Personal Tech | Peter Heydon ~ Personal Space

Cubby House Project – 04 The Floor Part 2

23 December 2014 – Replacing Pavers with Posts

Marked out the location of the holes with tent pegs while the floor was in position. Had measured the height of each stack of pavers, which would be added to my minimum pole height.

Started playing minecraft for real.

Preparation time, ~ 4-5 hours

26 December 2014 – Setting of Posts

Trip to Bunnings for:

4 x 1.8m treated pine posts (100mm diameter)
6 bags post-crete
More structural pine lengths (~12 x 2.4m lengths)

Scott gave me 2 x 1.8m pine posts. Had all the measurements to get all posts within 100mm of each other….but stuff it, cut them all in half.

Managed to get set 8 out of 12 posts before the day ended. The floor wasn’t 100% square, and distance between the bearers differed between the front and back.

Construction time ~ 4 hours, not including the excursion to Bunnings in the morning. I did manage to build the back wall frame in this time too.

29 December 2014

Dad helped build the two side frames. The first 8 posts were cut to a level height. We also lined up and set the last four posts in concrete. Rained a bit and had these last four posts covered with a tarp.

Construction time ~5 hours.

30 December 2014

A real day of action today, starting with cutting the last four posts:

Positioning the floor, and then nailing in cyclone straps on each of the outer posts.

Duration for the morning ~2 hours.

Cubby House Project – 03 The Floor Part 1

19 December 2014 – Procurement of first load of materials:

12 x 2.4m lengths structural pine (70x35mm)
2 x 12 mm structural ply (2400x1200m)
2 x 7mm ply (2400x1200mm)
4 x treated pine bearers (90x35mm)

Non-treated pine lengths (6 x 90x35mm x 3m) from Scott, picked up 13 December 2014

Location of the Cubby House

22 December 2014 – Commencement of assembling floor structure

Mounted on 41 pavers – perfectly level…

…but not perfectly safe. The drop was more then I anticipated

Construction time ~ 4 hours

SharePoint People Matches Was My Idea!

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has dramatically improved since its predecessor, and the one thing I wanted to mention was the related people matches. In SharePoint search now, you can configure the results to show people who are related to the content you are trying to search for.

This really is a great little nugget within SharePoint, because it is one that works to connect people who have tacit knowledge – knowledge stored inside people’s heads, and may not be explicit in any other format. People can be profiled based on their search queries, their profile, and their activities within SharePoint. Connections are able to be made as to who may be a person with some knowledge pertaining to a particular search query.

The only problem is, this all seems too familiar. It seems I’ve seen something like this before…my final year university thesis!

My thesis, TIXS: Tacit Information eXchange System: An investigation of electronically developing and exploiting tacit knowledge in communities of practice, was developed to perform what I explained above – connect people based on profiling their search behaviour, and afford the transfer of tacit knowledge.

All be it a much simpler implementation to the feature in SharePoint Search, it is essentially the same concept. Until someone else speaks up, I’m claiming that it was my idea first!

Backing Up My Digital Files

Working in the IT industry, I have seen my fair share of system failures and the data loss that ensures. Whenever something like this happens, I often ask myself how I’d be affected if I’d lost all my personal data. In reality, I could probably cope with losing everything *but* my photos. Photos (and other treasured memories) are the irreplacable items. I can recreate spreadsheets, documents and the like, but I’ll never have the chance again with my family to capture those memories.

Many years ago, when we first started with digital photography, I started wondering how to best backup my documents for total fear that some day I’d loose it all. I came across two main risks, and here is how I mitirgated them:

Hard drive crash: Moderate risk
I have many drives that have given me many, many years of service. I’ve also had one or two with problems that renders the data inaccessible. To get around this, I have an external USB drive that all data is backed up to. I’ve had this in place for over five years, and I’m now onto my second generation unit which is the same size as my main data drive (1TB). This is set as a scheduled task, so its not a chore for me to manage. I just use Robocopy – it is super simple to setup.

Cost for 1TB USB drive: $150

However, about 18 months ago I started becoming paranoid that this was not sufficient, and either there would be a problem before the files were copied off to the external drive, or the scheduled task would fail and I’d be without a backup for several weeks (which has happened). At the time I was doing a technology refresh for home, and invested in a mirrored raid array as the first line of defence. (For those not aware, a mirrored array is as simple as two sets of disks, which have the same information written to both of them, and managed by your hardware. If one disk fails, you should be able to continue uninterrupted, and then replace the failed disk ASAP. The added benefit is that disk reads are twice as fast as you can have two drive heads reading data from separate disks at the same time.)

Cost for the second drive and better motherboard: ~$150

Further to that, I also duplicate some photos to my wife’s laptop on a scheduled task too – but that is more for convenience for her than for backup purposes. Again, Robocopy serves well.

