Microsoft!!!

I very seldom (though not never) make use of cloud-based storage solutions such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. After the Fappening many years ago, I concluded (or was reminded) that you should never put something online, including in the cloud, if you wouldn’t want malicious people viewing it. (I should note that that’s not to victim-blame. Those responsible for the leaks in the Fappening were very definitely the villains in that piece. But I still advocate taking reasonable precautions.)

I should also note that I have a small number of files on my PC that I have made a declaration that they won’t be backed up online (for data protection reasons). So this isn’t just an idiosyncratic quirk or a mild preference.

On a related note, when I first purchased my PC, I spent a fair amount of time getting it set up and making sure the settings were as I prefer. It’s not a wildly bespoke system, but it is my system that I know better than some random developer at Microsoft.

So I rather object to the tendency of Microsoft, after every “major” update, to bring up a number of screens hectoring me to accept Microsoft’s recommended settings. If I wanted to use those, I would be using those. And I really object to their position of “assumed consent” – if you don’t explicitly opt out of their suggestions, they’ll “helpfully” go ahead and do it for you.

And so it was this morning that I discovered that Microsoft had moved (not even merely copied) all of my key files off my PC and into their OneDrive service. Meaning that any security concern, real or imagined, was now in play, meaning that my data protection obligations were compromised, and indeed degrading the experience of using my PC (because some files were no longer in the location the system required – though I should be glad of that, I suppose, or it might have taken much more than two days to discover).

And so it was that I immediately had a task to undo all of this and make sure the files weren’t any longer online and were back in the locations I expected. And reconnected the library files. (It also probably means that my automated backup for this week may well be a monster – it’s all the same files with all the same content, but they’ve all been “touched” since the last backup).

Thanks guys.

Millstone

A few months ago, after many years of consideration of the matter, I finally bought a NAS. It's a lovely device, that sits proudly on a shelf in pride of place.

And I wish I'd never bought the damn thing.

It took me several weeks to find any time to get the thing out of its box, and then still more weeks to install its expanded RAM, find, a spot for it on a shelf, and the switch it on. And then I promptly switched it off again, because I had absolutely no time to do anything more with it.

Several weeks later I again found a little time, and started on the "quickstart" guide for setting it up. Which took several hours, and got the device configured so that it is usable.

Sort of.

Because while the device itself is usable, in order to actually do anything it needs to be made visible on our network, it needs the relevant files copied across (and regular backups set up), it needs configured as a media server, and all our other devices need set up to act as clients.

And I have neither the time or, frankly, even the remotest inclination ever to do any of that. Because the whole thing is such a massive pain to do anything with that I really can't be bothered.

At this point, the most honest thing for me to do with it, and the thing that would cause me the least pain and hassle, would be to put it back in its box, put the box in the garage, and forget I ever bought the thing.

(I can't even sell it on now, because it's set up just enough that I'd have to restore it to factory defaults before I did. And even the thought of doing that pisses me off.)

The whole thing has just turned into a devastating waste of time, money, and energy. And is, frankly, really upsetting.

Gubbed

It turns out that I was wrong about my hard drive - although it did start working again, that was a final flourish before giving up the ghost. It appears to be totally dead this time.

I have purchased a new (and, indeed, bigger) hard drive to replace the failed unit. I decided that was cheaper and less hassle than having to engage with tech support (who, almost certainly, would just replace the drive anyway, with all data lost). I'll have a go at recovering the, fortunately few, things on the old drive that weren't backed up, but I don't hold out much hope.

Which is all somewhat odd: prior to 2023 I'd never had a hard drive actually fail on me. In the course of this year, LC and I have now each had a drive do exactly that, in each case with the loss of some, but not all, data.

