to the handful of channels we grew up with (this is pretty much what I do in the UK; although BBC 4 and a few of the Sky channels also have some worthwhile programmes), or to forego television altogether (which I have mostly done during my years of exile in China, and even during much of the '90s in the UK). The existence of multiple channels today seems to mean that we must suffer endless repeats or reality shows, and that at least 80% of the offerings at any one time will be complete SHITE. On-screen menus are awkward to navigate, making it difficult - sometimes impossible - to find a programme you might want amid the morass of dross. And we've lost the sense of community that TV fostered when it was an almost universally shared experience. I miss that.

Microblogging

I've ranted about this before as well. Of course, the preening narcissism and the mind-numbing inconsequentiality of Twitter and its ilk are odious enough, but what really bugs the crap out of me about this fatuous craze is that many of its converts become such zealous cultists about it that they - unthinkingly - renounce all other forms of communication, and create their own little closed community of tweeters, ignoring former friends who decline to sign up to the service.

Facebook et al

Not so much 'social networking' as 'anti-social non-networking'. The narcissistic urge is obviously a very common and powerful human foible, but I still find it amazing that the idea of parading trivial details of your life on a public website (for the convenience of stalkers and burglars) could ever have struck anyone as a worthwhile idea. I deplore the impersonalizing tendency of such communication, that it is blanket transmission to an unknown audience rather than a series of targeted, thoughtful, purposeful one-to-one interactions - which is what we ought to be cultivating in our social relations. I am gratified that so many business analysts these days are starting to suggest that the writing could be on the wall for Facebook; perhaps my prophecy of its collapse a few years ago will indeed be borne out before the end of this decade. I sincerely hope so.

I'm thinking of a 15-digit number: can you guess what it is?

When I experienced strange difficulties in accessing my cyberbanking a couple of weeks ago, I went along to my branch to make further enquiries in person.

How was it, I asked, that the cyberbanking log-in page would not recognise my 'account number' as a means of accessing my account details?  And moreover, how was it that the online customer help service had told me that my 'account number' "couldn't possibly be more than 16 digits", when it was in fact quite clearly 19 digits long?

Well, it turns out that the 'account number' for cyberbanking purposes is not the account number. Oh no. It's a secret number, for the use of bank staff only.

WTF????

I could not extract an adequate explanation from them as to why the bank would need its own code number for referring to my account. Or why this number is ordinarily kept secret from customers. Or why they were now willing to share it with me. (Gosh, I can be a forceful fellow at times!) Or why the cyberbanking log-in page was prompting me for a number that I, as a customer, wasn't supposed to know, instead of the REAL account number which I did know.

Sometimes you just have to make do with what you can get, and treat it as a positive result. At least I was able to confirm that - for all regular intents and purposes (checking my balance, arranging inpayments from employers) - my 'account number' is the 19-digit one that appears on my bank card.

The status and purpose of the other 'account number' is likely to remain forever a mystery to me.

Signs God thinks you're spending too much time on the computer

Rather than praying, cowering, beseeching, and all of that....

He resets his DeityBook 'status' to Wrathful, and very soon there's a whole lot of smitin' goin' on!

Consider - I am reaching a crisis point in my China Exit Strategy (ha!), and really needed to get super-busy at the start of this week... chasing up missing payments from various employers, trying to distill some coherent plan from the almost entirely inconsistent advice I've been getting from a string of different 'visa agents' (and certain unhelpfully 'helpful' friends!), trying to book some affordable flights to the UK and the US, getting hold of a big chunk of foreign currency, and finalising a sub-let on my apartment for part of the summer.

