I was trying to clean up my Inbox and found an e-mail from a month ago that I had somehow missed previously. I’m really glad I didn’t delete it as it contained a surprise that put a smile on my face. It’s in relation to some video game maps I made back in the 80’s. I’ll just reprint the e-mail below:

Hi there,

I just wanted to share with you a picture of something I’ve kept for nearly 30 years.  My brother and I played Ultima IV back in ’86, and your map files were given to me by a friend in high school.  Well, I printed them on our dot-matrix printer and spent several days actually coloring each character (you can see I kind of gave up being accurate on the ocean tiles).

Over the years I’ve googled The Red Pirate without success, just to see if I could find who made those, and I finally discovered your page last week.  I pulled my map out of storage, laid it out on the floor and took a picture of it for you to enjoy.

Thanks for the memories!

Ken

Thank you for writing and sending the photo, it was really fun to see.

Anyone else still have your printouts stashed away? E-mail me your story and a photo and you might see it here on my blog.

Cheers!

Years ago, researchers decoded the complete genetic sequence of Smallpox. Since then labs have decoded other variants but for this thought exercise let’s talk about “Variola virus strain Bangladesh 1975 v75-550 Banu”, for which a complete genome decoding was submitted to the CDC in 2006 and is currently available to the public from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website. Yes, you read that correctly. You can download the entire genetic sequence for Smallpox from a public web page and have been able to for some time now. As of 2014, complete DNA sequences of roughly 50 smallpox samples are available to the general public.

Granted this availability of the data (even when it was only printed in journals) has been a point of concern and debate in some communities. The common discussion carries around concerns of someone recreating a synthetic Smallpox virus to infect people. This was even discussed as a key concern for why the last strains should not be destroyed just last year in 2014.

What I’m more fascinated in though, and something my wife pointed out recently, is that by carrying the complete genome of Smallpox into a digital form and putting it in a public space the virus has in effect jumped hosts/species.

Countless web crawlers, archivers, and random web users (of all intents) have made copies of the web page holding this code. I’m sure there are even pages that duplicate the content and those too have been crawled, archived, etc…

Even if humanity destroyed all living strains of the virus, this digital version has the potential to persist indefinitely at this point (or at the least, indefinitely from the perspective of you and I). Where the virus goes from here is really anyone’s guess, but for now it is actively replicating and being transmitted globally and automatically by it’s new digital host, the Internet.

And no, I’m not linking to the virus… go ask Google.

Well I succumbed to the hype and pulled down P.T. for the PS4. It’s a free download, so why not? I’ll admit up front that I have not played any of the Silent Hill games (not sure why though), but I have played all of the Resident Evil titles and other games in the genre. Having the crap scared out of you while playing a game, for me, dates back to playing Doom in a dark room at 1 am in surround sound, creeping down a dark corridor and some demon noise makes you jump out of your skin. Good fun.

As a demonstration on just how scary and how many times you can be made to jump while doing nothing more than walking down 200 ft of hallway over and over, this demo unquestionably set the bar. One scare elicited yelps from everyone in the room and startled all the pets! Impressive to say the least. But unfortunately, that’s where the nice things I have to say about this demo comes to an end.

We did have some problems and hope they aren’t representative of what will be expected of the player in the full game. For instance, the key element for progressing the demo was completely non-obvious to me and everyone in the room watching. It wasn’t until about a dozen laps in when I had a flash of something on the screen (that we figured out later, was triggered by zooming) that forced me to finally gave up and look online to see what was going on. That’s when I learned about the puzzle. Sigh.

Also, play mechanics… It was quickly obvious that I had the ability to zoom my view, but it was not obvious what the point was. It didn’t actually zoom my view down the hallway, and only seemed to be effective as a way to add some closer focus on a nearby object, but even then it wasn’t much of a zoom/focus. It was more like an “I’m staring here” button. I stared at the clock, I stared at the radio, I stared at every blurry picture on the walls… hmmm. Why could I stare at things? Granted after I learned about the puzzle I quickly put the zoom to use in solving it. There were a few other times after this where you needed to stare at something but those later times were a little more obvious.

Next was the action button. The action button that apparently is only good for one action, and doesn’t work as an action button anyplace else in the demo. Open doors? You chest bump them. By the time it came time to use the action button, I had already pressed it dozens of times (along with all of the other buttons) and received absolutely no response so I had naturally inferred none of the buttons did anything other than the zoom. When my son finally looked online after I had been stuck for a few more laps, he told me to push the action button at this one location. I replied “what action button”? We worked it out but I wasn’t pleased.

On the one hand, I’m happy that the game wasn’t full of in your face hand holding (eg, Splinter Cell: Conviction or just watch Sequelitis: Mega Man Classic vs Mega Man X). On the other hand you have to give the player some kind of clues, even something as simple as a controller map in the options screen that showed that “X” was the action button would have made the experience that much more effective.