A Lucky Escape

My big challenge on Sunday came in the form of a broken PC - after restarting Chrome to update I discovered it suddenly wouldn't load my home page (which is a page of links stored on my D drive). I then rebooted the machine as a whole, only to find that the D drive as a whole had disappeared.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased with this, given that the PC is less than six months old. I was less pleased still when I discovered that Dell's automated chat assistant was only able to point me at a couple of utterly useless troubleshooting articles. And, of course, it being Sunday there was no chance of speaking to an actual human.

Though in the event that wasn't such a big deal - the root cause turned out to be nothing Dell could really help with anyway.

In an attempt to diagnose the fault I removed the drive, plugged it into my adapter, and connected it to LC's laptop. That confirmed that the drive itself was working. I then reconnected to the other machine, and accessed the BIOS, and it was working there too. But rebooting the machine still showed the problem.

Then I got lucky. Somewhere in there the machine restarted, and suddenly it was all working again!

The reason for this is that I have a powered USB hub attached (which is on its way out) and an external hard drive (which is definitely on its way out). When the PC restarts, but not when it boots from cold, this hub often fails to activate three of the ports, including the one with the drive attached. It appears that one of those two components is causing the problem.

Which is all to the good. I'll need to get a new USB hub sooner rather than later, since the other devices that are attached are rather important. And one of these days I'll find time to actually set up our NAS, after which the external drive will be obsolete.

So, a lucky escape. Not my best ever Sunday though.

Backup Plans

After a lucky escape with the hard drive from my old PC, we've been hit with a not-so-lucky event - the portable hard drive the LC uses for her work failed. Unfortunately, much of the content of that drive wasn't copied elsewhere, and although much of the drive was salvageable it certainly wasn't all.

Which is all a bit of a disaster, really.

The key lesson to learn from this one is quite simple: backup early and often, and try never to have a single copy of anything that's really important. And, ideally, set up your systems so that those backups are made automatically on a regular basis so you don't have to remember.

Which is an expensive lesson to have to learn again, but I suppose it could have been worse.

Never Simple

The task of setting up the new PC never seems to end.

We were extremely lucky to find that the hard drive on the old PC remained intact, which means that we didn't lose any data in the move. I've now copied everything across to the new PC, though for the moment it's all in a dumping ground folder - I still have a task to sort it into some sort of order and get rid of any files that truly are obsolete. (That's not as big a job as it may sound - I did a massive digital declutter a few years ago, so there are only a few stragglers to sort out.)

However, this has meant that the list of jobs to do for the new PC has dropped from 3 to, er, 4:

1. I have to set up a recovery image. Annoyingly, the advice I saw said this needed to be at least 16GB, with 32GB recommended, so I duly bought a 32GB drive, only to have it turn out that 32GB is the minimum and, worse, that "32GB" drive was effectively just very slightly smaller than that.
2. I have the aforementioned reorganisation to do.
3. Once that reorganisation is done, I need to install Dropbox - I want to do this near the end so that the file locations dovetail properly.
4. I need to switch the anti-virus software from the (perfectly good) version installed to the (also perfectly good) version we've been using for years.

I'm hoping to get all this done by the end of the weekend. But I'm not entirely hopeful - these tasks just seem to be growing arms and legs constantly.

The Setup Games

When I ordered our latest PC, I was advised it would be available around mid-March - later than I'd hoped, but I figured it was worth the wait. Plus, it was coming on a Monday, so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle for LC to arrange to be in for the delivery. But on Wednesday there was 'good' news - the PC was coming on Saturday! This was a bit more of a hassle, as we were busy entertaining on Saturday, but at least we'd be around for the delivery...

Then on Friday, just as I was walking out the door to head to work, I received a text telling me it was coming between 12.20 and 13.20 that day. Um, great... I think? Anyway, I had to hastily switch to working from home on Friday in order to take the delivery - I neither wanted to have to wait for the inevitable rescheduled delivery (which no doubt would be a hassle anyway), nor did I want to risk them leaving it in a 'safe' place.

So the new PC arrived on Friday at 11.30. Which is almost one of the times they said.