So, it was most unfortunate that I suddenly came down with 'flu from hell over the weekend, a wretched sore throat and fever, utterly debilitating. And then my phone got cut off unexpectedly quickly (it's usually OK to let the bill drift until at least the middle of the month, but the phone company is wildly erratic in its disconnection policy), which was a bit inconvenient for chasing up visa agents (some of these guys keep you on hold for 20 or 30 minutes at a time - which destroys battery and credit on a mobile phone). My mobility was further restricted when I managed to dislocate the dodgy cartilage in my right knee yesterday evening, and my usual 'prayer mat technique' for fixing it wasn't working (it had come out on the inside of the knee rather than at the front, and it's rather difficult to achieve full extension of the knee joint sideways - not without doing horrible things to your cruciate ligaments, anyway); I managed to sort it out eventually, but that was 40 or 50 minutes of extreme anxiety I could have done without. Then, when I managed to drag myself down to the Post Office to make amends for my telephonic delinquency this afternoon (the nearest one is two miles away, but it's so much nicer an experience than trying to pay in a bank), I found that their computer network was down. I was forced to go to the bank after all - and regular readers may have some idea of how bad that can be. I managed to get the job done in only about 20 minutes (which is astonishingly quick for a Chinese bank; mind you, there were only two people being served ahead of me...).

But then, when I got back home, finally ready to take on the massed hordes of visa fixers and travel agents and whatever... my computer CRASHED.

What? No, of course I'm not backed-up! Years of relatively trouble-free computer usage have made me complacent, I know. The last time I did a full back-up of any of my computers, I was still having to use floppy disks - and it ended up requiring half a dozen of the things, and taking absolutely hours. I gather it might be possible to get everything on two or three DVDs now - but it's still a bit of a hassle.

Yes, yes, I'm on it. I just don't have any free disks here right now. I am going to have to leave my computer switched on until I can get out to buy some tomorrow.

Oh, no - the CRASH was not a permanent crash. After the third or fourth restart, and much praying and cussing, and just going away and leaving the dratted machine alone for an hour to try to catch it by surprise... it eventually relented, and stopped hiding all my data from me.

But it had been a VERY SCARY experience. For a while, everything that I've ever downloaded or stored on this computer had disappeared - no photos, no music, no documents; not even a desktop folder with my name on it (although my 'Froog' administrator account was still in place, and GoogleChrome was the only non-preinstalled program still displaying on the desktop and in the Programs list [odd, because it is one of the more recent programs I've downloaded; stuff like Skype that I put on way back when I first bought the thing had GONE]).

A lot of this stuff, I do kind of have 'backed up'. A lot of it has been transferred over from former laptops, which are still just about alive. A lot of the work-related stuff I've taken the precaution of BCc-ing to myself on e-mail. But a lot of the most valuable stuff - training materials and research notes and articles that I've compiled over the past two or three years (stuff that is 'valuable' to me in terms of the time and effort and pride that I invested in creating it, rather than its possible financial worth) - well, it was looking as though that was ALL GONE. Not a happy feeling.

HOW do computers do this to us? Like mischievous amateur conjurors terrorising their family and friends in the parlour after dinner, they make you think that your most valued possessions have vanished into thin air and can never be restored. But eventually, after far, far, far too long, the lost items reappear again. "Only kidding!" they cry, with a smug grin.

And you just want to beat their head in with a spade and bury them in the back yard, don't you?

I am hoping that my new most regular commenter, John, who seems to be a bit of an IT whizz, might be able to chip in with some diagnosis or encouragement on this harrowing episode. In fact, I am inclined to blame him slightly. He had recently given me a tip about a crafty way to revert to the 'old look' on Yahoo Mail (changed a few months ago to something that is, to my mind, uglier, harder to navigate, and - at least on my browser, with my connection speeds - much slower and less stable than its no-frills predecessor). He told me that the new template wouldn't work on smaller screen resolutions, so if you put your display settings back down to 800 x 600 pixcels (and didn't that remind me uncomfortably of playing Doom on an ancient secondhand desktop while I was at law school, many, many, many years ago!!), Yahoo relunctantly gives you the option to switch back. Oh joy, oh bliss!

But not for long. After implementing the template selection on all of my various Yahoo accounts, I went back into my Control Panel to return my screen settings to normal. And something wasn't quite right. The desktop wallpaper didn't look as crisp as it had (much better than 800 x 600, but still not that great). And my desktop icons had all been arbitrarily rearranged in the upper half rather than the left side of the screen (and some of them, I think, had disappeared altogether; I do have rather a lot - I find it a lot easier to go straight to a desktop shortcut that to have to go through pop-up menus). 