All of that aside though, the real killer for this demo and why I might simply skip Silent Hills out of fear that there will be more of this, is the ending of the demo. The “ending” (say it with air quotes) that is apparently so random that even the people who’ve gotten to it can’t tell you what they did. We let the demo sit for three hours after getting every other trigger fired in the end sequence and we never received the final event. What started out as fun, engaging and novel quickly turned into tedium, boredom and then just flat out irritation. Ultimate we turned off the system and nobody really cared. I had already seen the trailer on YouTube and asked if anyone wanted to see it… Nope, no interest. They were back off to play Kerbal Space Program or whatever else. Pretty much anything but deal with this demo anymore.

I don’t know about you but I’m not sure that was the take away feeling they were looking to deliver. Then again, this is Hideo Kojima we’re talking about. The guy who likes to complicate his characters with incest themes and loads up his stories with irritating, personal political rants. Yeah. I’m not sold. So much promise though 🙁

Today’s news: Police are upset that people are tracking their stolen phones down and confronting thieves.

No. No it’s not just a phone. Ten years ago, for most people, it might have still been just a phone. The reality today is that the modern smart phone is closer to what the medical community might call a Mnemonic Aid.

Let’s step back for a moment for those of you who just don’t get it, but may have had the chance to play video games anytime since the early 90’s. Think of it this way. You’re 40 hours into your favorite video game and your save file is lost for some reason (corrupted file, lost memory card, etc…). If you’re like any kid in this situation, you about lost your mind. Some of you said “forget this” and simply walked away from the game. Some of you burned another month getting back to where you last were. Either way, it sucked.

Is that too recent an analogy? How about this. At least for you pre-90’s guys out there. Remember the “little black book” or tiny sheet of paper you kept folded up in your wallet with the scribbled on phone numbers and addresses for every person you ever met. What happened when that piece of paper went through the washing machine? You probably about cried and desperately tried to recover what data you could from those scraps of wet paper in every way possible. You usually failed, but either way, it sucked.

If neither of those two analogies work for you then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe talk to your neighbor, friend, sibling for some perspective.

But if those analogies touched a nerve… magnify those feelings times a thousand? Times a million?

The modern smart phone is your save file/little black book on steroids. Consider, that for many people, the modern smart phone represents the personal narrative of someone’s life for the last year or two, or more if they have simply been transferring things forward like photos, contacts and who-knows what else. It’s the last photos of their father in the hospital before he passed away. It’s their daughter’s prom photo. It’s the heartfelt text from their now, ex telling them how much they loved them before everything went to hell. It’s the video they made two years ago with their friends in some city, celebrating some special event which was too crazy to post to Facebook, but it’s their favorite memory because they will never have all those wonderful friends together in one place again. For many it’s a device that keeps the proof of better times. For other’s it’s a quick reference to everything that is their life today.

It’s the bookmarks and sometimes phone numbers of every restaurant, club or store that someone keeps track of for quick reference. It’s personal notes, diaries, health trackers, fitness trackers, and in some cases all of a person’s favorite music.

It’s also the one device more so than even your home computer that has instant login access to every important website in your life. It might even store all your passwords as well.

If it was “just a phone”, people would be upset, they’d get over it. You can replace a thing. But it’s not “just a phone”. It’s not just a thing. It’s a personal narrative. It is a slice of life. It is the sum total of all of the most important save file data anyone can have in their life which they happen to carry with them everywhere they go.

Note to the police. People are not hunting down stolen phones. They are hunting down their save files and for some of them, that data is worth dying for.

So, this is a story I don’t tell too often but in light of some recent conversations about performing backups following the news about the Iron Mountain fire, I felt it would be insightful to share.

Back in 1997/1998 I learned a very hard lesson about data loss and the publication I Co-Edited named Game Zero magazine.

First the back story to explain how this situation ended up the way it did.

We started our web presence near the end of 1994 with a user account with a local Arizona company named Primenet who offered users the traditional array of features (WWW, POP mail, etc…). This worked out great except for a couple of problems. The first was that even though we had registered the domain gamezero.com for our site, Primenet’s server name resolution would sometimes flip a visitor’s browser to the primenet.com/team-0 URL while the person was traversing the site. This caused lots of people to create bookmarks and links to the site by the wrong URL (this comes into play later).

The second and later problem, although not a technical issue, was the cost associated with bandwidth for WWW visitors to the site. Towards the end of our time with Primenet we were hitting fees of a few hundred dollars a month for bandwidth from our 700,000+ page views a month. Fortunately we had designed our site incredibly light, so that helped keep costs low, but traffic and fees were climbing. Ultimately I set my sights to moving us to new “discount” hosting services which were becoming a thing in 1997. It was obvious we could save a significant amount of money by moving the site.

