"Oops" by Wolf Kettler Photographer. Click on the photograph to see it bigger.

When I prepared a blog post on the evening of Candlemas for publication the next morning, I found myself unable to break into my own blog. The technical services supremo (no less) at my web space provider (1) and I go back a few years. Long story. He is endlessly patient and we have developed a co-dependent relationship: His company depends on my custom and I depend on him when things go wrong. At least I like to think of our relationship as being a co-dependent one. If I am honest, I suspect that I depend on him more than he depends on me. Then again, there is probably such a thing as too much honesty. Don’t tell him.

“Looks like a packet loss at your ISP’s (2) network border”, he e-mailed back shortly after my cry for help. He likes to stretch my technical competency and yes, I did work out what a network border is. It is where my Internet traffic leaves my ISP’s computers to venture onto pastures new. In this case, it had entangled itself in virtual barbed wire, had its journey cancelled and vanished in some miserable, cold place in cyberspace. All because a rogue and perfectly demented computer had decided to play cold war and close the borders.

Then I found out that this is not what had happened. The problem was at my web space provider after all. Points for me because I was first to know about it. The way I understood it is that some piece of expensive equipment had decided to take a nap without telling anyone.

“All well. My blog is now faster than it has been in ages”, I informed my contact the next morning and had to correct myself within minutes because my ISP killed the Internet. Not exactly killed. They did manage to resuscitate it four hours later. They had done maintenance work to make everything faster, better, more beautiful and more stable and some piece of expensive equipment must have decided to take a nap without telling anyone (sic).

When I pointed out to my good friend the unlikelihood of two unconnected yet similar events occurring within such a short space of time, he replied “The chance of having more than one issue affect you in what can be considered a short period of time in the Internet business is almost 100%” and went on to muse about the miracle of large scale cascade failures not happening every three minutes.

With so many people and so many everyday chores relying on the Internet and taking its reliable availability for granted, the future looks bleak. Still, I do feel a lot better now knowing this and I think I have worked out what a large scale cascade failure is.

Technical Glossary
(1) Web space provider: Web space is a cosy room painted in a psychedelic colour scheme, where my website hangs out. Provider are the nice people, who run the joint, when they are not busy ironing their kilts.
The information that you send over the Internet is not one large chunk but little bits. Lots of them. Think of it as a coach party. A packet loss occurs when one of the party (the slow one) is still in the motorway services buying bars of chocolate and the coach leaves without him. When he realises that the coach is missing and the coach party realise that their fellow traveller is missing, they all panic and scream and scare the hell out of each other.
(2) ISP: Internet service provider – a bunch of people in Yorkshire called Compo, Cleggy and Foggy, who plug me into the Internet (most of the time).

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Elga is not the girl in the photograph at the top. Elga is an acronym for an integrated health information system that the Austrian government is planning to introduce.

Elga is an acronym for an integrated health information system planned by the Austrian government. Click on the picture to see it bigger.

The Austrian doctors’ professional organisation (similar to the BMA in Britain) is opposed to the plans. They argue that the vast amount of money would be better spent on actual healthcare. The costly – to the tune of 23 billion Euros, they say – failure of a similar system in Britain is mentioned in an advert that was running in all daily newspapers when I last visited.

The advert shows a naked, middle-aged woman. She is not glamorous, she is not retouched and she wears the signs of ageing proudly – a wrinkle here, a bit of saggy skin there. She makes us feel good about our own bodies, which are equally imperfect. The notion of perfection is of course redundant and only exists in the minds of the cosmetics producers and the fashion houses. The image visualises a common Austrian and German expression. Literally translated “something that costs your last shirt”, meaning that you could lose everything.

In the same week I came across a Viennese district magazine, very similar in purpose to the magazines that local councils in Britain send to every household in their areas. Page one of this particular issue featured a prize draw for an erotic wall calendar – see image above.

Can you imagine in Britain a naked, middle-aged woman prominently displayed in the Guardian or the Independent or the Times? Can you imagine an image of a young woman clad only in stockings and gloves in the Wiltshire, Oxford or Hackney Council magazine? Neither can I.

This photograph was not accepted as an advert in a local magazine because it was deemed not family friendly. Click on the photograph to see it bigger. Photograph by Wolf Kettler.

I once had an advert declined by the publishers of a local magazine because they felt that the photograph that I wanted to use was not family friendly. The photograph was of a fully clothed young woman. I am glad to say that I did get my way in the end but I never found out why this photograph was so offensive.