The PC then sat in its box until Saturday, when I dug it out, connected it up, and got started. And inevitably found that I didn't like it - Microsoft have, in their wisdom, decided to change the desktop layout again and don't provide a handy "put it back the way we like it" option. Sigh.

The requisite moan about that out of the way, I then got started with installing the various bits of software: a replacement browser, the office suite, PDF and ZIP tools, and so on and so forth. It really does feel like there should be an easier way to do all of this, but unfortunately right now it looks like there's just an easier way to do some of this.

So we're now more or less set up. As far as I can see there remain three things to do: recover as much of the data from my old PC as possible (we have backups, but I'm hoping that the hard drive remains intact so I can get the definitive most up-to-date version of everything), reinstall Dropbox (which is best done after getting the data, so the folder can be set up easily), and switch the anti-virus software (from the installed free trial to the one we've been paying for).

It's funny how getting a new and better PC still involves hours upon hours of work getting it ready.

Freeze!

After eight and a half years of sterling service, my home PC has finally failed on us - for the past few months it has sporadically suffered from random freezes, which finally reached the point where it would consistently freeze while booting up. Frustratingly, I saw this coming just a little bit too late to get a really good backup of everything from the main PC - although we have multiple backups, there's one I don't entirely trust and another that is 3 months old. (Which isn't actually all that bad, given the way that PC is used - worst case scenario is that we've lost a year's worth of photos, mostly photos of randomness taken by Funsize.)

I have a new PC on order, which should arrive at the weekend. Once it gets here, and I've reconfigured the machine to my liking and installed the five key bits of software, I'll try attaching the old hard drive to see what can be recovered. With luck, it will just work and I can recover everything.

But it has been a frustrating couple of weeks, having to manage without the PC, but also kicking myself for not grabbing a definitive backup in the final day, and also having made several failed attempts to repair the machine (to enable that backup).

Then again, it has been time for a new PC for quite a while, and it should represent a significant improvement in performance.

Funny That

LC mentioned the other day that she had been considering the possibility of us getting Funsize a tablet for Christmas. She had had access to one for quite some time, as we gave out ancient Hudl tablet a bit of a reprieve, but that has now reached the point of being actually done for, not merely obsolete, so it was time to consider something else.

Funnily enough, I had been considering much the same thing from a slightly different angle - my intention for my bonuses this year, had they been worth anything, had been to replace all out IT stuff - PCs for me and LC, a new phone for at least one of us, a NAS for use as a media server, and a tablet for family use. As it happened, it was all a moot point...

Anyway, having looked at the options, it appears that the dedicated 'kids' tablets are no longer the way to go - the likes of the Leappad have gone more or less the way of the Hudl in that they haven't had an update in some time. That left us with a choice of inexpensive normal tablets, which have the distinct advantage of being less limited - so we could potentially make use of them for reading, surfing, or whatever else. And some of these are aimed at that kids niche, simply by virtue of being fitted with a robust cover and a kids' profile.

So that seems to have worked out well. Though we'll need to see where we go from here.

Keyboard

Over the past few days I have been pondering the fact that I get more done at work (or 'work') than at home. That has led to me conducting an experiment - today, instead of switching out my home keyboard/mouse combination when setting up my work PC, I instead moved the wireless dongle from the home PC to the work one.

The results have been very instructive - despite coming highly recommended, the home keyboard is nowhere near as comfortable to use as the one for work. The keys are just a little smaller, a little closer together, and the whole thing is just a little bit more tiring. The upshot is that there is a small, but very noticeable, difference between the two. (By contrast, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the mice.)

I suspect that that means I'm now in the market for a new keyboard - the difference is enough to really annoy me, and the productivity differences are surprisingly noticeable. All of which is rather interesting, especially since the home keyboard is considerably more expensive than the work one!

This does also highlight something rather frustrating - now that I know what I'm looking for in more detail, it's proving surprisingly hard to actually find the item. And, oddly, the pictures of keyboards on online shops are really bad. It's almost as if they don't want you to see what it is you're looking to buy.

