Pretend Computers and Holidays
I suppose technically this is being written on Friday morning. I thought I should write something, given that I didn’t post anything yesterday – breaking a streak that probably goes back to some point in November or December last year. I’m absolutely fine – just busy, and distracted by the ongoing backup saga at home.
One of my co-workers had a brain-wave at lunchtime today – we get credit with Microsoft through our developer licenses – meaning we can spin up hardware “in the cloud”. I’ve done exactly that – for the last few hours a pretend computer sitting somewhere in a server rack has been downloading all of my photos from Google Photos, ready for me to re-organise them, and upload them all to Flickr. The huge benefit of running the job in the cloud is the bandwidth – the entire download (over 110 gigabytes) will be complete within half a day – versus several days at home.
Enough nerdy stuff.
Some major news tonight – we have booked a summer holiday. The children will get their first flight in a plane, and their first experience of staying for any length of time in a foreign country. We’re going “all inclusive” to a huge hotel complex though, so there’s every chance all they will see is british families on holiday.
Oh – one more thing – after discovering just how badly engineered Google Drive and Google Photos are, I’ve started looking around at other solutions for email and file storage – and started looking at Zoho. Quite surprised to find out how much better than Google Mail it is, but then reminded myself that Google only do email so they can read it in order to serve adverts to you. Zoho’s core business is running businesses – so their email is very much more business class than Google’s. I might give it a try for a while.
Anyway – it’s gone 1am. I have work in the morning.