For backups, we had our production computer which housed all the original and developing web content, including the active mirror of the website and remote publishing tools as well as our POP e-mail client for all business e-mail. Additionally, we kept backups of web content and e-mails on a collection of Zip disks along with some limited content on a random assortment of floppies.

In 1997 hard drives where expensive! We’re talking a few hundred dollars for a 1GB drive. Our production PC had something like a 120MB drive, as I recall, so we had lots of data off loaded on the Zip disks.

Also around this time we also received word that the provider which had been handling our FTP based video repository was getting out of the hosting business. I decided it best to roll the video content into the new web hosting arrangement as the price would still be reasonable. We quickly migrated everything over, changed DNS entries, started sending out e-mails to people who had the old primenet.com addresses to please update their links, etc… Following the migration we only published a few major updates on the new server consisting of a couple of new videos and some articles which only existed on the website, our production system and our Zip drive backups.

Then problems started…

1. Traffic tanked on the new server.
2. My crawling the web looking for bad links suddenly made me aware of just how bad the extent of the linking issue was and a significant amount of traffic was still going to the old Primenet URL. Fortunately right before we closed our Primenet account we setup a root page that linked to the proper URL along with a notice about the move which Primenet was kind enough to leave up at no cost, but it wasn’t a full site wide redirect though. Just the root pages.
3. A few months into running on the new provider their servers went dark. When I contacted them to find out what happened, I reached a voicemail that informed me that they had filed bankruptcy and closed business. Done, gone… No contact and no way to recover any of the data from the web server.
4. We now had a domain name that didn’t respond, our old provider’s server was pointing traffic to that very same dead URL and since we had long since closed the Primenet account we had no ability to log in and change the redirect notice or make other modifications to redirect traffic someplace else.
5. While scrambling to find new hosting, the hard drive on our production computer completely and utterly failed. 100% data loss.
6. After getting a new hard drive I went to start rebuilding from our Zip disks and to my horror none of them would read. We had now become a victim of what became to be known as the “click of death”. We lost some 20-30 Zip disks in total. Almost everything was gone except for a mirror of the website from before the migration to the new hosting and other random items scattered around. We also had a limited number of hard copies of e-mails and other documents.
7. Lastly, while the Internet Archive now is a great way to recover website content. At this point in time it was still just getting started and their “Wayback Machine” had only just taken a partial snapshot of our sites (in both the US and Italy). Par for this story, the lost content was pages that had not been crawled yet except for the index pages for the missing videos. I could view the archive of the video pages… but the linked videos were too large at that time and were not mirrored.

Coming into this, I felt we had a pretty good data backup arrangement. But I learned the hard way that it wasn’t good enough. We lost all of the magazine’s e-mail archives including thousands of XBand correspondences as well as innumerable e-mails with publishers and developers. We lost two videos that had been produced and published. We lost a few articles and reviews. We also lost nearly all of the “in progress” content as well as a number of interviews.

At this point the staff agreed to stop spending money on the publication and formally end the magazine, especially since some of them were already making natural transitions into their careers and school. While we had stopped actively publishing at then end of 1996/start of 1997, if you were to ask me if there was a hard line for the the true end of the magazine, this was it.

Ultimately I did get the site back up as an archive which you can still read today. But, that’s another story.

The lesson of this story is to remember that there is no fool-proof backup situation. Only you can be responsible for you (or your company’s) data and you must always be aware that no matter what your best efforts are, data loss is always a possibility.

99.9% guarantees are great except for  that 0.1% chance, which is still a chance! and if someone is selling you a 100% guarantee let me know because I’ve got the title for this bridge in Brooklyn I might consider selling you for a deal.

What could I have done differently?

1. Spread out our backups across more than one media type and one location. Simply having a duplicate set of Zip disks and a second drive off site where there was no cross-mixing would have made a huge difference here.
2. More frequent backups of critical business data such as e-mail.
3. Retained the master account with the old service provider until we were sure traffic migration had been completed.
4. Upon the first sign of Click of Death observed. I should have isolated both the problematic media and drive from use and looked for a second drive as the damage propagated once manifest but nobody had enough information about the problem at the time and the manufacture kept denying the problem existed.

Granted some of these would have likely added overhead cost, but the the question is would that cost balance against the value of the data lost? I don’t know. But since this happened I have been far more diligent in my data storage strategies where I now factor in the value and importance of the data with the breadth and depth of the backup plan and go with the best possible solution I can devise.

I have had only one significant data loss in the years since this happened. It was just last fall and I was doing some data re-organization as part of a desktop upgrade. A USB drive I was using for temporary storage fell over and become damaged in such a way that it would no longer read the disk. I then discovered that the data on the drive hadn’t been synchronized with the backup repository for a couple of months for some reason. Fortunately it was non-critical, personal data (downloaded drivers and install packages that I was able to re-download from the Internet). So all in all the only loss here was in my time. But it was a reminder to me that even though I am way more careful than before, accidents can still happen.