I’ve been remiss ………

…………….. I haven’t posted anything for an undue length of time.  In my defence we’ve been pretty busy.

After we arrived in Dog River we had to dash home so I could keep an eye on the concrete crew.  They’re generally an OK bunch but I didn’t hire them because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted done.  The problem with concrete is that, once its poured, its all over.  There’s no going back unless you like leaning on a jackhammer.  As it was, despite my best efforts, they still hosed me a little bit.  I guess its not a big deal but it pissed me off nonetheless.

When I first hired Steve I told him what I wanted and made a particular point of telling him that I wanted hardener and sealer on everything.  The small town guys don’t generally get much of that specificity – concrete is concrete for most people.  If you’re dealing in larger centres then the contractors are used to outside authorities spec’ing the concrete but in small town SK what comes out of the truck is generally what you get and most people couldn’t tell you anything about their options.  Steve’s “finisher” had used hardener before but he clearly didn’t like using it and I’m willing to bet that, of all the jobs they will do this summer, my little project will be the only one involving hardener.  All of which doesn’t make any damn difference to me – I want what I want and I’m paying the bill.  Not that hardener adds any significant cost but I’M PAYING THE BILL and I want it how I want it.

All of which is merely preamble to the moment last Tuesday when, roughly halfway through the pour, I said to Steve “You’re putting hardener in this too, right?”  Which comment was prompted by the fact that I had seen no sign of any bags of hardener and it was getting past the time when they should have been adding it.  “Oh, you wanted it here too?” WTF? How much clearer should I have been?  By then of course it was too late because he didn’t have any hardener on hand and the nearest supply was 2 hours away.  So I’m a little pissed off.  It won’t likely matter in the long term but it will always piss me off.  He had some bullshit about how “they never use it outdoors” but the reality is that they never use it anywhere so the fact, if it really is true, that they don’t use it outdoors isn’t really noteworthy.

After we got through the apron pour, without hardener, we went back to Rouleau AKA Dog River and I visited a bunch more Assiniboia clients.  Then we moved from Rouleau to Kipling and I did some more 100 KPH crop inspections.  While we were in Kipling we reunited with a variety of my cousins that we don’t generally see except at funerals.  From Kipling we headed north and stopped briefly in Buchanan to raid Keith’s garden and do a bit of laundry.  Yesterday afternoon we moved to Humboldt which is where we are now.

I’m limited in what I can post for pictures because I’m pissed off at Mozy.  Its a long story but the Coles Notes version is that, when I had to do a restore last January, I discovered some really stupid features of their system.  I was mad enough at the time that I considered changing to some other backup system but then time went by and I kind of forgot about it.  About 10 days ago now I got a “credit card failure” notice from Mozy.  The chip on my primary card died sometime – I can’t exactly remember when – but it must have been since the last time I renewed my Mozy subscription.  The tone of the email pissed me off all over again, not to mention the fact that they were charging the subscription a full 2 weeks before the package I had paid for expired.  That whole attitude of “you can’t use our system unless you prepay well in advance and we’ll go ahead and charge you for a renewal without notifying you” really bugs me.  So the credit card incident combined with my memory of my frustration this winter was enough to push me over the edge. 

As it turns out Dropbox offers a perfectly workable cloud backup system at a fraction of the price of Mozy.  And as it turns out, the Dropbox solution is much more flexible than the Mozy system which was precisely the cause of my frustration last winter.  Mozy is one of those technology companies that simply KNOWS that they are much smarter than all their customers and therefore forces their customers into a one size fits all mould. 

So what does all this have to do with uploading pictures you ask?  Having paid for a Dropbox upgrade I am now in the midst of an initial synch involving hundreds of Gigs of files.  My standard method of quickly moving images off my camera involves Dropbox.  I expect that method won’t work until the initial synch finishes and I’m not really interested in the frustration of setting up a cable connection.  So the only photo you get this time is the town of Humboldt’s entrance sign.