Some might think this scary

Nothing is going to leap out and scream boo. There are no gory photos. Nothing broken. Just a topic people don't like to talk about.

Our wills (the last testament kind of will, not the amount of determination we have) were written long ago. In the sense of leaving everything to the spouse, they're still valid. But then the surviving spouse has a problem, in that everyone else mentioned in it is dead. Doing a new one becomes a priority. Plus, what happens if we both die at the same time, perhaps in a regrettable incident of road carnage on the local highways. After all, even at our advanced age, driving is the most dangerous thing we do and is thus the most likely cause of death.

But then we got to thinking. So one of us dies, and let's pretend it's me. Essentially all the bills are paid through my bank account, which at this very moment Linda couldn't get into even if you put a gun to her head. Oops. There are other ways to pay those bills, just much less convenient. But does she know all of them? (Yes, we know Linda knows ALL, but it's easy to overlook something small that comes up once a year.)

I switched us from the regulated rate to a plan a while ago, and once I got into the account was shocked to discover that not a single piece of contact information they had for us was current, other than the address to which a paper bill was sent. The phone number was Linda's office number from several decades ago. Our home number had been incorrectly entered. The email address was out dated. I had to actually call them, and read off a bunch of numbers from the current bill before they updated all the info and reset the password.

So we've started making a list. Just started, and good Lord, so many things already. However did our lives get this complicated? Still, we will persevere. Ask yourself, does your spouse, or your child/children know how to take whatever actions are needed to cope with all this stuff, and probably more? That might be something important like paying the electricity bill, or something small like closing the library card in an orderly way.

The worst case scenario is that we're both found barely alive in car wreckage. Who do the police call? How do they find our medical records? Who feeds Celina? During my training rides and runs I wore a road ID bracelet with emergency contact info, but all that info is outdated. I'm pretty sure my phone has an in case of emergency number, but what if the phone is destroyed?

The idea is to gather all the info about our life into a reference manual, print it in a reasonable sized font for old and stressed eyeballs, then put it somewhere safe but handy, with a back up copy somewhere safe off site. 

All the info, like:

EMERGENCY CONTACTS

Keith Cartmell 

Linda Mulligan 

Kelly McKinnon (Linda's sister)

Executor ??? (Yes, we really should update our wills.)

HEALTH CARE

Dr  (Keith) 

Dr (Linda)

BANKS/INVESTMENTS/PENSION

TD Canada Trust account for paying bills

Royal Bank 

LAPP

IPC Michelle Kilty Financial Advisor (who is awesome!)

IPC investment account 

Tax accountant (paying a tax account started back in the 90's for me, and is probably the best value money I spend in a year in terms of reducing stress.)

CRA (Keith)

CRA (Linda)

UTILITIES/OTHER MONTHLY/YEARLY BILLS

Enmax

Direct Energy

Telus (Keith) Mobility and Home

Telus (Linda)

House and car insurance are through xxxxx

House Account xxxxxxxx policy xxxxxxx renews Jan 28

Car Account  xxxxxxx policy xxxxxxx renews Jan 28

Nucleus auto withdrawal monthly through credit card

Blue Cross

Clearview (furnace servicing) monthly withdrawal through credit card

COMPUTER STUFF/SOCIAL MEDIA/MISC

Laptop login

Airport WiFi via laptop

iMac (email computer)

Mac.com 

iPhone (Keith)

Android (Linda)

Nucleus

Adobe (Lightroom) (which leads to a big question, what to do with the very many photos? I'm not now famous, but then neither was Vivian Maier during her lifetime.)

Blurb Bookwright (app on laptop)

Facebook

Instagram

Google

ParkPlus

MGAA

Credit monitor (Keith)

Amazon

Library (Keith)

Library (Linda)

Linktree

And all that was just the first pass, off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure there's more. Then there's going through to document account login information, or instructions for whatever. I've already noticed that some things are harder to figure out on the fly, and I tell myself that it's the world becoming more complex and bad interface design. I tell myself that often. Sometimes there's swearing.

