As Sybille declared this evening, I look like a geek! On the desk in my office is not one laptop computer, but two! So a blog post of explanation.
Nearly five years ago, I started to use my first ever laptop computer. As I explained back then, it was purchased as a result of a generous donation by a member of the St Clement’s congregation, supplemented by a contribution from Sybille and myself. It has served me well since May 2012, both for running the Prague Anglican Chaplaincy, and for reasonably regularly updating this blog. But right from the day of purchase, we agreed that it belonged to the Chaplaincy, not to me.
Therefore with my forthcoming retirement now less than three weeks away, I have started the difficult task of separating my personal and Church life. So last Wednesday, I bought myself my own personal laptop computer, the one on the left in the photo above.
Earlier on Monday this week, we left both computers in the care of Hardware & Software Services, for them to transfer everything from the Chaplaincy computer, onto my new laptop. Also at our request, they kindly removed unnecessary and unusable software and services of both Microsoft & Hewlett Packard, from my new laptop. It cost CZK 1000, just under Β£32.00 β money well spent I believe.
Today, aided by Sybille, my two email accounts were separated. After Sunday 30th April, I will no longer be chaplain(at)anglican(dot)cz. Therefore, whilst all my past email correspondence to this address has been downloaded onto my new laptop, no new emails can be. They can only be accessed by using the Chaplaincy computer.
Likewise, my new private email address, ry(at)rickyyates(dot)com, set up four years ago but hardly ever used until now, can only be accessed from my new personal laptop. The small amount of past correspondence on the Chaplaincy computer has been transferred to my new laptop, and then deleted from the Chaplaincy computer.
Over the next few days, I have the task of carefully deleting from the Chaplaincy computer, all my personal material, letters and files, leaving only material which will be useful to a locum Chaplain and my eventual successor.
Also, from now on, each time I arrive at my desk, I will first of all have to decide on which computer I should be working, depending on what I’m doing π The next few weeks should be fun!
On the evening of Friday 20th June, after a very interesting but busy week about which I hope to write more here in due course, I returned home just after 10 pm and turned on my laptop computer. I wanted to pick up any new email, deal with new comments on this blog, look at the BBC News website to catch up on the day’s news, and visit Facebook.
I duly typed in my password but, instead of my desktop with icons appearing, I was greeted with the message, ‘The user profile service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded’. Several further attempts to logon just resulted in the same message appearing. I was completely locked out of my laptop and feeling totally helpless.
I had this same problem a year ago. On that occasion, it happened on a weekday and a nearby computer business called ‘Hardware Software Services’ (despite being a Czech company π ), kindly resolved the issue that same day. But they are only open for business 10.00 β 18.00 Monday to Friday, so I immediately realised that this time, I was going to be without access to email, the internet or any of the material stored on the laptop, for at least three full days.
I did console myself that it could have been worse. The next morning, Saturday 21st June, I had to officiate at a difficult funeral β only the fourth funeral I’ve conducted since moving to Prague nearly six years ago β a reflection of the relatively young age of most of the English-speaking expat community here. I was grateful that I had already prepared and printed everything I needed for that service.
Whilst I didn’t need to write a sermon as we had a guest preacher on Sunday morning, I had set Saturday afternoon aside to do all my other preparatory work ready for worship on Sunday. Most notably, this meant drafting the ‘Weekly Bulletin’ containing the text of the Biblical readings, hymn numbers, titles and tunes, together with notices of forthcoming activities & the contact details for me and the members of the Church Council. Not only did I not have a functioning computer on which to do this, all the relevant information I needed was also completely inaccessible.
I am quite proud of myself that, despite these difficulties, I did eventually manage to produce a ‘Weekly Bulletin’. I did so by using someone else’s computer, creating a new template, before copying and pasting the Biblical readings from a CD. I then printed off one master copy, leaving the back page of a folded A4 sheet, blank. Before photocopying copies from the master copy, I place a copy of the back of the previous week’s edition over the blank page, as the information contained was virtually unchanged.
My greatest problem was bringing to mind the four hymns I’d chosen a few days earlier. I’d sent the details by email, to the musical director of the choir of St. Chad’s College, Durham, who were singing at our service, as their choir organist was going to play for the whole of our worship. But the only record of my chosen hymns was in that email, which was sitting in a file called ‘Sent items’, on an inaccessible laptop computer. Fortunately, by re-reading the Biblical readings, all four eventually came back to my mind.
