Mois : mai 2018

I have to admit, I’m knackered. It’s actually surprising just how much effort is involved in organising these things! Anyway, the hardest bit is now over…all that’s left is the jury and the prize giving.

This is someone trying desperately to sell the themes – without any success – to passers by.

The morning started well with 86 participants in the BIJ waiting for the ‘off’ at 10h. I have to do a little speech, explaining things etc. etc. (which apparently that went ok) and at 10h the first theme was splashed up on the video-projector.

Everybody had to meet at the Cathedral in Auch so we all set off and climbed up to the top of the town – and at 10h20 I divided the 86 participants into 2 groups – one group disappeared with a guide, and the other group were given information to follow a little ‘parcours’ at the top of the town to visit things they might not know even existed. What the second group didn’t know initially was that the first group were having a guided tour of the inside of the Cathedral.

At 11h30 the two large groups changed and the whole thing started again – with people moving back towards to BIJ to download their images and eat (very important!) at 13h

We all ate together in the concert hall – we provided the drinks (we even had a keg of beer!) and the participants brought their own lunches.

At 14h the third theme was announced on the video-projector and they all went off out again. Everyone had to remember to meet at Ciné32 at 15h20 – where I announced the fourth and  final theme – « Follow me » I said, and they did…into a circus tent where I had organised a demonstration by a group of local circus artists. This went down very well and at 16h30 we were all back at the BIJ for the last round of downloading.

After the last images had been transfered, we started the diaporama which showed all of the 559 images, one after another.

Everybody seemed to enjoy what we had organized – which of course just makes it more difficult for next year (!) – but I’m happy to say we had the most participants (86), the broadest age range (7 – 77years old) and the most images – 559.  Looking at the initial albums there’s a lot of good work….I can’t help thinking the jury is going to have it’s work cut out tomorrow!

 

 

 

 

 

I decided to use Backblaze to keep a copy of my image files on a Cloud server. Their offer is reasonable – 50$/year for unlimited space – so I signed up on the 15th of April and started my initial backup.

Things chugged along ok for a couple of weeks, and when I checked, 777Gb of data had been copied (I have 4,7Tb to copy in total…)

Then on the 2nd of May my iMac restarted itself when it installed an Apple update (Like an idiot, I forgot to ‘uncheck’ the ‘automatic install’ of updates.)

When the machine restarted, so did the backup – but for some strange reason there were only 146 Gb of data on the Backblaze servers.

I sent a message to their help desk – the reply (from a certain ‘Christopher’) bore no relation to the question I had asked. I had simply restated the details (above) and received a mail explaining why files were marked for copying etc.

No Christopher – first, read the f****g question.

I wrote back, asking whether or not they had actually read my original mail, only to receive another unintelligible mail.

I also downloaded the IOS app for Backblaze so that I could check on progress on my telephone. It should allow touch recognition to start the app (instead of having to type in the e-mail address and password each time) and asks if you want to set this up when you install the app. This doesn’t work either.

So after my brief experience with them, I’m very disappointed – if only I could get a REAL response to my (simple) question – frankly I cannot recommend a system where the A: users questions are ignored, and B: bits don’t function.

Sadly I’ve paid my 50$ and I doubt I’ll get that back, but I am looking around for an alternative backup system…

UPDATE

In fairness to Backblaze, I’ve just had an understandable answer (took a while guys…) were ‘Robert’ (AKA ‘Christopher’) informs me that they seem to think something on my computer is generating ‘extra’ files which are being uploaded. I can’t imagine where they come from, or indeed what they are – and of course, there’s STILL no explanation for the sudden DECREASE in the file count. They suggest restarting the computer and seeing what happens…

…so I have.