On a somewhat related topic, I learned that there's such a thing as a fire and water resistant bag, similar to a fire safe, but portable, in the sense of a go bag. The putting documents or a computer disc into a baggie and putting that in the freezer isn't really a thing. I don't really expect to have the emergency services people bang on the door in the middle of the night to tell us we have x minutes to evacuate, but then again, there's lots of people in various communities that have had that exact thing happen. I can sit here right now, and think wallet, phone, passport, medication, cat. Would I remember the phone charger in a rush?

I've already put a reminder in my Reminders app to review this yearly. The hardest part will be to update the electronic copy whenever a password changes. I've already learned that when I create a new password, I need to write it out in plain text, then copy it into the browser. There are several times where I've got back into something via a forgot your password process, and then just as I was about to log out realized I'd already forgotten the new password.

And yes, I know there are password manager apps. I am not I trust them, and haven't really looked into how they work. Perhaps I should. I know that list isn't complete, and so many passwords, and they shouldn't be repeated. I've taken to using pass phrases. As an example which I have not used is, "Thefirst!Chronicleonmydeskis*March2018". A password check site says that would take centuries to crack. Good enough for me. Then again, the most common way for thieves to get into an account is to persuade people to log into them while they watch with a keystroke logger.

I recently described the adventures around a hard drive failure. How would the non-tech person in your house deal with that if the household tech support person isn't available? There's lots of stories about the new widow coping with the world after her husband who took care of everything died. We split things up a bit better than that, but I've no real idea where all Linda has accounts set up, and for what. I mean, world domination and all, there's lots to keep track of.

Yes, I know. You read all this, and said to yourself, "Yeah, I really should do that." Then you're going to browse Facebook and get some breakfast as you finish your coffee, then get on with whatever else is planned for your busy day, and cope with whatever barges into your life. Then tomorrow is a whole new day. And it doesn't happen, buried under the many things that are happening. Just don't say nobody ever told you.

No special reason for this photo, just because.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Two similar photos taken from almost the same place. You can see how much better a photo is when there are reflections included.

Linda

Newfoundland

That is as far north as you can drive on Newfoundland itself.

New Brunswick

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

Flower

Landscape

On cold snowy days like today, it's nice to remember scenes like this.

Dino related

A short one today

So where was I? In the middle of something, I'm sure. Then there was some distractions, some of are still in progress. At least the hard drive situation has settled down, and the new drive should arrive next week.

As a reward for sending in the recent Blurb book, I have 50% off another book if I send it in before March 23. I don't have one cued up, but here's an idea. If you have some photos and a book in mind, we can collaborate on it. Or maybe you want a book of my images. Whatever. I'll walk you through the Blurb book creation process, which is lots of fun. If it's a big lay flat with nice paper you could save a couple hundred dollars. If you live here there could be coffee or wine. If you live somewhere else there are ways to make it work. Let me know and we'll make it happen.

I've been staring at the screen for a few minutes and I've got nothing more. So lets show you a nice little waterfall, you can scroll through the of the day photos, and we can all get on with whatever it was we were doing. Which I think is going to make coffee.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

Flower

Landscape

Dino related

RIP Raid drive

Well, that just in case (from yesterday) just paid off. I'd copied all the files off the RAID drive onto other local discs, and made sure they were all there. So it seems.

I was up early this morning listening to the RAID drive beeping away, and the desktop icon flickering on and off. I put it out of it's misery and turned it off. Things are a lot quieter. I bought that drive in December 2017, and replaced the enclosure in 2020. Looking at hard drive failure stats I have nothing to complain about. I wonder if running for almost 2 months straight doing the backup to Backblaze contributed to the failure? I'll never know.

Is it possible to take the RAID to iCube and recover the data? Yes, and maybe, respectively. But I don't see the need. I don't have a delivery date for the SSD yet, but I think I'm ok. He said. Knock wood. Cross fingers.

You have backed up your data, right?

Oh, and now that the exported photos are on an internal SSD drive, browsing is ever so much quicker.