Bang Up To Date

I've never been hugely into video games. Even back in my first year of university it was more a case of one game in particular ("Civilisation II") causing me problems rather than flitting between many such games. Nonetheless, I gradually accumulated a large number of games, most which did at least get installed (albeit not played) on the PC I had at that time.

Naturally, after I gave up on video games following the aforementioned Civ2 incident, I pretty much stopped buying them. This wasn't a complete stop, as I was occasionally tempted by a game, which I then mostly ended up not playing, but it wasn't a particularly huge issue.

When I finally retired that PC and moved to my laptop I decided not to install anything until I actually came to use it, which meant that only one game was installed. That then held true with the move to my current PC.

A couple of years ago, during one of my decluttering phases, I finally got rid of almost all of those games that hadn't been used for years and were just taking up space. I haven't felt their lack. However, I did keep two games - "Icewind Dale II" (which I'd never played but thought I might), and "Neverwinter Nights 2". That last was the game I'd installed on the laptop, got a fairly long way through, and then abandoned. I thought I might give it a go again.

Anyway, those two have been sitting on my shelf taking up space since then. Until Saturday evening, when I finally got around to installing them onto my PC. I still haven't actually played them, of course, but that is at least now an option.

As you can see, I'm bang up to date on PC gaming!

Prepping for a New Normal - Webcam

One of the features of lockdown has, of course, been extensive use of Zoom and similar tools for video chat. One of the key things that has enabled this is that I brought the entire contents of my desk from work, including a webcam. Said webcam has been doing double duty as a webcam for our home PC. This has been a major boon, but of course there will come a time when I have to return to the office, and the webcam will go with me.

It is my expectation that even after things return to normal, the use of video chat will remain something of a feature - it's just much easier to get people together online than in person. Consequently, I knew fairly early on in lockdown that I would want to invest in a webcam of my own. (Additionally, if I do end up doing more extensive work from home in the new normal, having a camera here would just mean one less thing to have to cart back and forward.)

So I did what I usually do with this sort of thing and spent some time researching the market, narrowed my choices down to a few solid options from reputable suppliers, and then picked an item. And having made my choice, that was it - I try really hard not to agonise over these choices once they're made - even if they're not the best choice, they're typically good enough... and certainly good enough to render any further stress not worthwhile.

The chosen camera was out of stock everywhere, of course. And then, when it did come in stock, there was a Coronavirus premium applied, such that it was way more than it 'should' have been, and certainly way more than I was set to pay when there was no pressing need for it.

Still, it was a pain constantly looking to see if it had come back into stock at any decent price, or being tempted with alternatives at lower prices - most of which, I'm sure, were perfectly adequate for the job I wanted done... they just weren't the chosen item.

Well, the good news is that the item in question finally came back into stock, from a source I hadn't really considered (but am happy to use). So it should arrive later this week. I'll then look to set it up on both PCs, in preparation for returning the current camera back to the office.

#31: "The Broken Sword", by Poul Anderson

#32: "Sharpe's Sword", by Bernard Cornwell

More IT Musings

I've run out of hard drive space on my PC. That is actually not a surprise nor indeed is it particularly a problem - hard discs are fairly inexpensive these days and installing an additional drive into the PC isn't impossible.

However, I'm back to considering whether it's really worth it. There are a few things going on:

Firstly, there's still a question of how long the PC will realistically last. My latest check on the state of the art suggests that it's still not hugely behind, at least for the tasks that I make use of it for. Of course, if I used it for games or video editing, that would not be true... but I don't. However, there's always the risk of a catastrophic failure hitting the machine, at which point there's a need for a new one. (Then again, that doesn't negate the benefit of adding an additional drive, since it could just be extracted and moved to the replacement PC... probably - see below.)

