It is 2 am and I am furiously trying to get all the electronic things I need to get done before I am in a place beyond electrons back to the place I love in the Himalaya. The end of the road in NE India, high in the mountains on the Bhutan-Tibet border. But right now I am trying to get photos deleted from my computer and accounts so that I will be able to add more later. Tonight at dinner we were in the middle of a meal and the lights all went out not just our lights but the entire hotel, the entire city as far as we could see. That was hours ago and the power has been on for some time noe. When everyone else was in bed I finally had time to get some time to get the long, long, long list of things to get done before we were where electrons were far and few from my reach. Then it started raining, then the thunder and lightening.
We are in the top floor of a large hotel in Guwahati, the internet was fine until about 9 then it crawled to a halt. Pages opened in slow motion or not at all and nothing was going up to that place in the sky were the electrons run free. Everyone in the city gets on the line between9 and at least midnight. Just a week or so before we left I had run my computer's nearly 1 terabyte of memory space completely full. It had slowed down the week before then gradually it came to a full stop with on a small window that said " You have 7 MB of free space" and stopped working entirely.
I did the logical things like getting Jonathan Yi to help me. A computer whiz that got a 4.0 in his premed classes while working and going to school full time. He suggested deleting the larger files. There were a few videos, well actually a few hundred but mostly really short ones of Ming playing the piano. We got rid of what I could easily see were poor quality or too long for sure. But that did not dent the problem. Jonathan says that you need AT LEAST 20 % of your hard drive free to function well overall.
Then I looked at the real problem..... the 38,727 full size photos in iPhoto... no they were actually recently switch to "Photos" Apple's new and not improved at all photo storage and editing system that is so much worse in many ways and really just forces you to put your photos in the cloud rather than on your machine, but I had been fighting that for years. Now there was no choice. We had a fast internet connection at home but I very quickly found out not quick enough. There were over 500 Gigabites of photos..... At first I did not notice but after a day or two it was painfully clear, the download times were very quick but uploading was only 20% of the downloading speed. Jonathan said there were good reasons but I did not want any of that, at this rate it would be a few weeks, and I was leaving for India in about 10 days.
Jiasong decided that it would be a good idea to get her photos off her machine too, she had fewer photos but a much smaller hard drive as well. Once she started, our umbilical cord to the outer world went dead slow. All the programs we used every day came to a crawl. We both have lightening fast machines and plenty of know how to use them, when nothing is wrong but now we were in over our heads. Jonathan took her machine and kept it on a fast line and finished her upload in just two days, but mine IS my brain in so many ways, I could not live without it for a single day. Appointments, documents, communications, Skype-email-text-phone-photos.... everything goes trough this machine. It is so important that it gets backed up EVERY hour of every day by the Time Machine. Having four different jobs all of which are computer intensive, all of which are done part time but where I am present everywhere all the time as a photon or an electron in peoples in boxes and on calls. My life came to a halt.
Fortunately with running it all night long, by hooking it up by hard wire and by taking everything down that did not absolutely have to be running I finally got finished. All 38,000+ were safe and secure in Apples new hold on my paycheck... forever. There were some issues though. I had another 148,000 photos on other hard drives at home already, but they could wait. Then I did the thing that Jonathan thought was foolish (he unfortunately knows a lot about these things) and started to delete and edit photos. Several hours (like 6 each night) and soon there were over 2,000 fewer photos, but now they had been deleted from 'Photos' they had finally to be deleted from my maehine and then from cyberspace. How does something so simple get soooooo complicated so fast? Easy peasy right? Well, not so much. This was not a large amount of space but there were a lot of files. I figured out how to delete them, fully from all the copies that the Apple puts on your machine just to be sure that IF you want that original (and all the edited versions as well)that they will be there, just waiting patiently back in that dungeon at the bottom of your computer.
Nice feature but recall that I was not entirely happy with the new Photos replacing iPhoto? Well there are some bugs.... for example it somehow took all of my deleted photos and decided to load them onto my phone... the memory in a phone is a LOT less than on a computer. That leaves me at 2:55 am trying to fix it, in the middle of lightening storm, in the middle of Assam, in the middle of the night...... I'm going to trundle off to bed. It is 44 degrees here tonight so the rain is wonderful. For those who still subscribe to the only system (other that Burma and Liberia) that this wonderful USof A uses, our weights, measure and time system is really, really out of step with the rest of the world but what it means here is that it is really, really hot (111.2 degrees to be precise).
The rain is cooling things down tough and perhaps I will be able to sleep before the 12 hour jeep ride into the mountains... provided of course that the rain did not wash away any of the roads. When Leah Wood went up last year about this time I think it took her a few extra days of sitting in line when landslides were coming down the hill and the roads needed to be cleared. Hopefully my computer folly will not be followed by a landslide. Unless it is a landslide victory for Nyima in the next election.