What is it, I wonder, that makes opinions in Britain so hostile towards the naked body? The British are not prudish per se. At least I think they are not, although I have to admit to finding it strange that nudity in this country is always seen as something devilish, funny or embarrassing, never normal.

Does nudity not play a natural part in everybody’s life? Are we living in a morally oppressive society that is obsessed with what is considered proper at any one time? Or perhaps the enjoyment of the naked human body is seen as something morally improper and therefore intolerable.

We are born naked and we were created by people, who were presumably naked at the time – both of them, in the same room and at the same time. How shocking!

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Let’s talk about trains. I am not pondering on the British government’s go-ahead for a high speed railway or that it will only connect a very small number of cities with London. I am not considering why the project will be funded publicly when future profits will presumably go into the private operators’ coffers. I am not stating my bemusement at the fact that in fourteen years’ time we will have trains that only reach the same speeds that certain trains in Europe already achieve or exceed today.

No, let’s talk about the convenience of public transport and let’s call it public even though it is no longer public. The hop on-hop off concept is alluring, except that in Britain we are being discouraged from using public transport in such a chaotic, disorderly way. We are being punished if we board a train without a ticket and this is effectively a punishment for using public transport. Of course, we have long become accustomed to the fact that train tickets bought on the day of the journey are substantially more expensive than those bought in advance. There is no good reason for this practice, apart from what they call optimising profits from a “public” service.

In a perverse way, though, the restrictions make sense: If the train operators do not allow passengers to purchase tickets on the trains, they can do away with attendants completely. It is a variation on the cheap-cheap-cheap theme, which has been plaguing us for years. We can get cheap but we cannot get service or quality, which ultimately means that cheap becomes very expensive for the consumer but is very profitable for the providers.

Perhaps it is all a historical inevitability. Rail travel first became big in Britain and yet today we have one of the worst rail networks in Europe. Or take workers’ rights and working conditions. Karl Marx started his movement out of Britain and yet today working conditions, working hours and pay must be among the worst in Europe.

Other countries take a different approach to rail travel. They encourage passengers to use public transport by making the act of purchasing a ticket easy and flexible. When I visited Austria recently, a small ad in a newspaper caught my eye. It read “Buy your tickets on the train without the premium”. Now there is an idea.

British train operators should see this as a lesson in customer service.

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I could not quite believe what I read in the FAQ on a fellow photographer’s website. The photographer answered the not unreasonable question how long clients’ photographs would be kept in a conundrum of technical excuses along the lines of “oh, everything is so difficult with digital images and we will run out of space sooner or later, so we will chuck out your photos and if you want something from two years ago, tough”.

Personally, I aim to keep all my work indefinitely. I think it is good service to do so. True, clients do not often come back for reprints after lengthy periods but it happens and in any case, a lack of disk space is no good reason to throw out my work. If you want in twenty years’ time and perhaps as a retirement present a life size print of that nude portrait that we will make next month, I want to be able to help.

The other photographer’s statement about the difficulties in storing digital images was bewildering. Technology is supposed to make life easier for us. If you run out of space, you just add another hard disk or replace the current one with a larger version. This is where my new Drobo says “hello, pleased to meet you” and my heart says “I am off now”.

Simply put, a Drobo (short for the company name Data Robotics) is a sleek little cabinet that houses a number of hard disks and groups them together so that the computer and its user see them all as one huge drive. At the risk of making myself look old, I have used computers that ran on one floppy disk, I remember when hard disk drives were first fitted in personal computers and a time when a 20 GB hard disk was magical. Now and with the help of my Drobo, I can store an unimaginably large quantity of photographs or, should I wish to pursue another career at some point in the future, run the financial affairs of a small country.

The Drobo is not a unique concept. There are many products from various manufacturers, such as LaCie, Certon and Western Digital, that do the same – group disks together to make one large drive and store everything in duplicate. If a disk fails, replace it with a new one and everything is rebuilt automatically. Run out of space and add another disk or replace it with a larger one. Technologically though and, as it turns out strictly on paper, the Drobo has advantages over its competitors, all to do with mixing drives of different sizes and rebuild procedures in case of disaster in the form of incompetent assistants, fire, earthquakes or a cup of tea that has found its way to where it should never have gone. Not to mention the vengeful ex, who is intent on destroying your life’s work.

The Drobo has also some disadvantages, which are serious enough to make the rivals look like a lifeboat crew when you are about to drown out at sea. Annoyingly, but not surprisingly, the manufacturer keeps quiet about the less lovable characteristics. After all, if you knew about the product’s faults, you would not buy it, would you?