So, I thought, something is being a bit glitchy here. Maybe I need to Restart to fully restore my old Display settings. 

And that's when God - or the Devil - started messing with me!

Banks - a medieval instrument of torture?

Six months ago, on the recommendation of a (Chinese American) colleague at one of the management consultancies I occasionally write for, I switched to using the Bank of East Asia. I'm not sure what their ownership structure or history is, but they're headquartered in Hong Kong, and thus I fondly hoped that they might be a little more rational and a bit more customer-friendly than their mainland counterparts. 

Perhaps they are a little, but not much. At least they have an English customer service hotline - which I am obliged to resort to rather too often.

The recommender had particularly praised their online banking service, and this had been the main reason for my adopting them. I used to get paid almost entirely cash-in-hand, but over the past year or two there has been a shift to most of my employers insisting on trying to make payments into a bank account for me. It is a royal pain-in-the-arse trying to monitor who has paid in what and when with a regular Chinese bank. In fact, it proved to be just about impossible. So, the facility for being able to check my account balance and recent inpayments quickly and easily online was the major selling point for me.

But I haven't been earning much lately, so... I hadn't bothered to check my account for two or three months. And when I tried to do so the other day, I found that the bank had just revamped its cyberbanking website. I tried to be optimistic about the change (after the initial irritation of taking some moments scouring a cluttered and unfamiliar homepage to try to find the tab that would take me to the cyberbanking area): it seemed that the 'new look' was somewhat more streamlined.

Unfortunately, on this new log-in page the previously available options to sign in using your name or a 'username' appeared to have been removed, or were at least temporarily suspended or dysfunctional. The only way to sign in was via the account number - which is a cumbersome 19 digits long. And I found that the entry window only admitted up to 15 digits.

I tried entering the full account number, thinking that perhaps it was registering somehow with the bank's website even though it wasn't all being displayed on my screen; but when I hit 'Submit', NOTHING happened. Not even the little swirly thing that tells you your computer is trying to do something; certainly not an 'error message' of any kind.

I tried a few more times. I tried omitting the last two, three, or four digits, thinking that perhaps they might be some sort of bank code and not after all part of my account number. Still no joy.

In a spirit of experimentation, I decided to query this via the online customer service link. When an operative finally got back to me 36 hours later, their message was.... my account number couldn't possibly be more than 16 digits.

Oh. Well, I'm looking at it right now, and it is definitely.... 15, 16, 17... yes, 19 digits long. And your dratted input window wasn't registering anything more than 15 digits anyway. WTF???

Call me old-fashioned, but I find it particularly disturbing when bank personnel appear to be UNABLE TO COUNT. Perhaps they're not using base 10??

Later that day, I found that the cyberbanking log-in page had changed again. I was now once more able to log in under my 'username' (although, having not used it in nearly three months, I struggled to remember it at first). But guess what? My 'account details' page now displays only a balance, not a list of transactions.

I am still waiting to hear from the customer service drones what the hell is up with that.

Dear Blogger

Your new menus and 'Compose' screen layout look just HORRIBLE.

Why move all the buttons over to the side, when we've been used to them being at the bottom for 6 years?? WHY???

The new homepage screen is IDIOTIC too. How is it better to have to hunt around in a sub-menu under a not-terribly-obvious-what-it-is picture tab, instead of just having all the options you might want to access clearly labelled WITH A WORD each?

Are you trying to create a blogging platform for people who are ILLITERATE??

These changes aren't just unnecessary, pointless, and irritating - they are actually CHANGES FOR THE WORSE. It is BEYOND STUPID.

I think I am going to migrate to Wordpress unless you allow us to revert to the old-style user interface.

A difficult question

I read at the start of the week in the New York Post (via a short, flippant piece in the UK Sunday newspaper, The Observer) that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is once more in trouble with the authorities, this time being investigated by the French police in connection with procuring prostitutes for his notorious sex parties, which may expose him to possible charges of 'misuse of corporate funds' or 'aggravated pimping'.