We are in the top floor of a large hotel in Guwahati, the internet was fine until about 9 then it crawled to a halt. Pages opened in slow motion or not at all and nothing was going up to that place in the sky were the electrons run free. Everyone in the city gets on the line between9 and at least midnight. Just a week or so before we left I had run my computer's nearly 1 terabyte of memory space completely full. It had slowed down the week before then gradually it came to a full stop with on a small window that said " You have 7 MB of free space" and stopped working entirely.
I did the logical things like getting Jonathan Yi to help me. A computer whiz that got a 4.0 in his premed classes while working and going to school full time. He suggested deleting the larger files. There were a few videos, well actually a few hundred but mostly really short ones of Ming playing the piano. We got rid of what I could easily see were poor quality or too long for sure. But that did not dent the problem. Jonathan says that you need AT LEAST 20 % of your hard drive free to function well overall.
Then I looked at the real problem..... the 38,727 full size photos in iPhoto... no they were actually recently switch to "Photos" Apple's new and not improved at all photo storage and editing system that is so much worse in many ways and really just forces you to put your photos in the cloud rather than on your machine, but I had been fighting that for years. Now there was no choice. We had a fast internet connection at home but I very quickly found out not quick enough. There were over 500 Gigabites of photos..... At first I did not notice but after a day or two it was painfully clear, the download times were very quick but uploading was only 20% of the downloading speed. Jonathan said there were good reasons but I did not want any of that, at this rate it would be a few weeks, and I was leaving for India in about 10 days.
Jiasong decided that it would be a good idea to get her photos off her machine too, she had fewer photos but a much smaller hard drive as well. Once she started, our umbilical cord to the outer world went dead slow. All the programs we used every day came to a crawl. We both have lightening fast machines and plenty of know how to use them, when nothing is wrong but now we were in over our heads. Jonathan took her machine and kept it on a fast line and finished her upload in just two days, but mine IS my brain in so many ways, I could not live without it for a single day. Appointments, documents, communications, Skype-email-text-phone-photos.... everything goes trough this machine. It is so important that it gets backed up EVERY hour of every day by the Time Machine. Having four different jobs all of which are computer intensive, all of which are done part time but where I am present everywhere all the time as a photon or an electron in peoples in boxes and on calls. My life came to a halt.
Fortunately with running it all night long, by hooking it up by hard wire and by taking everything down that did not absolutely have to be running I finally got finished. All 38,000+ were safe and secure in Apples new hold on my paycheck... forever. There were some issues though. I had another 148,000 photos on other hard drives at home already, but they could wait. Then I did the thing that Jonathan thought was foolish (he unfortunately knows a lot about these things) and started to delete and edit photos. Several hours (like 6 each night) and soon there were over 2,000 fewer photos, but now they had been deleted from 'Photos' they had finally to be deleted from my maehine and then from cyberspace. How does something so simple get soooooo complicated so fast? Easy peasy right? Well, not so much. This was not a large amount of space but there were a lot of files. I figured out how to delete them, fully from all the copies that the Apple puts on your machine just to be sure that IF you want that original (and all the edited versions as well)that they will be there, just waiting patiently back in that dungeon at the bottom of your computer.
Nice feature but recall that I was not entirely happy with the new Photos replacing iPhoto? Well there are some bugs.... for example it somehow took all of my deleted photos and decided to load them onto my phone... the memory in a phone is a LOT less than on a computer. That leaves me at 2:55 am trying to fix it, in the middle of lightening storm, in the middle of Assam, in the middle of the night...... I'm going to trundle off to bed. It is 44 degrees here tonight so the rain is wonderful. For those who still subscribe to the only system (other that Burma and Liberia) that this wonderful USof A uses, our weights, measure and time system is really, really out of step with the rest of the world but what it means here is that it is really, really hot (111.2 degrees to be precise).
The rain is cooling things down tough and perhaps I will be able to sleep before the 12 hour jeep ride into the mountains... provided of course that the rain did not wash away any of the roads. When Leah Wood went up last year about this time I think it took her a few extra days of sitting in line when landslides were coming down the hill and the roads needed to be cleared. Hopefully my computer folly will not be followed by a landslide. Unless it is a landslide victory for Nyima in the next election.
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| My look when I found out that our carrier was part of "Sky Team", we were only an hour late leaving Shanghai, so not too bad, no connecting flight on the other end. |
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| Cows really do have the right of way here, and if necessary you stop and wait for them to do what they want to do. And no you do not harass them in any way, or the locals take great fun in harassing you. The photo did not add was one of us in the wrong lane heading into on coming traffic going fast too because a cow was in the lane we were suppose to be in. |
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