The fun part of yesterday was the family skate over at our community centre. All involved were amazed we still had ice. Thanks to our hard working rink crew, though they said it was too cold to do a really good job flooding the rink. None of the skaters complained. Photos here, if interested.

From a walk in Fish Creek earlier this month, looking for reflections. I got a couple odd looks from people walking by as I was working the scene, but that's nothing unusual.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

Flower

Landscape

Dino related

My inner Luddite is calling

It's been an adventurous couple of days on the computer front. My whole blogging workflow relies on finding images quickly and easily. I hadn't realized till recently that Spotlight was doing it. And recently Spotlight has been losing it's mind. At first I blamed Backblaze, and there was indeed a thing in my setup that needed tweaking. 

But then a bit more research seemed to indicate that the big RAID drive might be the problem. I've spent some time, or rather, the computer spent some time making local copies of files on several of the drives I've got kicking around. Just in case.

It boggles my mind, actually how much drive space I've got although some of it is not in regular use. All these are old fashioned hard drives with the spinning disks.

18 TB on the RAID drive. (4x6 TB RAID 5 if I remember correctly)

10 TB External G drive

5 TB on a Lacie rugged external drive with the cute orange sleeve.

5 TB, another one

1TB, another one

1 TB the internal laptop SSD

40 TB in total. There's probably another TB spread across a bunch of SD cards. 

You've probably seen the 1956 photo of a 5MB hard drive being loaded onto an airplane with a forklift. It's the size of 2 large refrigerators. The 5 TB drive fits in the pocket of the pants I'm wearing right now, and replaces 1,000,000 of those drives. (If I did the math right, and don't get all pedantic about powers of 2.)

I just saw a great price on an external 8TB SSD, and bought it. Once it arrives there will be a bit of shuffling around. I think I'll put the CR2 photo files, all 7.5 TB of them on the SSD, after maybe weeding out some of the obvious losers that there is no purpose in keeping. The exported photos will live on the internal drive where they're handy. Everything else will go on the G drive. Then I'll CCC the various files to the RAID drive, for as long as it lasts, and from there it will go to Backblaze for off site storage. 

(Are any of you still awake?)

I finished the New Brunswick book and sent it off to be printed. Linda proofread it and found one spelling mistake. The spell check found one more. I'm not sure when it will arrive. I'm hoping before March 17, since the local senior's club asked me to do a slide show of photos from Newfoundland and New Brunswick. They loved my Yukon and New Zealand photos. In addition to the slide show I'll bring the books and leave them on a table off to one side.

In film photo news I developed roll 6 today, and am pretty please how that project is going. Here's the first one from roll 5. I've figured out doing 2 rolls at a time is the most efficient use of chemicals.

All the hard drive chatter was supposed to be a lead up to the Luddite yearnings within, and I got a bit distracted. Maybe that's part of the problem, that I'm easily distracted now. Going through some of the computer problem or figuring out enough of Spotlight to re-index was a pain in the butt. Rather than a place to tell Spotlight what to include, the list is what to exclude. Not sure why they did that. The process to force Spotlight to re-index is not intuitively obvious.

There's an update to Carbon Copy Cloner, that if you aren't careful when setting it up to copy something, will wipe out everything else on the destination disc. My phone is nagging me to upgrade, and I don't want it to happen. Usually an 'upgrade' to a new version breaks something that I like the way it was, and adds in a bunch of things I don't want, and have to turn off. Even that is made difficult by ambiguous wording usually expressed as a negative, and the little slider doesn't really indicate on or off in an obvious way. Sometimes you want to turn it off, or on, to not get a 'feature'. The new phones are AI everything and that is a complete turn off. I don't want to be involved with training an AI, and having it trying to do the things it thinks I want to be done.

The nice help lady at Backblaze tried to explain how their backup routine could run at midnight, get totally caught up, and when I look at the computer again in the morning there are hundreds of files totalling several GB that are in the queue to be backed up off site. There were checksums and this and that, and I have to admit it all seems more than a little arcane. I know that Backblaze has saved the bacon for several of my photo buddies, but I hope it never happens for me.