The energy saving Sleep feature

Computers putting themselves to sleep after a while of inactivity is standard these days. Great for your electricity bill, probably great for the computer’s life span and great for the environment. Unfortunately, when my Drobo goes to sleep, he is not inclined to wake up again easily, no matter how much I tickle him under his chin. (Yes, it’s a he and not an it.)

I remember the first time my Drobo went to sleep as if it were yesterday. Granted, it was only last month. He should have woken up and stood to attention, ready for action, in the same way as the rest of the system. Alas, there was no gentle whirring of a hard disk, no sparkle of a light, not even a flicker of an eyelid. There was not a grain of doubt in my mind: My Drobo was seriously ill, possibly struck down with a rare disorder.

When I said “my Drobo is always so sleepy. He does not want to wake up” to the Drobo support people, they suggested trying this, trying that and trying the other, none of which made any difference. He would perform whilst awake but if I let him go to sleep, he would sink into deep unconsciousness.

“Is my Drobo suffering from narcolepsy?” I asked after nearly a month and wondered whether I should feed him amphetamines.

“No, it’s not that”, the friendly support person reassured me. “It is a known issue. There is nothing you can do except unplug and re-plug it every time.”

Unplug and re-plug? Some technical solutions have a distinct stone age charm. It took them nearly a month to let me in on the secret. A month, during which I spent hours trying, well, this and that and the other.

The Drobo people told me that they were “hoping to resolve soon”, which of course means that there might be a fix next month, next year or never. I believe that this is what is called not good enough.

I should know better but I could not help myself and voiced my disappointment on twitter – and received a prompt reprimand from somebody, who claims to be the Senior Director of some department or other at Drobo. On his twitter account he says that Drobo is “the coolest storage on the planet”. If it worked as it should I would agree.

“Please enlighten me .. what Drobo functions do not work”, he demanded.

So I did, enlighten him, that is, and this was the end of our brief encounter. I expect that he did not want to be enlightened in so much detail and I have to face up to the fact that I was a mere fling to him; a one-tweet stand.

Data restoration

One of the attractions of a drive like the Drobo is the ease, with which data can be rebuilt in case of something really bad happening. As it is composed of a number of disks and the data is stored in clever duplicate on another, if one disk fails, you can simply swap it for a new one and the drive rebuilds the data automatically. If you are of a paranoid persuasion, you can have it keep three copies, including the original.

I met a fellow Drobo user on twitter, who told me that the rebuild procedure in case of a hard disk failure seemed to take a rather long time. He was in the process of rebuilding 2.5 TB of data and the process had been running for eight days (!) already. Estimated time to completion: 15 days. When he raised the subject of long rebuild times with Drobo support, he was apparently told that “some of our customers are waiting for weeks”.

Backup

Whilst my Drobo should be a pretty safe method of storage, it still needs backing up. For day-to-day operations, the RAID concept with its automatic second copy is good enough for me. Periodically, however, I like to have a full, extra backup of everything. Ideally, this backup should be kept off-site.

When I first installed my Drobo, I needed a quick way of testing it and decided to run a backup using the Windows Backup tool. After that, nothing worked. Drobo support told me that their drives are incompatible with Windows Backup. Not a big deal because I had never intended to use Windows Backup. I was lucky because I had not yet transferred large amounts of data onto my Drobo. Lucky, because I was told to reformat it and set it back to virgin condition. I do not blame the people at Data Robotics for the incompatibility but they could have prevented the situation if they had mentioned it in their documentation.

Did I mention the backup programme Acronis True Image from a different manufacturer, which is one that is recommended by Drobo? It works a treat except that it has disabled the built-in card readers on my PC. Also a known issue, about which the manufacturer keeps quiet. I have yet to hear back from them but I think that I already know the answer.

Conclusions

Manufacturers of computer equipment and software have the annoying habit of assuming that everything that is wrong with their products is the result of their customers’ awkwardness and that every customer is overjoyed to spend hours troubleshooting the manufacturers’ mistakes. Oh yes, these people are very generous with your time!

Just because I use a computer does not mean that the manufacturers can expect me to be an expert with enough time on my hands to sort out their shortcomings. My car manufacturer does not expect me to be a mechanic.

I would be in favour of legislation that requires manufacturers to state any known technical issues and incompatibilities clearly, in plain language and in poster size print before you can buy their products.

I love the concept of the Drobo and I do run my fingers across the slick chassis once or twice a day (he is ever so handsome to look at), to which he will usually respond by saying “I am sorry, it’s not my fault”.