Secondly, there's a question of whether what the PC really wants is a second, high-capacity drive, or whether I should install a smaller solid state drive, move the contents of the C partition across, and thus free up about a terabyte of space on the existing drive. That would have the advantage of giving a significant performance boost as well as adding more capacity, but is one step less portable when the time comes to completely replace the machine. (And it's worth noting that the existing hard drive is one of the components most likely to fail and thus force that move. And any new PC would have an SSD already installed, so that wouldn't be coming with.)

But, thirdly, I'm also leaning towards the benefits of setting up a NAS device, and thus moving all of our data storage off the PC almost entirely. The effect of this is that the existing hard drive on the machine would suddenly become much more open, and the need for a second hard drive (of any sort) would disappear. The only real problem there is that that is also by far the most expensive approach in the short term.

Finally, I find myself considering what our long-term computing needs really are. At present, we have a desktop PC (nominally my PC) and a laptop PC (nominally LC's). I really quite like this arrangement, in that it covers all of our bases, gives a lot of flexibility and, crucially, gives us access to a big, fixed monitor for long-term work. (I was never particularly happy working with a laptop.) However, at work we have now been issued with very powerful desktop-replacement laptops, complete with docking stations that allow us unfettered access to external monitors, keyboards, and mice. In effect, it's very much the best of both worlds.

Based on that, part of me considers that when the time comes for a replacement, what we'll actually want to do will be to replace both computers at the same time, with two identical, powerful laptops. And then invest in a docking station and all the kit to allow one of these to be plugged into the workstation in the study, giving access to everything else.

Which is an even better approach than what we have now. But with two downsides: firstly, sufficiently powerful laptops are necessarily expensive, where it would be considerably cheaper to instead go with a good, but less powerful, laptop and a fairly powerful desktop. Secondly, switching to the two-laptop approach would mean that any second hard drive I purchased now (whether the high-capacity one in the first approach or the SSD in the second) would immediately cease to be useful.

So, it's a tricky one, with lots of options to consider.

The upshot is that I'm thinking that the way to go is to add the NAS device. That gives us plenty of storage and also has the advantage of giving us the most flexibility when considering future upgrades. Given the expense, though, it will be a while yet before any purchase is made... unless the storage issue becomes urgent in the meantime.

Microsoft's Worst Decision

I use a lot of Microsoft software. I don't, however, consider myself either a fan or a hater - they're just tools provided by a company, some of which are good, some of which are not so good, and some of which are good but not really worth the money. And, in fairness to them, those tools have generally, very slowly, been getting better.

However, there is one boneheaded decision, made some years ago, that still drives me mental every time I hit it. Specifically, they decided that PCs should be much more like any other appliance, and hide as much of the internals from the user as possible. And, in particular, they should hide all the BIOS feedback during startup.

That's all well and good, until you get to the point where the PC is busy doing something and gives absolutely no feedback as to what that "something" is - I see the HD light blinking on and off, but there's nothing at all on the screen, no response from the input devices... is it busy working on a task that's just taking a long time, or has it crashed and needs me to take action.

For goodness sake, tell us what's going on, and give an indication that progress is actually being made! And I don't mean showing us the spinny dots - all that indicates is that the UI thread is running, but it may well not be connected to anything else. That way, I don't need to either leave a PC that might be stuck sitting indefinitely, nor do I need to take a punt on a power-cycle that might do more harm than good.

Desk Woes

In addition to repainting the study, we're quite keen to replace the computer desk. Said desk is still working fine, but it's fourteen years old and rather beaten up (having survived four house moves). The keyboard tray is unfastened on one side, there's a CD holder wasting space, and its position in the room means that the tower nook is on the wrong side. All in all, it's okay but not great.

Unfortunately, it appears that in addition to PC sales dropping like a stone, sales of computer desks are likewise tumbling. Either that, or people just delight in creating many variations of the same really bad desk design. (My particular favourite is that there are loads of desks that would be quite good if the two sides were switched, but no signs that that desk is actually produced anywhere.)

