Save early, save often (DOG EAR)
Save early, save often (DOG EAR)
I‘m a coder from way, way back. Back in the days when home computer programs were saved on tape and memory was slotted into the machine and could crash if you hit the table hard enough, you saved early. And often. Even while working Fortran on a mainframe you habitually saved. I even always had a book with me back in my Navy Underwater Research days, given the usual outages we faced.
Now, everything seems bulletproof.
But I am reminded of the old adage: Never have an unsaved session larger than you’d be able to afford to lose (well, something like that).
One of the things I do on this page is to write up model railroad operation sessions. It’s actually a popular side-blog here, with the operators half-frightened that I’m going to single them out for comment for some mistake they made. A lot of times, it’s a nice shout-out to people who host. In this particular instance, we had a session at the club. It was a lot of fun, and so I wrote about the three train meet at the summit of a grade that was a real squeaker, all sorts of tense railroady drama. It was pretty late, I was very tired, and I just wanted to get it done before hitting the sack. Once it was finished, I hit spell checker in Joomla (its actually a component that I’ve added).
And it failed.
I think it was trying to log into some spelling reference somewhere. But it couldn’t connect. A dialog telling me it couldn’t connect locked up my screen and wouldn’t allow me access to the page beneath – I couldn’t even cut and past what I’d done. I looked into the Task Manager but couldn’t identify the locking spell checker. It just kept spinning and spinning. The only thing I could do was pull the plug and end my browser session. Goodbye blog post.
So now it’s after midnight and I got to rewrite everything all over again. Yes, in the nature of rewrites, it was a better recount. But I was so, so tired. So even though I’m wrapping this posting up, you can bet that I’ll save it before I hit that spell checker button. They aren’t going to get me again.
Until the next time.