Probably unfortunate given what I do for a living, but there you go. Actually, I’ve always wondered if it’s a useful trait – I’m not usually a proponent of technology for technologies sake – if I can solve a problem without getting high-tech, that’s my preferred option.

I may just be feeling paranoid, but it seems that the bytes have been ganging up on me recently – I have a growing number of niggling problems that refuse to go away. The odd challenge can be quite enjoyable, as long as the implication of not fixing it is not too severe – but you soon start to realise how much we have grown to depend on email / google / multimap / skype and all the other trimmings when you can’t get them.

And worse, it almost makes me feel physically ill when I start to feel I’m not able to keep it all running – when things go wrong faster than I fix them; when the silicon is ruling me rather than vice versa. Is judgement day coming?

Having decided to give Vista a chance, how is it repaying me? My machine has started bluescreening two or three times a day at the most infuriating times (like when you’re blogging about it). I’m going to live with it for a bit longer rather than doing anything rash – ongoing.

The lighthouse webcam crashed earlier in the week – usually gets sorted by turning the power off then on again, but from inside the lantern there was no sign of life outside – meaning a second trip with more keys, tools etc. Turns out it was a blown fuse so nothing major – fixed.

I’ve replaced the firewall in my modem / router with a mini-ITX box running IPCop – the idea was to secure my network a bit better while allowing certain individuals more access to growing numbers of devices I’m hosting – but it absolutely refuses to let OpenVPN work as advertised, and I’ve loved that application when I’ve used it in the past – ongoing. While fiddling I did muck something up with the blue network meaning it wouldn’t grant dhcp leases to wireless devices – fixed (phew). Postscript - OpenVPN is now working perfectly – turned out it was a problem within the network and not with ipcop – zerina is a great plugin that makes managing OpenVPN a doddle.

My Acer easyStore NAS is pretty much up and running now, but I still have a niggle where every time I restart my laptop the backup application can’t then see the drive – you have to remove protection then re-protect to run a backup, meaning you have to do it manually every time – that wasn’t the idea but I haven’t been bored enough to try and get some more support after the last time – ongoing.

Do things like dodgy starter solenoids on my truck count as computer problems? Still adding to my irritation though – hopefully this week I’ll crack more issues than arise and get back to a tolerable level of ‘silicon rage’.

Of course I’m my own worst enemy – I will not leave well alone, and have to keep fiddling or trying to improve things. But the moral of this story (if there is one) – don’t let the machines grind you down!

Nature is analogue, our senses are analogue, once upon a time the way we interacted with the world was analogue, and life was great.

But then, with increasing power of microprocessing, a steady creep of digital representations of an analogue world has been invading our lives, ready to take over control.

My first encounter with an almost moral objection I have to this process came in the 80′s with the introduction to the mass market of CD players – at the time I was deeply in love with my Rega Planar 2 turntable, Akroyd Coniston speakers and Nytech Obelisk amplifier – not extreme HiFi, but certainly enough for me, and I just couldn’t face the thought of losing the pure simplicity of an analogue system by introducing an alien technology in the heart of it.

To this day I’ve still never bought a CD player as a component – although my Rega isn’t hooked up to anything at the moment I still hold the view that the ‘proper’ way to listen to music doesn’t involve any sort of digitisation or digital signal processing along the way. Hissing and scratches are all part of the analogue world, but some of the weird noises you get when digital signals corrupt are just not ‘right’, let alone the ‘concert hall’ type effects that can be applied at a whim. But yet I have an iPod, because isn’t it so much more convenient carrying your entire music library in your pocket?

Next came photography – I’ve still got a pair of Olympus OM2 bodies with a selection of lenses, and I have a crude but functional mono darkroom in boxes on a shelf that I keep meaning to set up again somewhere. I had a blast trying out the various methods described by Ansel Adams etc. where you can almost ‘touch’ light. Yet all the photographs I’ve taken in recent years have been digital, because it’s so much more convenient than lugging round a bulky large format camera.

I’m a hypocrite – I want to remain in an analogue age, yet when it comes to the crunch I listen to my iPod more than my Rega, pick up my Fujifilm F700 instead of an Olympus OM2, and put up with all the other insiduous digital invaders like Sky+ because it’s so much more convenient.

But there is more to it than just convenience – the ‘miracle’ of technology opens up new possibilities to the average punter undreamt of in the analogue age. I never got into movie-making, but I know you can do an awful lot now with a digital camcorder and a PC for not a lot of money, compared to what you used to have to spend in the Betamax days. And if I were a composer or a musician I might appreciate the capabilities of the recording studio I could set up without needing a big win on the Premium Bonds (before the days of the Lottery!) like you used to need to afford all the gear.

But here is my real dilemma – digital technology offers almost limitless possibilities and potential for creativity, but I’ve found personally that my limited creativity is at its best when constrained – too many shiny spangly distractions get in the way of achieving simplicity and purity.

Back to photography, the limited number of variables available don’t stop the ability to produce stunning images. On a manual film camera, ignoring for the sake of this argument issues of composition, lighting, choice of film etc. you really only get to play with shutter speed and aperture, the combination of which creates an exposure on the film. Take that exposure into a simple mono darkroom, and you have a few more variables available to you, but it’s still somehow on a ‘human’ scale – how you process the film, what paper you choose, how long you expose the print, any dodging and burning effects – it’s all done mostly by hand and feels very natural.