On the morning of Monday 23rd June, I arrived with laptop in hand, at the premises of Hardware Software Services, within a few minutes of them being open for business. By late afternoon, I once more had a working laptop computer with no loss of any data. I was kindly informed that what had happened was ‘a known Windows 7 problem’ and that mine wasn’t the first one that they had fixed. At the very reasonable cost of CZK 600 (just under Β£20.00), I was reconnected to ‘my world’ π Arriving home and connected once again to the internet, I downloaded fifty-eight emails and nineteen comments on this blog. Sadly, all the comments were spam π
This whole experience last weekend, brought home to me once again how dependant I am upon one laptop computer, together with instant access to the internet. Suddenly, I could not carry out many everyday aspects of my job. My laptop computer is such a wonderful tool, storing an amazing variety of information and giving me almost instant communication with others β that is, so long as it works! And it isn’t just my expectations β last Sunday morning I had to apologise to the congregation, that if any of them had written me an email during the previous two days, I hadn’t seen it, yet alone been able to reply to it. Even emails that were slightly older which I had seen, I was presently unable to write a reply to any of them.
There is an interesting postscript to this whole business. The computer engineer at Hardware Software Services explained that, as part of resolving my computer access problem, they had de-installed and then reinstalled my anti virus protection but that everything else was in order. However, a couple of days later, I was unable to carry out an internet banking transaction with a message saying that this was because my internet browser was not ‘Javascript enabled’.
I returned to Hardware Software Services where the computer engineer agreed to look at the problem. He discovered that for some reason, I now had an older version of Mozilla Firefox and he went online to download the newest version. Being Czech, though fluent English-speaking, he promptly downloaded the Czech version of Firefox, something I only discovered when I got home. The simple solution is for me to download the English version of Firefox myself. But to do so, I have to follow instructions in Czech, because of currently having the Czech version of Firefox π
Two weeks ago yesterday, Sybille and I made a short journey in our car, to a Prague City Council facility where it is possible to safely and legally dispose of electrical and other household goods that any Prague resident no longer requires. In the boot of my car, were four β yes four π , old computers, together with a screen monitor, all of which had been rapidly gathering dust for many months, sitting on the floor of my office in the Chaplaincy Flat. Prior to that, two of the computers had been stored in the bottom of the wardrobe of our guest bedroom for at least couple of years.
Before disposing of the computers, Sybille spent several hours completely clearing each of them of all the data they once held, so that no confidential information could end up in wrong hands. It was waiting for Sybille to find the time and this programme to do this, that had delayed their disposal. One thing that particularly struck me as we carried out this whole exercise, was how rapidly technology advances and changes these days. How what was once state-of-the-art technology, has so soon becomes obsolete.
Two of them belonged to Sybille and came with us when we moved to the Czech Republic in September 2008. Both had Windows 98 as their operating system and the facility for inserting a floppy disk. I wonder how many of my readers remember them? π One of the two when bought new, was the office computer for the group of parishes in North Oxfordshire of which I was Rector from January 1993 until August 2008. It was bought to replace its predecessor which used the DOS operating system. How many readers remember that?
When the Benefice Council agreed to buying a new computer that had Windows XP as its operating system, they also agreed that Sybille could have its predecessor. She inherited the second computer from a husband & wife who lived within that group of parishes and who ran their own business from home and were also upgrading their computer systems.
The other two computers had both been the Prague Chaplaincy Computer in times past. One of them was the computer I inherited when we moved to Prague in September 2008. It had Windows 2000/NT as its operating system and was apparently given to my predecessor as Chaplain, by an American member of the congregation who was returning to the USA and did not wish to take it back with her. It was the computer on which the early posts and associated photographs for this blog were compiled. But by Spring 2010, it was rapidly dying.
The second computer replaced the first. It was given to me by a current member of the congregation whose employers had recently upgraded their computers, and were happy for the old ones to go to voluntary organisations who could make good use of them. It was a vast improvement on the Windows 2000/NT model as it had Windows XP as its operating system. But having previously belonged to a Czech company, it had one major downside – it only spoke to me in Czech π
Despite this, it served me well for just under two years. That was until the on-board battery died, which nearly resulted in me losing all of my data and files. Fortunately, my computer savvy wife came to the rescue, but that incident made it imperative that I moved to another computer as soon as possible. Fortunately, a generous donation and a contribution from Sybille and myself, enabled the purchase of the new laptop computer I’m currently using to compile this post, as I explained in an earlier post of late May 2012 entitled ‘All change!‘
I greatly appreciate the freedom that my laptop computer now gives me to remain connected via email and the internet, when I am travelling. Whilst it normally sits on my desk in the office of the Chaplaincy Flat, connected to mains power and to our home wifi network, I have taken it with me to Brno, when staying there overnight after conducting a service, and also when I visited the UK in August last year. To be able to access my email & answer any urgent enquiries when not residing at home, is a great boon.
Yet when I see people out and about with their tablet computers, iPhones, etc., I am left to wonder as to how quickly my laptop computer, which is still less than one year old, will be considered as being obsolete. After all, its operating system is Windows 7, which has already been succeeded by Windows 8. There are times when I think, can we not stop for a moment and actually appreciate all that modern technology has done for us? Instead, technology continues to advance β and that advance seems to become ever more rapid.
