Of Computer Mice (and Men)

I try to make sure my computers and software are kept up to date and not neglected, but even when I think I am doing everything right, something will inevitably go wrong. Sometimes the best-laid plans, well, you know how that goes….

Christmas time for graphic artists can be either slow (as in, nothing is going to get done before then end of the year since everyone is off and no one cares) or be super busy (as in, everything needs to get done before the end of the year because everyone is off and there are not enough days in December with all those pesky holidays that just screw with scheduling). This year was busy. Super busy. Super duper busy. And there could not have been a worse time for my computer to die. As in, would not start. As in, I went to check on a project before making dinner (on a Saturday night!) and all was fine. Went to check my email after dinner and my computer was dead. No chime. No nothing. Crap. Double crap. After a late night call to AppleCare, I snagged the last open appointment for the next day at my nearby Apple store (oh, joy, 4:30 in the afternoon, on a Sunday, at the mall, a week before Christmas—just shoot me).

As I suspected, there was nothing that could be immediately done for my dearly departed. The tech kindly referred to my computer as “vintage” (which means I would have had to take the machine to a third party to fix) and, according to the tech, even if it was fixable, the fix would not be cheap and (more importantly) would not be fast. And, I needed a working computer by the next morning. Best to put my money into a new machine. So 30 minutes later, I was walking out of the Apple store with a new computer. As soon as I got home, I plugged it in and started the setup, and then went to make Sunday dinner. Thanks to Time Machine, I was able to transfer everything over to my new computer before Monday breakfast. By mid-morning Monday, I was up and running and back at work. (At least, that part of the story had a happy ending.)

After a few months, I took the old computer down the street to Classic Computers for a definitive assessment of its condition. (Classic is kind of like vintage except it sounds slightly better.) The diagnosis: it overheated and was never coming back from the grave. Since all my past computers had run hot, it never occurred to me that the fact that I could practically fry an egg on the back of the monitor was an issue. Turns out it was (and unlike my older models there is no way for me to open it up and check to see if the fan is clogged with, say, cat hair). Now I know. Hot computer, bad.

Then, just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water after my computer disaster (or at least, breathe a bit easier on the digital front) my website went south. Way south. Like South Pole, global-warming south.

Mid-January, I got an innocuous message from my hosting service that my site had been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I get these messages occasionally, and it has never been a source of much interest. Newer is better (mostly) and updated is good (mostly). So, I paid little attention until later that week when I visited my site and discovered it was totally FUBAR. As in, gone. As in, there was a weird holding page where my site was supposed to be. Was I hacked (I have been told more than once that WordPress sites are a hacker’s dream)? What had exploded and caused my site to go totally phooey. I had no clue.

After a call to my host’s support line (Bluehost, and, yes, they were very nice and very helpful), my site was back and only partially FUBAR. At least, it looked like my site only with a bunch of junk floating at the top (kind of like that mid-Atlantic garbage patch looks like in floating the ocean). I considered reloading the site from a backup, but my most recent backup was a more than a few months old. (My bad.) After an extended call with a WordPress guru (thank you, Delta Angel), we decided my best course of action was to turn off all my plugins and see what happened. And the site (minus plugins) was back. Turns out that innocent WordPress upgrade, wasn’t quite so innocent after all. It had rendered a lot of my plugins useless, and others it had rendered just downright destructive. Here I thought, I was being good and keeping everything up to date, but turns out some of those plugins were never updated and had become obsolete. Who knew? Not me. Now I am backing up my website automatically (thank you, Back-up Buddy) and trying to keep those pesky plugins to a minimum.

For now, my computer is happy, and my website is happy. And I am happy. Something will go wrong, sooner or later. I guess the trick is to work on keeping it later than sooner.