I learned that his lawyer, Henri Leclerc (it was not stated whether M. Leclerc had himself attended any of these parties), had some months ago made the following facetious statement in an attempt to make light of the matter:

“He could easily not have known [that the women were being paid]... because, as you can imagine, at these kinds of parties you’re not always dressed. I defy you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a nude classy woman.”

Google's image of 'classy'

... and not so 'classy'...

It would serve this asinine lawyer and the loathesome DSK right if the judge in the case accepted this argument along with its implied corollary that one can easily tell the difference if one sees these women at any time clothed: that would lower the evidential threshold required to secure a conviction very substantially.

I would have thought that a willingness to get naked with such a priapic old sleaze as DSK was in itself strongly suggestive of being a paid sex worker.

Perhaps France should follow Italy's lead in creating signs to increase public awareness...

Although, you know, M. Leclerc, prostitutes can be "classy ladies" too (and non-prostitutes decidedly 'unclassy'). That was such a monumentally inept and tactless remark, betraying so many smug patriarchal prejudices, it really did make me choke on my muesli. Funny, yes, but horrifying at the same time - especially when one reflects that people like this are running the country, running the world.

[I have also just discovered that DSK - rather than his buffoonish lawyer who made the remark - is now inextricably linked with the words 'naked prostitute'. A Google search on that term (innocent research for this post, I assure you!) currently returns mostly pictures of the lecherous old git.]

The bottom of the academic barrel

It's not only the Chinese academic who can drive me to rages of tears with his/her laziness, ineptitude, inconsistency, and muddled thinking.

The latest huge batch of academic editing I had to deal with included a couple of pieces by European writers - and they were pretty nearly as bad as the Chinese articles.

There are two linking factors which I think may explain this.

The first, of course, is that this is a Chinese academic journal I was editing for - so, it has no profile, no credibility: it is a sump for talentless time-servers who need to rack up some token 'getting something published' brownie points, but have no chance of their work being accepted by any decent journal (with a peer review screening system).

I suspect that an almost equally potent reason, though, is the fact that these people are all from the field of 'Marxist studies'.  Marxism - and, even more so, its Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist and other derivatives - has ceased to have much credibility or relevance in the modern world. Most academic institutes specialising in this field today are sponsored by the former Communist countries for propaganda purposes. It's a niche that mostly only attracts third-rate intellects and loony obsessives.

Moreover, having sprung from the German philosophical tradition - Hegelian dialectics and so on - Marxism is heavily burdened with obscure and self-referential jargon. Enthusiasts get rather too intoxicated with this secret code, thinking perhaps that the circularity of their arguments is effectively concealed from their readers by the impenetrability of their vocabulary. Or perhaps they just derive the same giddy thrill from the exercise as a dog does from madly chasing its own tail.

Yes, I believe the nature of Marxism and Marxist studies largely explains the intellectual poverty of most of the people who choose to write in this field. It does not fully explain why such writers are incapable even of giving consistent citations or transcribing quotations accurately.  [The last jackass I had to deal with had relied for almost 10% of his bloated 12,000-word text on extended - and garbled - quotations from this excellent book on the art of Chinese propaganda posters from the Mao era. Fortunately, that book is on the shelf right next to my desk, so it wasn't too much of a bother to correct these quotations from the original source; well, it wouldn't have been, if the dingbat had even managed to get the page references right! This is not part of the service usually expected of a proofreader, or even of an editor/polisher. I invariably go the extra mile - and more - like this because I care about quality, in an abstract way, for its own sake... regardless of financial remuneration or whether my efforts will be noticed or appreciated by anyone. I fear this makes me something of an endangered species.]

How to lose friends and antagonise people

Take a bazooka to their sacred cows, that's how.

Just in the last few weeks, I have risked outraging and appalling large sections of my potential readership by... averring that The Shawshank Redemption is not the best prison movie ever made, but the worst; mocking the achievements of Chairman Mao; characterising Withnail and I (an enormous cult favourite among UK students) as unengaging and strident; and wishing that The Lord of the Rings might have been written by anyone other than Tolkien.

