Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: In between testing

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

In between testing

Back into a testing cycle at work, comparing two big spreadsheets with lots of data. Easy peasy you say. The problem is that it's Maximo, where nothing is simple, and there's lots of mapping involved. What does that mean, you ask? Take a simple thing like priority, from 1 to 4. In the new system it goes the other way, so what was 1 becomes 4. Or in another case, it takes the old priority, adds a 1, and that's the new priority. Except there's an exception, and you've already heard more than you wanted to know. I'm just glad I'm not doing the actual preparation and loading of the data. Been there, done that.

I've been shopping for another external drive, and doing some computer housecleaning. Turns out the big RAID drive has 4 TB of RAW photo data and 57 GB of edited photo data, plus other related Lightroom files to make the whole thing work. Getting a 1 or 2 TB solid state drive is easy. Bigger is harder to find, and more expensive. There might be ways of chaining together several smaller drives, but I'm hoping to go the one big drive with backups route. The failure of the RAID drive enclosure power supply has spooked me a bit.

Still, the computer house cleaning has been a good thing. I deleted nearly 3,000 photos that I'd marked as rejected. These are mostly out of focus shots while chasing bees or dragonflies. No reason to keep them. That leaves about 120,000 other photos, of which I've chosen to edit about a fifth of them. The remainder are where there are similar shots and I chose the best one, or were event photos taken on the fly and there were other better ones, or just failed shots where there isn't anything wrong with the photo but it just isn't what I was looking or trying for. I suppose, in my copious free time in retirement (that noise you hear is Linda choking on her coffee) could look at each of those photos and ask myself why I'm keeping it, other than hard drive space being so cheap it's easier to store it than think about keeping it.

Where was I again? Oh yes, shopping for a new phone. My old one is coming up on 3 years old, which for some people is from the stone age. I think of it as barely broken in, but the battery and the software system running it is essentially broken. Time for a new one.

It will be no surprise to any of you that there is nearly an infinity of phones on the market at prices that purport to be nearly nothing, to holy doodle expensive. If they lasted longer I'd be more inclined to buy an expensive one. Then there's the plans. More infinity. Plus Canadian plans are stupid expensive. I got a plan in New Zealand that was essentially unlimited data and texts, for 2 months, that was about half the price of what I pay for one month of less data here.

I am buried in choice and not liking it. The main things the reviewers seem to talk about is the camera, and I don't give a shit about the camera. If I want to take a photo I'll typically use a real camera. The only time I take photos with the phone is because I want to send a photo of a piece of paper somewhere right now, or I have to take a photo of a cat and the real camera is not within reach.

The phone is for texting, checking email, playing sudoku while waiting, the calendar, parking sessions, actual phone calls, and in about that order. I no longer use Facebook on the phone, and you may have noticed I haven't updated Instagram for a while. Oh, and I sometimes time how long something has been on the BBQ, I keep track of gas milage on an app, sometimes record my walks so I know how far a route is. Reminders, a calculator, the map get periodic use.

I have thought seriously about doing without, but there are several things that want to send me a text as part of a 2 factor authentication. This is presented as the ultimate in security, but I sneer. If someone has enough data to impersonate me where it matters on line, they've probably gone to the trouble of hacking my text account and intercepting the 2 factor texts. Still, it might be an interesting experiment.

We actually had a fire the other day, and I got looking at the coals. I've always loved the colour, but didn't want to get the camera too close at all.

In an addendum, I've discovered that adding photos the way I did, seems to keep them from getting bigger. Sorry about that. I'll try it the other way tomorrow.