Nuking Problems
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:51:53 GMT
There are really three ways to deal with a problem:
- Address the problem with careful action, possibly creating an institution in the process. This is called “dealing.”
- Ignore the problem, allowing it to annoy you and consume your time, essentially, permitting it to rule certain corners of your time. Weenies often call this “coping.”
- Nuke the problem by making it go away completely. This has no other euphemism, because nobody knows how to address problems apart from action or management.
This month, I have dealt with two problems.
The first was backups. I created an institution to handle the problem: I bought an external hard drive, learned all of the different backup strategies, did various benchmarks. Every week I’ll plug the external hard drive in and run Disk Utility, creating an image from Macintosh HD, in a folder with the appropriate date in the Backup folder on the external disk. When I run out of space, I’ll delete the oldest one. Done and done.
This is my backup institution. It consumed about 10 hours to set up and it will consume about 10 minutes per week for the rest of time. (Of course, the backup itself takes longer, but I can sleep while it does that.)
The second one was spam. I should just be using Spamfire, but the IMAP code never became stable enough for me and I wanted a server-side solution. CRM114 isn’t as good (in my opinion) and it certainly has taken longer to train, but now I have completely server-side spam filtration under my complete control. It’s quite nice, mostly because it’s solved now and I no longer have to tolerate Apple Mail’s worse-than-guessing spam filter. In fact, I have told it to consider the CRM114 header a necessary condition to marking anything as “Junk,” so all it actually does now is put a brown label on the message and not load remote images. Solved.
Now, I have not nuked any of these problems.
To nuke a problem is to make the problem vanish altogether. One of Michael’s friends nuked the problem of deciding what to wear and fashion by deciding to wear nothing but grey sweatpants and sweatshirts. That takes some balls. That’s deinstitutionalization with a vengeance.
I’d like to know how exactly one goes about nuking problems like backup and spam. Probably by deciding not to have any meaningful data. Or carry everything around on USB drives. Use paper mail?
There’s the buddhist approach. Lots of users, Windows and Mac, nuke the backup problem by accepting that every few years they are going to be sent back to the data stone age. All my work? Gone. Everything I’ve ever done on a computer? Gone. And I’m OK with that.
A surprising number of businesses take that approach. But it’s appallingly common among personal users.
It’s similar to the way St. Therese nuked the tuberculosis problem: by dying.