The upshot is that the selection of a new desk is inevitably going to be a compromise, and very likely a downgrade from what we have currently. And we don't even have the option of just getting an exact replacement of the existing desk - which wouldn't be great either, but would at least have the effect of undoing fourteen years of abuse.

I've even started to think the unthinkable, which would be to make my own desk to better match what I really want/need. But then a remembered that I have absolutely no skill with DIY, and so would just end up hurting myself and producing something ugly and useless. But apart from that it would be a great idea.

In the meantime, I have at least found what I think may be the least objectionable compromise...

Not a Game-Changer

Over the past several weeks, I have given some considerable thought to the possibility of replacing one or both of our home PCs. After all those deliberations, approaching the question from multiple angles, and generally agonising over the question, I've come to a decision.

I'm not going to bother.

The thing is, both our home PCs are now at least five years old, and that being the case it feels like they should be due for a replacement. This is especially true of LC's laptop, which intermittently suffers from performance issues. And yet, both PCs quite happily do what we want them to do, so it would mostly be just about getting new PCs that do the same jobs better.

The first machine I decided not to replace was my desktop PC. Here, the thing that I thought was going to be a compelling reason to upgrade was to add USB 3 sockets to the machine. The lack of such sockets would represent a distinct limitation in the machine. (You can add such support later by inserting an expansion card, but my experience of similar upgrades in the past is that they're not very satisfying - they work, but not terribly well. So faced with the choice, I'd be inclined to upgrade.)

However, having dug through the specifications for the machine, I was surprised to find that many of the USB sockets are already USB 3. The upshot of this is that there's no hardware limitation to compel a replacement. And that means that any such replacement would be about performance gains.

But digging through those specificiations highlighted that the PC was actually a fairly high-end machine when I got it. Indeed, it appears that it was actually marketed and sold as a gaming PC (despite my never having had any intention to use it for gaming - and indeed I never have). I'm not entirely sure why I went for what was a vastly over-specced machine at the time, but I'm rather glad I did - this machine should remain perfectly adequate for what I actually need for several years to come.

The decision regarding LC's laptop was somewhat more complex, for a while. Given the known issues with the machine, there would seem to be a good case for an upgrade.

However, it turned out that the issues with the machine were largely due to software configuration. There was a problem with the anti-virus software which I was able to sort out. Additionally, there's a small problem in that the machine is itself only used intermittently, which means that when it does get used, it immediately finds several updates and a virus scan that are urgently required. Keep on top of those, and the performance issues largely go away.

The upshot is that in both cases an upgrade is possible, but in both cases it would represent a significant expenditure for an incremental, rather than revolutionary, improvement - a nice-to-have, but not worth the investment of funds.

The other thing that my investigations turned up is that, for both machines, there are two upgrades that are worth making and that will provide much, if not most, of the benefits of replacing the machines at a fraction of the cost. Specifically, both machines would benefit from more RAM (especially the laptop, which is running with 4GB where Windows 10 really wants at least 8), and both machines would also benefit from switching to a solid-state hard drive.

So it looks like I might be delving back into the world of PC upgrades, something I've not tackled in a decade or so.

Retiring the Tablet

A few years ago, I invested in a Hudl 2 tablet from Tesco, largely because it was quite cheap and relatively powerful for the price. And it was quite useful... for a while.

The truth is, though, it really didn't last long before outliving its usefulness. And as soon as I invested in a smartphone it immediately became obsolete - there's nothing I would use the tablet for that I wouldn't use the phone for instead. (And equally, while there are some things I wouldn't use the phone for, for those things a PC is still the tool of choice.)

The upshot is that the tablet has now been retired from use. It's not that we're getting rid of it (yet), and it's certainly not that we're going to upgrade to the latest model. It's just that that form factor turns out to be a solution that doesn't really have an associated problem. Which feels wrong, somehow, and yet... not.

