Lessons Learned

Radix Fidem is faith-driven. I’ve consistently taught that you should follow your own convictions, and that the only reason we have anything to share is to offer examples of what’s possible. The whole idea is to drive you to look inside your own soul for the living Christ to guide you.

My convictions tell me that my recent 3.5 day experience in the aftermath of an ice storm served as a warning. It was designed to let me experience the kind of challenges I’m likely to face during a more serious tribulation time. I’ve made some miscalculations that were exposed by this challenge.

Some things should be obvious, simply because it’s so human. You are limited in the conveniences for personal sanitation. I typically do things daily that weren’t going to happen without electricity, because bathing and shaving with cold water is more work. The food you buy is based on the need to avoid cold storage, so that only the highest priority items get stuck in the ice chest. Some of this I learned quite well serving in the US Army in a specialty that was always out on bivouac. It’s not a bad way to learn such things.

But some challenges are purely contextual to your mission and calling. Whatever else, I still need to maintain a strong presence on the Internet. I discovered that a laptop is not the best way to do that around here. I’m going to have to change my thinking on the whole business of being online.

I’ll still keep my desktop, in part because I’m running network services on it for both my wife and I. And for serious writing, this machine remains the tool of choice. But for mobile computing, that laptop is the wrong tool. It got to be a real boondoggle during our time without electricity. So I’m going to switch over to a tablet with a keyboard. I can’t get away from needing a keyboard, but having a smaller machine with a different set of connectivity tools is simply necessary. Furthermore, it will be a tablet with a SIM card, because I need to use it in places where no wifi is available.

We also learned how cloud storage is essential. There were hiccups with one of our Win10 systems coming back online. We experienced one of those Windows updates that wiped all the personal files, reset all the configurations, and removed some installed software. Without the OneDrive backup, that would have been a total disaster. Now, I am pretty fastidious about backups on my own collection of files on physical media, but I can see how easily one could lose the use of such things, so I’ll be evaluating the ways I can keep things available both ways.

Granted, Android isn’t known for that kind of borking the way Windows updates do sometimes, but the point is some of my friends have asked me to keep my archives available, and I’m working on a plan to store that stuff online somewhere that’s accessible to all, maybe in more than one place. I’m trying to find the cheapest, yet most reliable, route. The question is complicated by the turmoil among the Big Tech operations.

Pray with us as we contemplate the necessary changes. I don’t mind the personal discomforts; my childhood was one long and continuous discomfort in that sense. But it gets really lonely when the few real friends I have are hard to reach, and the majority of them are accessible only through the Internet. I need you folks.