Most days we work to bring you The Hardwick Gazette are pleasant and almost fun, but having said that, you can begin to imagine where this is going.
Two Mondays ago, we came in to find a critical piece of computer equipment which stores all the documents, photos, ads and page designs that go into creating the paper had failed. It is supposed to have enough redundancy to launch a NASA rocket safely, which apparently it does, if that launch can be slowed down to a tortoise’s pace.
For the technical among you, we operate a RAiD 10 (or perhaps 1+0 in some nomenclatures) Network Attached Storage unit that combines mirroring with striping.
One of the four drives has failed. The device should save our data and, in the best of circumstances, allow us to continue working. It does the first, but fails miserably at the second; our data appears to be fine, but the unit has become useless for any real work.
We’ve transferred what we could over to a cloud storage system operated by a giant seven letter tech corporation whose name begins with a “G.”
Many people use products from that company which are free so you might be tempted to say we got what we pay for. That’s not the case for us as a business that depends upon more robust products from that company, so we do pay for them and the cloud storage functions you get for free with email end up costing us to use.
You’d think that a giant corporation would work to make its products conveniently compatible with those from other giant corporations, but you’d be wrong.
Much of our work is done in products from another giant corporation with five letters in their name that begins with an “A.” You probably know them as the developer of the Portable Document Format commonly known by the moniker “PDF.”
It turns out that the storage product from “G” can’t easily open desktop publishing files from “A” so we need to download them to our desktops that are managed with products from another giant and ubiquitous corporation with an eight letter name beginning with “M.” (Think “DOC” or “DOCX.”)
That creates multiple and confusing copies, making it difficult to track them in a process that’s already complicated. Tracking those files is driving us silly.
On top of that, we use open source products to write our stories and that adds another level of complexity.
Last week, as we learned how to navigate the new environment, we were here well past dark Tuesday, and even close to midnight for some of us. Long ago, when a printed version of the Gazette existed, staff might have been here past dark many nights. but that hasn’t been the case since the paper went digital.
We’ve gotten a bit better at navigating the temporary tech environment this week and our new drive has shipped, apparently to arrive Thursday, so perhaps we’ll be back to normal next week.
As I wrote this, I thought I heard one employee who shall remain nameless, suggest readers bring us wine late on Tuesday afternoon. It turns out they said they feel like they’ve been whining a lot these last two weeks. The wine sounds like a good suggestion on the surface, but we are already so tired, it would likely only make things worse.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
