Next Time????

This week marks the one year anniversary of the Santa Fe high school shooting in Houston. Today on the news there were stories about the shooting. There were stories about some of the survivors a year later and their memories of the shooting. There were were stories about how Texas schools and Texas government have addressed school safety.

Every single measure that has been taken has focused on additional preparation for an “active shooter scenario”. This included things like adding more security personnel, adding more metal detectors and more training for teachers and students. In other words everything that has been done has been totally focused on being more prepared for Next Time.

Next Time??
Is that where we are now? Resigned that there has to be a Next Time?
What this says to me is that the United States has accepted school shootings as a new and unavoidable norm. That we have made the statement that we can’t prevent this from happening, all we can do is prepare to try to limit the damage.
Have we really given up on trying to make the most recent school shooting the last school shooting?
Have we just accepted that there is going to be a Next Time and nothing we do will change that?

The report talked about Santa Fe High School having been considered a model of preparedness right up until a pissed off 17 year old proved that you will never be able to cover every detail of every scenario. The president of the board of trustees for the district which contains Santa Fe is on record saying that the district's policies and procedures worked. As the Denver post reported afterwards Santa Fe school had a shooting plan, armed officers, and practice. And still 10 people died. But in typical fashion the response has been to look at rectifying specific failures like substitute teachers not having keys to classroom and safe room doors and remodeling to get rid of windows in classroom doors. There is also a plan to upgrade the school police officers’ weapons to include AR-15s.

As far as I can tell the Santa Fe shooting wasn’t even a blip in the national debate about gun control. In this case the guns used were a shotgun and handgun both legally owned by the shooter’s father. No assault weapons were involved and since it is unthinkable that we might change regulations on shotguns or handguns, why even talk about gun control? Aside being unwilling to consider regulating gun ownership we can’t even seem to talk about what responsible gun ownership would look like. I have seen no mention made of how the guns or ammunition were stored or that they were apparently accessible to the 17 year old. If anything the guns being legally owned, non-assault weapons has been held up as evidence that there was no way this could have been prevented.

I’ll have to go back and check, but I’m pretty sure the second amendment does not say that anyone has a right to be utterly irresponsible about who has access to their firearms.

PSA: Never trust a single repository for Important work

Allow me to pause and digress briefly from the current series of posts to remind everyone out there that if you have any work that would be problematic or painful to recreate save it in more than one place.

This is a reminder that we all hear all the time and I think at this point almost everyone either has a personal story or knows someone personally who has lost valuable data or work to a hard drive crash or some form of data corruption.

How is it then that this has not become second nature to all of us?

Well, I'm here to share this message once again from the perspective of someone who though he was being responsible by hitting save regularly but put too much faith in the system of record. It turns out that Blogger.com saves exactly one version of your work and that it very helpfully auto-saves every few seconds.

I have been working on the second installment of the "Privilege from the inside" series and was getting close to publishing part 2 when I came home to discover that we had a power outage and that my desktop had shut down unexpectedly. I was not too panicked by this with regard to the blog because I had been saving obsessively. The post had been harder to write than I expected, so when I got a sentence I liked I immediately hit save.

So I started up my computer, launched my browser and navigated to the blog. The rest of this is sheer speculation, because no one can tell me for sure what happened. The end result was that when I loaded the draft I had been saving so diligently I discovered that it was a 5 day old version that was missing my slow and painful progress.

As nearly as I can reconstruct when I launched my browser it said that the last session had ended unexpectedly and did I want to restore. I clicked Restore. All of my previous tabs came up including the blog. My guess is that my local browser restored an older version of the draft for some reason, and then the auto-save very helpfully saved that version before I could tell it to restore the version that should have been saved to the cloud. 

So here I sit another five days later still trying to reconstruct what I lost because I'm quite sure it was far better than what is coming to me on the same topic now.

There are a couple lessons to be learned here.

1. No single repository is 100% safe. Even if it is on a cloud. 
1. If something is important enough make sure you have independent backups.
2. Consider using versioned storage.
1. Yes, this sort of thing is normally reserved for things like code or legal work where the history and evolution of something might be important.
2. But that doesn't mean you can't use it for something as simple as a writing project.
3. When something happens and you lose some work get over it.
1. Yes, it sucks losing all that careful wordsmithing.
2. No, it probably was not Shakespeare. The only reason you think it was so brilliant is that it isn't around to prove you wrong.
3. Lost work is like the fish that got away, and it is just as pointless to ramble on about it.