Once the new drive arrives I'll have to turn off all the automatic updates and backups, figure out where everything is and where I want it to be, get rid of the duplicates that I know exist, and generally houseclean and tidy. I'll probably be a quivering wreck when I'm done.

Shall I talk about cars? Our car is a 2016 Honda Fit. An old fashioned internal combustion engine, that is a miracle of power and efficiency compared to the behemoth motors around when I started driving. It's nearly the perfect car for city driving. I hope it lasts another decade and when it dies they'll have actually figured out driverless cars and humans mostly won't be allowed to drive anymore.

We rent modern cars while on vacation, and mostly I hate them. It used to be you could hop in a car, adjust the mirrors and seat, start it, and go. Maybe tweak the heater controls or play with the radio buttons to find a station you like, and typically that could be safely done while driving.

Now? Starting it means foot on the brake and find the button. Except the last car had been left with the seat all the way forward. Then figure out the mirror controls. One rental car had 5, count'em 5 buttons on the rearview mirror and 3 grown adults with more than a century of driving experience between them couldn't figure out what any of the buttons did. 

Generally the next step is to get your phone to talk to the car so you can find your way out of the airport parking lot, which means having the right cable, which is a bit of a boondoggle now. Some devices ask the cable if they're authorized. I digress. Finding the cable outlet was an ordeal in the most recent car. In Moncton getting out of the airport was pretty easy, but there's been some white knuckle moments in other airports. I've never figured out why sometimes I get the map and the voice giving directions without any fuss, and sometimes it's one or the other, and sometimes neither.

In the most recent car, to put the car in reverse, there was a button on the lever to push in, then you had to push the lever forward. Finding park the first time took a minute. Do not get me started on trying to figure out the climate controls. I wouldn't even consider trying to do it while driving. I didn't even try to figure out the radio.

Then there are the driving assists. It is very unnerving when the car tries to override the steering wheel. I'm trying to avoid a pothole or deal with a narrow lane because of construction, and it wants to stay in the lane. At first it fights you, then gives up and the car swerves. Several times the roads have changed, but nobody told Mrs Google, and it starts snipping at you to 'return to the route,' when that route doesn't exist. Or changing the cruise control speed depending on how close you are to the vehicle in front, which depends on a setting I couldn't reliably figure out how to change, and which appeared to change itself. Which changes some of the calculations about passing or changing lanes. One car kept turning the high beams on when I didn't want it to happen because fog, and it took a while to find the control to turn off the automatic adjustment. I once somehow turned on something I didn't want, and had to park the car and look up in the manual how to turn it off again. At least there was a manual.

If there was a button in cars that was labeled, "Geezer" and when you pushed it a warning came up on the screen that every car now has (and don't get me started about screen controls) saying, this button turns off automatic everything, including road assist, cruise control, this, that, the other, blah blah blah, do you really want to do that you grumpy old Luddite fart? I would push it twice.

I know people who decide which camera to buy based on which menu system seems intuitive to them. That's another example of what is really quite a simple device, made complex by the addition of a computer. 

Our stove can be turned on remotely, and why such a thing is possible is beyond me. Seems like a safety hazard. I can easily imagine the day where there are no controls on the stove at all, one has to download the controlling app onto your phone, and cook that way. 

Once upon a time watching TV was a simple thing. You turned it on, and fought with your siblings about which of the 3 channels to watch on the tiny screen. My laptop has a bigger screen than the TV grandma had in her assisted living space. Now, you can buy a TV bigger than our bed. After you set it up to talk to the internet, and get the right apps on your phone, and pay a modest monthly fee, you can watch nearly anything ever made, if you can navigate the arcane menu system to find it. Is there any normal person that enjoys the setup process? Or even understands it?

My plan for this afternoon is to go over to the family skate event at our community centre to take photos and chat with the people that show up. Mostly it's people out having fun with their kids and it's great to watch. There's a few phones out, but not many, and not for long. It's real people having fun in the real world, with other real people. It's nice.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (NB)

Film

Linda

Newfoundland

New Brunswick

Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did

90 days, or so ago

Flower

Landscape

Dino related

Curtis