News, Update

Is it a home or a studio

25 Jul , 2016  

It’s part house, part office, part studio, part unknown. As you will gather our move is over. Here we sit, surrounded by furniture that needs putting together. The computer thingummy you need is in a box, somewhere. Which box, or for that matter which room is it in, is a complete mystery to us both.

Practicalities are high on our list of things to worry about. We have gone from the usual services, gas, water, that someone else worried about to; oil heating, bottle gas and a septic tank. It may be trivial, I am sure many of you out there don’t understand the problem. But it’s not something we had to cope with before. It’s all new and not a little bit scary. The highlands, in winter, without heating, not something either of us wants to think about.

Once home gets sorted out, next is the studio and office. First thing, get Broadband and network installed and working. We can then go from sneaker net to internet. And where are we going to put the server? For the last two years, it has happily sat on a desk. Should we do something different, or should we try and find the old desk?

Talking of servers, one big challenge that we have to grasp, we now live in the countryside. Remote is great for wildlife, but we have to make contingency plans. Should we have a fire, the response time is going to be longer. Potentially any fire will cause more damage.

Fire and magnetic media don’t get on. We need to update our backup strategy, but to what? We store a lot in the cloud but that’s not practical for our main library. Just too many big files, slow broadband and we need to access our pictures. So we need physical backups onsite. How many and how we protect them against loss and damage, is a problem currently awaiting a solution.

So with everything that needs thinking about and then doing, what’s going to be our next step? The elusive thingummy and just how much heating oil does the tank hold? These are questions that need immediate answers.

“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.” – Winston Churchill

But I bet he wasn’t trying to connect up a computer in a house with no heating.

Read about our moving to the Scottish highlands in Part One and Part Two

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