Years ago, core computing tasks were performed on shared mainframe computers, with individual users assigned terminal devices to communicate with the mainframe computer. Some of the terminals were smart, and able to enhance the interaction. Notably, the CTC Datapoint 2200 was in fact itself a programmable computer (in production five years before Steve Wozniak's Apple I), and was the direct ancestor of the x86 computers of to-day. But few of smart terminals themselves ran any code other than to provide interface for communication with the mainframe. (And the dumb terminals ran no applications.) There were efforts to get the general population using mainframes by way of terminals located in their homes, but these efforts enjoyed limited success.

Then the idea of personal computers caught hold, so that a large share of the population indeed computed at home or in the office. But the computing itself was primarily done at basically the same physical location as was the user. It was possible to add some communications hardware to the computer, and then use it as a terminal device, but most of the tasks that had previously been performed on a mainframe were now being performed locally.

When the 'Net came into wider use, some people started having the thought that perhaps it would be an advancement if principal computing tasks were moved onto the Internet, which is to say onto serving computers that were available by way of the 'Net. Unsurprisingly, I see this as a return to an earlier, previously unpopular model.

Now, sometimes, changes in an infrastructure can breathe new life into essentially older technologies; and one shouldn't reject this idea of moving back to locating core computing on remote machines simply because we had previously reduced its relative use. But I find it a signally unappealing idea, because it removes the independence of personal computing. I very much like the fact that I can do everything without communicating except communication itself. I have local applications for text processing and for type-setting, for multimedia generation, for mathematical analysis, and for programming. For these things, I don't have to rely upon a connection to the 'Net nor upon someone's server.

While there are some tasks that might be better performed by a network of distributed service, there is no particular reason for handing responsibility to such a network for mundane tasks that users could easily be performing with local equipment. And the introduction of the opaque buzzword cloud to refer to distributed service on the Internet does nothing but get my back up.

Anyway, I was prompted to ventilate by this story:

T-Mobile Sidekick users have had things such as contact information and photos stored on the cloud, which in this case is to say some servers that T-Mobile has leased from a division of Microsoft, which division is aptly named Microsoft/Danger. Well, the servers weren't properly backed-up, they crashed, and most or all that they held is just … gone.

[Up-Date (2009:10/15): Microsoft has now largely reversed itself, declaring we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way.]

I didn't get a chance to ride the bicycle that my father gave me. The vehicular gate to the parking area of the apartment complex in which I live was mysteriously disabled; and a few days later, on 25 November, exactly one thing was stolen — that bicycle. Whoever stole it came prepared with something that could cut through a heavy-duty security cable.

I learned of the theft on the morning of 26 November, as I was packing my car for a trip to visit my parents. The complex manager promised to review the video recorded by the security cameræ. Since the bicycle wasn't visible from the street and the thief or thieves were prepared with cable cutters, I'm pretty sure that the theft was by a party including someone who had been on the property earlier, and that said person or persons had disabled the gate. He, she, or they were probably attendant to the position of the security cameræ.

As unhappy as I was, I considered not travelling, but I knew that I would make my parents very sad if I didn't come. So I went ahead.

On top of ordinary reasons for visiting them, I had been asked to help them get their computers up-graded from Windows XP SPs 1 or 2 to SP3. Although SP3 installed without difficulty on my Windows partition, the installation aborted on each of their machines. Well, we have SP3 on their machines now, but the processes have been trips through mine-fields, with many explosions.

We ultimately resorted to formatting the principal hard drive of my father's desk-top computer, and installing everything from scratch except in-so-far as we have over-written much of the new contents of the Application Data folder with the old contents. It seems to be in reasonably good shape now.

Things went smoother with respect to my mother's lap-top computer, but (at this stage) the OS knows that the built-in sound card is some sort of audio device, but does not recognize it as a Playback or Recording device. In fact, the OS likewise cannot tell what sort of audio device a SoundBlaster PCMCIA card is. I've tried many things, and visited many sites looking for a fix, but have so far failed.

As I've fought with the computers, my mother has repeatedly acted as if my father has been pushing me too hard to solve the problems, while actually my father has at various stages pushed me to quit working the problems hours before I would normally want to stop. I greatly wish that neither would act this way.

Also making me unhappy is the reduced opportunity to talk with the Woman of Interest. My parents are Morning People, and operating on something like their schedule greatly reduces my window of opportunity to speak to her. Then, because I use a head-set, people don't have a good visual cue that I'm using the phone. People have a propensity to start talking to me without first listening to whether I'm in conversation. And, finally, a fair amount of my normal telephone interaction with the Woman of Interest involves one or both of us being relatively quiet for extended periods. (We have unlimited connection time within the Sprint PCS network,[1] and so leave the connection in place and interact as if separated by a room partition.)

My brother and his long-time girl-friend also came for Thanksgiving, but left on the week-end. Yester-day, they got a quick civil marriage. Later, they will have a bigger ceremony to which they can invite friends and family. What precipitated the marriage seems to have been that my brother was offered a job in Tucson shortly after being laid-off from his job in Austin. I think that his girl-friend reälized that she should seal-the-deal. (Yes, she seems to have been the one most reluctant to commit.) My parents and I really like her.

With my brother moving to Tucson, my father is now speaking wishfully of my moving here as well. But he does understand that I would much rather live in or near the forests of the Pacific Northwest than in the Arizona desert.

Yester-day, my cousin Lyn (a really nice guy, who suffered some sort of in utero cerebral damage) came to visit my mother. I tagged along as they ran errands yester-day, and to-day as they went to Sweetwater Wetlands and to Tohono Chul Park.

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[1] Actually, we're limited to 44640 minutes per month (or sometimes as few as 40320 minutes). Perhaps not enough if one loves eight days a week.

The Windows installation on my computer is currently spending many hours to accomplish something that should take less than a minute.

Most computer storage systems have a sort of thing that some of us know as directory and others know as folder. People speak and tend to think of files as being in these things, but actually files are only in these things in much the same sense as a persons are in a phone book. Hence, directory is at least the less misleading term (paper files being in paper folders more as people are in buildings). Directories are usually themselves implemented as files, which then makes it trivial to put directories in other directories.

Logical disk C on my computer entirely resides on one physical hard drive. I have a directory on C such that I'd like to move it from one parent directory on C to another on C. What that literally means is that I would like to add a listing for it to another directory, remove a listing from the earlier parent, and change what the moved directory lists as its parent. I don't want to relocate the files that it contains to another part of the logical drive; I certainly don't want to relocate them to another physical drive. I don't even want to relocate the directory in question. I just want to change which parent directory lists the directory in question (and what it lists as its parent directory). So I did a cut-and-paste from one folder to another, something on the order of twelve hours ago. The move is still in-process; the progress bar indicates that it is less than half done. The disk drive is in a state of near-continuous activity, and the dialogue box is listing the subcontents of the directory one-by-one.

(Sadder still, this move is in preparation for moving the files in question to a different physical device, which will take considerable time no matter which operating system is used.)