I’ve got two situations with technology that I want to talk about today. The first one is that some tech problems have nothing to do with you, or anything you’ve done – sometimes the gremlins in the system just decide to run amok. And the second one is pretty much the opposite of the first, involving something called PEBCAK (read on and I’ll explain)…
On Friday morning, I was rudely awoken at 4 in the morning by an ear-splitting bleeping sound. After stumbling about in the dark for a bit, I discovered that the source of the noise was my work laptop, doing its best impression of a reversing lorry and showing me a message on the screen that there was something very wrong with my hard drive.
I took a quick picture of the error message on my phone to show whoever would need to fix it (always a good idea, where possible), and then I forced the laptop to switch off by holding down the Power button for about ten seconds. I unplugged it from the charger for good measure, and made a mental note to apologise to my next door neighbour for the disturbance at a more reasonable hour.
The second thing happened while I was using one of the spare work laptops while mine was getting a replacement hard drive. For some reason, the spare laptop kept locking the screen and asking me to log in again at random times, sometimes mere seconds after I’d just logged in.
It was very odd, and more than a little frustrating, until I realised that every time I went to do something on the laptop, I was resting my wrist over one of the laptop’s sensors. You might have wondered how a laptop knows to turn the screen off when you close the lid – well on this particular model, it uses sensors to register when the lid is closed, which I’d been confusing every time I went to type something or use the trackpad.
So this particular problem was a distinct case of PEBCAK, which is where the Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. Or in other words, I was the problem – so while sometimes it’s the gremlins, and we’ve done nothing wrong… but sometimes it is us. Whoops!
Why I’m not suggesting you take up knitting…
Claire was telling me last week about a project she’s working on at home, which is a “mood blanket”. She knits a couple of rows for each day, and the colour is determined by how she’s feeling that day. One of the colours is teal, which is when she feels energised after having done a decent amount of exercise that day.
Anyway, that’s the background – what Claire and I were actually talking about was how she was feeling a bit ashamed of herself because of how little teal there was in her blanket… meaning that clearly she’s not getting enough days where she’s getting exercise. She knew that anyway, but seeing it there in glorious technicolour made her stop and think.
I think we’re all a bit like that sometimes – vaguely aware that we don’t eat healthily enough or don’t get enough exercise – but without really knowing for sure. That’s where it can come in handy to keep a record. It doesn’t have to be a mood blanket – I’m not saying everyone should take up knitting! But keeping a record somehow can be a real help to work out where you are, so that you can work out where you want to be.
And that’s where the second of our new health books comes in – “One hundred days to Improve Your Health: A daily write-in journal to help you build healthier habits…..”
It’s not a mood blanket, but it’s an easy-to-use spiral-bound journal that you fill in every day for 100 days. You write in anything you want to keep track of – how much exercise you did, what your diet was like, how much sleep you had, and anything else you want to put in there, really. You can start by making a goal for where you want to be, or you can just start recording where you are now, before deciding what your goal should be – it’s entirely up to you.
There are health tips in there, along with advice on setting goals and how to manage them too. And checkpoints along the way to remind you to take a step back and see how you’re progressing. For more details about the journal, as well as the main book, Health Tech: Websites Gadgets and Apps, have a look here.
Claire says she’s thinking of giving it a go, although in the meantime she’s just going to aim for a bit more teal on her blanket…