More bad news

I learn this afternoon that there has been a catastrophic cable failure at the world-famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It seems that suspension cable problems at this quite old - nearly sixty years old - observatory surfaced in August and that some cables parted much more recently, dumping the near 1,000 ton central gondola down onto the receiving dish, hundreds of feet below. Luckily no-one was hurt, but I don't know what prospect there is, if any, of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Maybe specification or quality control on those cables, back in the middle of the last century, was not all that it might have been.

Rather nearer home, I have been a bit annoyed with British Telecom, to whom I pay quite a lot of money every month, a lot more than the headline figures which feature in their television advertisements for broadband services. But I have not minded because the service has been very good, including in my case access to what they called their Tech Experts. Who came with a telephone number which got you through to them, to a person, in seconds, rather than the usual minutes. People who would have a go at almost any domestic IT problem that you threw at them and quite often came up with a solution. Which I found quite impressive. Helped along by a gadget which enabled them to take over your screen and have a look around - while you were watching, naturally. And you trusted them to do this because they were BT and although privatised, BT might still be supposed to have proper security and personnel services in place. There was also something called BT Cloud, a version of Dropbox or Microsoft's OneDrive, on the strength of which I switched from Dropbox to BT Cloud for protection against data losses, particularly the sort which were more or less my own fault. Finger trouble or impatience.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from BT telling me that the Tech Expert service was being withdrawn, replaced in some part by travelling engineers who would, if necessary, make home visits to get your Broadband going again. Other problems no. Not too impressed.

Then a couple of days ago, I got pop-ups telling me that I needed to do an update to the BT Cloud client. First the laptop, where the update went wrong, and while there still appear to be a lot of BT Cloud flavoured data files, they are not where they should be and there is no BT Cloud service. Second the desktop, where the update has been in progress for a couple of days now. If you poke around you get a pop-up telling you that a lengthy meta-data update is in progress. In the meantime, no service.

I might say that it is hard to be sure that these updates do indeed come from BT. Furthermore, the quality of the update process falls far short of that offered by Microsoft, where there are often long waits, but at least you feel you know what is going on and you trust Microsoft to get there in the end.

I did try the special help line for BT Cloud, but all they could suggest was reloading the software, which I know from experience works by deleting the local copy of all your accumulated data and starting over. Which can take a very long time - and I have not yet reloaded.

I suspect that the outcome might be that I abandon BT Cloud and switch back to data sticks for this sort of backup. So far at least, the necessary drivers to make them work have not gone AWOL. And so far at least, the sticks themselves have not gone AWOL.

All quality time which I would rather be spending on something more interesting.

Reference 1: NEW Grid | The Arecibo Observatory (naic.edu).

Reference 2: Dropbox.