“Yes, it is”, I reply firmly.

The rest is routine. Drobo sheds a tear or two, goes to sleep and I gently unplug and re-plug to wake him. Then we make up and the world is a happy place until the next time he gets sleepy.

I would love to love my Drobo but as things stand, I can’t.

Updates

To present a fair picture, I will post updates until the sleep issue has been resolved:

18 Jan 12: Met a fellow photographer on twitter, who had to replace an existing 2 TB hard disk with a 3 TB disk because he was running out of space. Initial estimate for the rebuild was 31 hours but he estimates this process to be completed within about 26 hours – a much more reasonable time frame than the 15 days I had come across before.

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Quicken 2004 and Windows 7 are not natural bed fellows. Here is how to make them work together:

1. Before you install Quicken 2004 on a Windows 7 machine, right click on the start.exe file on the original Quicken installation CD and select the compatibility tab under properties. Tick “run in compatibility mode” (Windows XP SP3) and “run as an administrator”.

2. Double-click start.exe to install Quicken. Do not (!) allow it to open the programme at the end.

3. Manually copy the files mfc70.dll, msvcr70.dll and msvcp70.dll from your old installation to the new programme folder.

4. In the new installation on your hard disk, right-click the file “qw.exe” and select the compatibility tab. Tick the two items from step 1.

That’s it. As always, the procedure has worked for me – use it at your own risk.

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So-and-so is Phil Holden, a dwarf actor, whom I had photographed in October 2009. The lady explained that she was working for the producers of the popular BBC show “John Bishop’s Britain”. A forthcoming episode was to feature Phil surrounded by fans and signing his photograph. The BBC wanted to use one of my photographs from our photo session.

“Problem is”, explained the lady, “we do not have the budget to pay you for the use of your photograph.”

Television is one of those odd industries, where the main characters, main contributors and the producers are being paid very handsomely and everybody else is expected to work for free.

“This is indeed a problem”, I replied cheerfully, smelling free publicity. “Can you credit me prominently?”

The ensuing conversation centred on why it was not possible to credit me, that there really was no budget and me declining. John Bishop’s Britain must be a multi-million Pound production. After a few more minutes, the production company did find a few coins for me in their coffers after all.

I am told that the sketch is to be shown in tonight’s (27 December 11) episode of “John Bishop’s Britain” on BBC1 at 10:15 p.m. Watch out for a dwarf signing photographs.

It was a bizarre coincidence that I received a call from another producer of a BBC programme only an hour later that August day.

“We are making a programme about modelling for BBC1”, said the female voice, whose owner was obviously neither as experienced nor senior as her predecessor, probably a junior researcher on loan from some school or other.

“You want to interview me?” I asked perhaps somewhat naïvely.

“No, I just want to ask you a few questions”.

“I’ll be credited in the programme then?”

“No.”

“Okay”, I sighed, “what’s your budget?”

“Oh no, we cannot pay you. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

With no interview, no pay and no credit I asked the caller what was in it for me.

“Nothing”, she uttered with an undertone of indignation as if I had just betrayed the whole country – and I declined.

Below is the photograph that was used in John Bishop’s Britain. Click on it to see it bigger.

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Symptoms: The individual portfolio pages do not complete loading and never progresses beyond the “loading points” animation. E.g. portraits portfolio.

If you are experiencing this problem, simply enable “compatibility view” by clicking on the icon in the right of the address bar.

Click on the image to see it bigger.

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I noticed this morning that my blog post Sexy Socks is now among the all-time ten most read posts on my blog.

I am somewhat baffled because I only wrote the post in response to one (!) person coming to my blog by searching the Internet for “photo session sexy socks”. Perhaps the topic of sexy socks is an undervalued one.

By the way, my call in the above post for lace ruffle top socks-owning models with nice feet yielded no responses and I had to buy my own pair. Socks that is, not feet.

More posts that mention socks

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Here are some more photographs of my winter queen. Click on a thumbnail to see the photograph.

To book your own photo session, please contact me to arrange a date. Or, with Christmas fast approaching, why not give your someone special a photo session gift voucher.

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Air travel is undoubtedly the most uncivilised form of motion. You hang about at each stage of your journey, everywhere is overcrowded and uncomfortable, and they treat everybody like a criminal. On a memorable Austrian Airlines flight I was even told in a rather bolshy manner that I could not have a vegetarian meal because they did not cater for vegetarians.

The notion of service does not come into air travel.

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