I don't accommodate myself well to widely held opinions; I don't tolerate misplaced enthusiasms; and I don't pull my punches in deference to brittle sensitivities.

You might say that rubbing people up the wrong way is something of a speciality of mine.

You cannot be serious!

It's getting hard to sign up for anything online these days. IMPOSSIBLE, in fact.

Two or three times in the last week, I've tried to register on a site - and been rebuffed because of inability to come up with a unique username. One was an online golf game (I eventually bitched to their customer service e-mail address about the problems, but they never got back to me), one was a dating site (ahem... I invoke the Pete Townshend Defence: it was for research, honestly!), one was a music site - same story with all of them. All conceivable usernames were taken!

I'm not sure that I believe that. I have four or five aliases that I use fairly regularly online, and I can swap them around with the similar number of passwords I employ (not counting the two numeral-only ones I use for my banks). And some of them are pretty damned unusual. I've never encountered this sort of problem in the past.

Now, guys, please, if you're going to make it this hard to register a username, you at least have to give people some prompts as to what's available. OK, so there are already a dozen Froogs on your site (it seems unlikely to me, but your automated pop-ups insist that it is so); but I assume not all of the numbers from 13 to 100 have been taken - give me a hint!

My cyber-wounds were salted by a run-in over the weekend with the British Chamber of Commerce's website here. Their nice marketing manager had set up an account for me ages ago, to make it easier for me to reserve a spot at speaker events; but I hadn't yet had cause to activate it. When I finally did so, the first thing I was invited to do was to select a new password for myself.

And the nasty, nasty, HAL 9000-like site did not like any of my usual passwords. Nor, indeed, did it like any of the variations I tried on my usual passwords - adding an initial capital, and/or some numbers at the end, and/or an exclamation mark.

Yep, the prompts kept telling me that I should make my password "more secure" by using a mixture of upper and lower case, a mixture of letters and numbers, avoiding actual words, and throwing in some word-breaks or punctuation just for good measure. It appeared that they were determined I should create a password similar to the bizarre default one they'd initially given me, which was the utterly unmemorisable WskPAbmdpi.

Even more galling, the dratted machine seemed to be offering these comments as paternalistic advice for my own good, rather than giving me notice that my proposed password was unacceptable. So, I carried on hopefully pressing 'Enter' in defiance of these irksome pop-ups.... and eventually one of my 'inadequate' passwords was unexpectedly accepted!

Trouble is, after trying about 20 different ones in quick succession, all non-standard variants of my usual repertoire, I can't for the life of me remember what it is.

JES recently led me to this xkcd cartoon, which cogently explains why most computer passwords are dumb: we want words/phrases that are easy to memorise but difficult for a machine to 'guess' by laboriously working through options - rather than vice versa!

More toothgrind

After a couple of years or so, I'd grown deeply weary of the Bank of China (long queues, limited English-language service, negligible online service, additional charges for everything, and an uncompromisingly xenophobic attitude towards issuing credit cards to foreign citizens), and was looking around for a replacement.

One of my work contacts in Hong Kong recommended the Bank of East Asia - which, she said, had good customer service, excellent online banking in English, and would be easy for her to arrange payments into.

Jolly good - let's try that.

Well, I was initially stymied by the rarity and obscurity of their locations. None of the Chinese friends I asked knew of anyone who banked with BEA, or had any idea where one of their branches might be. I eventually tracked one down right in the middle of Beijing, just a few minutes' walk from the Dongsi Shitiao subway stop - but it is very well hidden in the basement of a nondescript office block, down a concealed and unsignposted flight of stairs. However, this could be a good thing, because there's never anyone in there. Both regular members of the counter staff speak reasonable English. And it is a very convenient location.

Unfortunately, my first attempt to open an account with them just after Christmas was stymied by their insistence that I needed proof of address (in the form of my 'Temporary Residence Registration Certificate' from the local cop shop) as well as proof of identity. No-one has ever asked for that piece of documentation before (and I've opened accounts with at least a dozen different banks during my time in Beijing)! And the really galling thing was that I usually keep that certificate in the back of my passport, but had deliberately removed it just before setting out (because I didn't want to risk losing it: it's a flimsy piece of paper that falls out of anything - wallet, passport, pocket - all too easily). Bugger!