I’ve recently upgraded my copy of Macromedia Studio MX to Adobe CS3 Web as it’s now marketed (must blog some time about my love/hate relationship with this suite of software) and I spent some time yesterday playing with Photoshop CS3 which is included in the package. Feeding it a RAW file from a digital camera is very similar to cooking your own film in a darkroom, but my initial feeling was being totally overwhelmed not just by the things you needed to do to make a technically correct image – that’s just me having to ‘pay my dues’ by learning a new set of techniques – but also by the unbelievable scope of creative tools that are made available, not only familiar ones like dodging, burning, filters, masking etc, but also control of things like tonal curves beyond the wildest imaginations of a simple darkroom setup.

Out of interest, here’s a comparison of a straight shot from my F700 on the left; on the right is a Photoshop manipulated union of an overexposed and an underexposed image which is starting to approach the dynamic range of the human eye (and incidentally a good photographic film!). Technically interesting, but it’s certainly not ‘art’. Is digital manipulation any more ‘wrong’ than what I used to do in a darkroom, or did I get any less satisfaction from it? Let’s just say it’s ‘different’.

OK, my interface to this analogue world is now mostly digitised, but I still can’t remember a sense of ‘inner piece’ listening to music on my iPod like I used to with my Rega, and although I get a buzz taking pictures with my F700 I’ve never felt as satisfied with the end result as I have when taking the time to construct an image on an OM2.

Thinking about it as I have been whilst writing, although I seem to be blaming the technology, I think it’s how I’ve been relating to it – digital devices and techniques seem to be too cheap and easy, I don’t put in as much time, effort and thought that I used to in a purely analogue world – there you used to think harder every time you pressed the shutter release, or picked an album from the shelf, because you knew you were going to have to put up with the result for a long time – you invested in the outcome much more.

I still seem to yearn for the analogue life, but yet for convenience my life is mostly digital

I’m sorry that my first post in so long has to be a rant, but having spent hours on the phone to various technical support lines I have to vent…

Worrying about the vulnerability of work on my new Dell laptop, and wanting a bit of resilient storage to boot, I bought an Acer Altos easyStore NAS device which comes bundled with a bit of software called DiskSafe Express. I know there are many ways of doing this, but I thought this was a ‘proper’ one (should be for the money) but what I wanted was a setup that automatically keeps a current image of my entire drive somewhere safe, without me having to think about it.

What the easyStore appears to be is a funky little box running linux, with 4x250GB SATA drives in hot swap carriers, a gigabit ethernet connection and 2 USB ports for additional drives. The web interface allows various configurations of drives, but mine out of the box had the drives arranged in a RAID5 array giving just under 700GB storage.

Reading the instructions, most of this is left free to be used to maintain ‘backups’ – you have to specifically allocate space for network shares, and it chonks away when you assign more – advising you don’t increase any share by more than 20GB at a time. So this ‘backup’ thing is quite integral to the device it would appear, and I’m happy so far.

When I come to install the bundled software on my Vista Business laptop is when the trouble starts – it complains ‘Microsoft iSCSI Initiator v2.00 or later is not currently installed’ and sends you to the Microsoft site to download it – but on that site amongst the list of supported operated systems Vista is missing – it appears iSCSI Initiator is included in the Vista distribution. Downloading it anyway doesn’t do any good because if you try and run that installer you get ‘Setup could not find the update.inf file needed to update your system’.

SO Googling etc. around iSCSI and Vista doesn’t shed much light, so as a desperate last resort I try and get some technical support from Acer. I hope I heard a sympathetic groan there – because my forehead has brick shaped imprints – I was directed to a premium rate phone number for technical support so I created a ticket online. Two days later a reply comes back saying I was probably downloading an upgrade from Microsoft, try the full software or failing that ‘discuss the problem further with Microsoft’.

Microsoft quickly determine that Vista was ready installed on my new machine when I got it so I should contact the manufacturer for support, or they were happy to help, for something like £46. Dell were very friendly, but were unable to offer any meaningful advice on an obscure aspect of Vista – the most useful thing they suggested was I get an external hard drive which could back up my entire computer ‘at the push of a button’.

What I’ve read about iSCSI sounds very good – if it can be got to work, because it’s supposed to enable direct communication to a physical device on a IP remote network device (block level I/O). These network devices are typically SAN (Storage Area Networks) or NAS (Network Attached Storage).

I’m going to see how much further I can get as I’m sure I can’t be the first person to try and use this kit on Vista, but I’m already dreaming up an alternate strategy – so much for thinking this would be easy.

Postscript: Although top marks go to Dell for ringing me back this morning to see how I was doing, taking details and promising to find out what they could for me, duffers award goes to Acer support. Fiddling with the box management pages I found an obscure link to Acer support. There was an FAQ section which offered no help whatsoever, but then I spotted a ‘Windows Vista’ link on the left taking me to a secret world of downloads to make Acer products work with Vista including … an updated DiskSafe Express – it looks like it’s installing … to be continued (no doubt)