#44: "Pathfinder: the Six-Legend Soul", by Amber E. Scott

An Update

Dear Microsoft,

I appreciate that sometimes it will be necessary to update my PC for security reasons. I further appreciate that applying those updates will sometimes require restarting my PC. And I even appreciate that some updates will take longer than others to apply.

What I don't appreciate is that you don't tell us beforehand when a 'restart' is expected to take a particularly long time, leading to my PC being out of action for an hour and three-quarters when I have better things to be doing than watching your largely-illusory count of the percentage completion.

And I really don't appreciate it when the counter gets to 100%, the PC restarts for the final time, I log in, and then have to wait another five minutes for a painfully slow "we're getting your PC ready" presentation. If you still have work to do, your update is not 100% complete.

(Even more galling still is that, as far as I can see, the net effect of the updates has been to cause my PC to run 10% slower than it did previously. Gee, thanks!)

Just an idea: maybe in future you should consider giving an estimate of how long a 'restart' is expected to take?

#55: "Pathfinder: The Thrushmoor Terror", by Tito Leati

The Recurrence of PC Woes

As always seems to be the case, my PC has chosen to act up just as I'm facing up to an already-busy weekend. It's going to have to wait - there are things I simply must do this weekend, so annoying as the PC fault is I can't deal with it right now.

But the fact that this has happened is really annoying for two reasons:

1. This PC doesn't get particularly heavy use - web surfing and some light clerical work. It doesn't get used for gaming or coding or video editing, or anything remotely intensive, nor does the software load change except at the whim of Microsith.
2. This failure is really the latest in a cascade of failures that has now engulfed every single bit of software on the machine - first it was Office that needed removed and reinstalled, then that broke the anti-virus software, and now the OS has developed a fault. Which suggests there's something in there underlying it all. Time for a reinstall, I guess.

So much for Windows 10 being a good one. Sigh.

#7: "Pathfinder: The Kintargo Contract", by Jim Groves

Digging Through The Archive

When I set up my new PC, I took advantage of the opportunity to 'properly' synchronise the Outlook email folders with the webmail versions used by my providers. This had the effect that Outlook promptly downloaded every email I had received in those accounts, going right back to 2009. It was something of a shock to suddenly have 5,000+ emails to dig through, the vast majority of which are spam emails from one company or another.

Since then, I've been gradually going through the painstaking process of sorting all those emails, deleting the junk and filing the rest away into a more ordered set of folders. I'm now down to having a mere 1,000 emails to go through, from July 2011 back to January 2010. So with a lot of luck I'll have that job done soon.

What has been quite strange, though, has been reading through all those emails. Because I started with the most recent ones and worked backwards (excepting the three months of 2009 that were covered), it has essentially been a process of walking backwards through time - seeing the confirmation emails for Christmas presents, film tickets, and holidays; seeing the emails associated with the wedding cropping up (in reverse) and then subsiding; seeing the band have exactly the same discussions four years ago as we had in January (to do with school lets). It was quite odd seeing weekly spam emails from various companies gradually disappearing, presumably from the point where someone sold them my address. (In some cases, there was the oddity of the emails appearing, persisting for a while, and then disappearing again. I guess if you shop there once, and then not again for three years, they might lose interest.)

I was also somewhat perplexed for a while about an invoice from Premier Inn. Why did I have a one-night stay in London in November of 2011, I wondered? And then, a few 'months' earlier I found the answer - Lady Chocolat had been in Kenya, and that was when I went down to London to meet her return flight. Ahah!

But what has surprised me most, though, was the record of just when we'd seen various films in the cinema. Constantly, I was surprised at just how long ago it was since these films came out. (I was also surprised at just how many really bad films we'd been to see, but I probably shouldn't have been - after all, I was there at the time!)

(Oh, and what's also odd is not so much what's there as what's missing. There have obviously been some significant events over the past five years - several births, marriages, and a significant death - and some of these generated not a single email. Yet "Prometheus" gets two. Strange.)