So, anyway, I tried my luck again the other day, and this time everything went swimmingly. It took me barely half an hour to open an account with them (which is about the minimum you can expect to take over even the simplest of transactions in a Chinese bank).

Now, let's see about that much-praised "cyber-banking" facility...

Not so good. I've been given a 'personal security key' on a USB stick, but not given any instructions on how to use it. The bank's website does not contain any instructions on how to use it. Hmm, perhaps this doesn't matter so much, because I appear to be able to log into my account without using it. So, here I am, in my account, poking around and looking at my balance and all my user details without employing my security key. This is not quite as secure as I'd hoped! And there's still no 'help' page to guide me through what the security key is for, and how and when I should use it.

But then I find I apparently need to use it if I want to carry out any kind of 'transaction', such as changing my username or password. Good, that's more like it! Let's try that.

Oops - I am being told that I need to download some software for the USB key. I had assumed the software was all pre-installed but apparently not. I find I am unable to download anything on to the USB key, because it is 'invisible' to my computer - not displayed as an available storage address. Odd. Well, OK then, I'll just try downloading it directly to my computer to see what that does (there are NO INSTRUCTIONS as to how or why to download this stuff). Well, it's given me a nice little icon on my desktop, but still no instructions for use. But I imagine it must interact with the USB key somehow, and I'll probably get pop-up prompts when I need them - right? Er, wrong. Every transaction I attempt fails. Usually (but not always) the error message that foils me announces that I haven't downloaded the necessary USB software yet. WTF?? Oh yes, I have. Is the website (and/or the USB key) not recognising my dowloaded software for some reason? Is there some further software I need to download? Is there some software I need to download from or upload to the USB key? Do I need to do something to activate the software or the USB key?

Well, it's a complete mystery. There are absolutely no guidelines on the site. The 24-hour online customer help is in Chinese only. The e-mail enquiries service (which does appear to cater for queries in English) is evidently only available during office hours. And the character limit is less than a Twitter message, so I have to send five or six e-mails to try to explain my problem. And they all disappear from my Outbox after a few hours this morning, without generating any reply. Grrrr.

Ah, but this lunchtime, a very nice young woman with excellent English calls me to try to help me with my problem. Although her help is more geared toward reassuring me that I won't really need to use the cyber-banking much anyway than answering my questions about how I am supposed to use this confounded USB key. I eventually manage to tease out of her that the USB key probably doesn't work with my browser. But by then, we have chatted for 5 minutes on my mobile and she has exhausted my pre-paid credit (you have to pay for incoming calls in China); so, we have to continue our discussion by SMS, before my credit runs so low that I can't even send messages any more.

It turns out she thinks this system will only work with Internet Explorer 8.

Oh dear. There is a reason I don't use Explorer (apart from a generalized hatred of Microsoft): it's glitchy, unstable, and unworkably SLOW.

And I'm not even sure what version I have. So, I'd better check. Easier said than done. It's not identified in the browser window. It's not identified in the desktop icon. It's not disclosed when you click 'Properties'. It doesn't appear at all under the 'Add/Remove Programs' list (making it tricky to uninstall!). And when I finally find the program file... still no obvious marker as to which generation it is. Fortunately, just a moment's research online leads to the knack of unlocking the browser's secret identity: I have IE9.

I use my last text message to contact the nice lady at the bank to ask if this will be OK.

She takes a long time to get back to me (I imagine she's checking with someone, bless her). Eventually, she says... NO.

So, I have to work out how to uninstall IE9, and then find somewhere online that's still offering a download of the retro IE8 (not a very easy task, it would seem at first glance)??? Oiveh.

But it turns out the nice lady was mistaken. The system is compatible with IE9: it does recognise the downloaded software and give me the appropriate pop-up prompts to use the USB key. It's just UNWORKABLY BLOODY SLOW.

I think I need to go and chuck rocks at a panda for an hour or two to unwind. I wonder what time Beijing Zoo closes in the winter?