Incidently, after reading a lot of advice online, I never wipe my camera data cards until the images are in at least two other locations, usually my PC and the external drive.

Theft/fire/damage: Low risk
To combat total phyiscal loss, I always had the intention to leave my external USB drive with my mother-in-law, and conduct a backup at least once a week for it to be taken off-site. In practice, this would have been great, but in reality it never happened. I needed my data off-site, and I needed a method that was self-maintaining and affordable; online backups fitted the bill.

After a considered review, I ran a trial with BackBlaze. What impressed me the most was an article I read on building Petabytes on a budget. The engineering that had gone into their pods impressed me, as well as the pricing model of unlimited storage for US$5 a month. I have now been using them for about 11 months, and been very happy. I randomly test a restore of a few files, and there is nothing I need to do other than check that their software is still running (hasn’t crashed out yet). My only gripe was the portability of the data between computers. I rebuilt my PC earlier in the year, and I had to re-upload all my data again (a 3 month process with my ISP data limits). The customer service was receptive of my feedback, and their client software now allows this porability.

Cost: US$50pa (or $5 per month)

With these softwarekeep.co.uk methods in place, I sleep well knowing that my data is safe. The data integrity process is for all intensive purposes entirely automated, and will serve me well for many years to come. You could easily forego either the USB drive or the mirrored drive and save some money – but I wouldn’t recommend foregoing both. Removing one option would leave you with an initial first year cost of about $200, and then $50 pa ongoing. A very cheap method of insurance for keeping those precious memories intact.

Hanging Up on Vodafone

Lessons learned:

Companies, like Vodafone, make it extremely difficult for you to terminate a service.
Staff are only doing what they have been told, try hard not to blame them.
Sometimes you need to seek alternate paths, away from the obvious route.

The first revision of this blog post was going to be a rant on the problems I had trying to disconnect my Vodafone mobile broadband service. In the spirit of trying to keep positive on life, I thought some constructive criticism would be better.

To begin, I signed up to the mobile broadband service in June 2008 for 5 GB per month, $39 per month on a 24 month contract. This was one of the best deals available at the time. I predominately used it commuting to work, and it came handy while on holidays or when the home ADSL service was unavailable. I had good days with this service, and terrible days too. Between problems with USB modem detection and inconsistent coverage, I usually had a 50% chance of getting on first go, and then a 50% chance of staying connected on my daily journeys (within 15km of CBD) commute. The experience over the two years was barely passable as satisfactory.

My actual usage varied from what I initially thought I needed, and I found myself to consistently use less than 500MB a month. If you take that into a pure $/MB view, I was only using 10%, wasting $35 per month.

Very recently,my work laptop died just one month out of the Vodafone mobile broadband contract. With no immediate plans for it to be replaced, I decided to terminate the service. This should have been a straightforward task, so I decided to visit my local Vodafone outlet. The guy there was helpful enough, confirmed my contract had ended, but couldn’t cancel the service. He cited that I would need to agree to some legal clauses which would be recorded over the phone.

The next day I called the number given to me at the first store. At 12pm, on my lunchbreak, I attempted the vodafone customer service number. After getting through the IVR, I waited 30 minutes before I gave up.

That afternoon, I visited one of the Vodafone stores in the Brisbane CBD. Again I was told to call the Vodafone customer service line. I explained the 30 minute wait time, and I was advised that it would be busy now (approx 5pm), and told me to call at lunchtime when it would be quieter. It is quite frustrating that a simple task as I perceived it couldn’t be achieved immediately in store.

After I got home that evening, I tried three times to call customer service. Each time I cited to the IVR, as per their recommendations, to ‘cancel my service’. I was played a standard message of ‘we have more calls than usual’ and then had my call disconnected. Clearly a ploy to imped my request to terminate.

To test my theory that service cancellations were given a low priority, I tried for a fourth time. I was now within 15 minutes of my first call that evening, and I had 15 minutes to go before the call centre closed at 8pm. I rang again and told the IVR I wanted an ”account enquiry’. I few moments passed and I heard on hold music, and there was no message that they were all busy. Finally some progress.

Twelve minutes later, I was answered by a gentleman who was part of the accounts department. He helped me reset my PIN, but had to transfer my call to a separate team to perform the cancellation. It was now 8pm, and my hopes of getting through to someone was diminishing quickly. Thankfully, a representative answered, and after I abruptly stopped their cross-sell and retention effort, I had the cancellation scheduled for the next business day – no legal questions asked.

I’ve never met an organisation so unwilling to assist with a basic, legitimate request. Had this had been resolved upon first contact, Vodafone would have been perceived by myself in a positive light, and I would have been happy to recommend their service.