Panic over

Now that the dust has settled, and I know that I have all my business critical work secured I realise how close I came to losing something really important. That's my cycling spreadsheet, with a record of nearly three years of rides.

In the wee small hours of this morning I was worrying about the relatively trivial matter of re-entering a year's worth of book-keeping activity from the paper records in my little black box. Losing track of my Eddington number would have been a far more serious issue, and far more difficult to recover.

Many years ago I was a system programmer on mainframes. Screwing up the accounts database, along with the backup copy would mean that virtually an entire organisation would grind to a halt until it was sorted. More than thirty years on, I still remember a meeting with the Chief Accountant the morning after we did just that. You'd think I would have learned.

At times like this I repeat the little ditty that we used to recite in those days:

I hate this damn computer
I wish that they would sell it
It won't do what I want it to
Only what I tell it

It's my reminder that whether it's Linux, Windows, Mac OS, or the 1970's mainframe that we used to grapple with, there's not a lot of point blaming the software. The operating system didn't decide to over-write the back-up with corrupt data, or install the wrong version of a software package.

Anyway, I think we've got everything sorted now. Until it returns to normal the office is looking nice and tidy. I'm certainly going to to have another try at Linux, but I think I'll take a somewhat different approach next time. And I can go on working on my Eddington number, without having to reboot it.