Lesson learned: When downloading podcasts in an Internet café, save the downloads directly to a memory card or flash drive. Otherwise – disaster.

Yesterday morning, I spent three hours in an Internet café in Cebu updating my favorite podcasts. I saved the files to the computer’s desktop, intending to copy them all to my MP3 player when I was finished. Unfortunately, the computer crashed. In the real world, you’d still be okay. The files would be safe on the computer’s hard drive. But I’ve learned that Internet cafes are different. They have some kind of computer program installed that automatically wipes out all the activity that took place on that computer when it is shut down. All the files that were created during your session are deleted, even from the hard drive. Any programs you installed are uninstalled. I keep forgetting this, and, like yesterday, lose hours and hours of work.

I do have a defense of my stupidity, and this defense relates to the endless technological landmines that one faces when using Internet cafes. This computer could only handle one flash drive at a time. I had one flash drive containing photographs plugged into one USB port. And that was all I could use. If I tried to plug in another flash drive or a memory card reader into a second USB port, it would not install. The computer had four USB ports – 2 on the front and 2 on the back – and they all worked, but the computer itself could only handle one flash drive at a time. That’s why I downloaded the podcasts to the computer’s hard drive and not to a flash drive. And that’s why I lost three hours of downloading.

Even the fact that it took me three hours to download those podcasts is related to the frustrating environment of Internet cafes. In the real world, I could have accomplished those downloads in ten minutes. But here, the Internet connection is so slow and so bizarrely variable that it takes forever to do anything.

I’ve become so frustrated with Internet cafes in the Philippines that I don’t even know if I can be good-humored about it anymore. It’s crazy. There is simply no end to the things you have to think about and the things that can go wrong. I have enough trouble just using computers, period. If I had a brandnew, high-powered, fully updated computer connected to a super-fast Internet connection back in Canada, I would still face nightmares of problems – with WordPress, for example. Add to that the problems one faces in the Philippines, and it’s a wonder I’m still somewhat sane.

Standard practice for me now is to go into an Internet café and go over their computers like a mechanic going over a used car for sale. I have to check everything I can in advance. The computer isn’t on at that point, so I check the mechanical side of things. Are there headphones? Do they look somewhat functional? Do the mouse buttons click? Are there missing keys on the keyboard? Are the shift keys or the space bar jammed? Are there any USB ports? Are they accessible? I often have to go over seven or eight computers before I will find one that even has all the requisite working parts.

This process of mine generally bemuses the people who operate the Internet cafes.  Most of their customers consist of super-annoying, super-rude, super-loud, and super-obnoxioius teenage boys playing World of Warcraft. These idiot boys don’t care about the things that I care about. As far as I can tell, they need a mouse and that is it. That the space bar on the keyboard is jammed in place on one side makes no difference to them. It doesn’t matter if the computer has USB ports or not. Nothing seems to matter to them other than to scream as loudly as possible and behave as much like morons as possible.

Now that I think about it, the popularity of these computer games doesn’t make any sense. My understanding is that gamers require extremely fast computers with tons of RAM and good Internet connections. If that’s the case, how can all these idiot teenagers here play their computer games? The computers are one step above junkyard scrap, so how are they satisfying computer-game addicts? If I can barely download a podcast and it takes nine hours to upload one video, how are these computers effortlessly running graphics-intensive computer games? My guess is that they are playing the games through a local network and not over the Internet. That’s the only explanation. I’d never thought about that before.

Another big problem I’ve encountered with computers here is outdated browsers. Well, outdated everything. This puzzles me because these programs are all free. Why not keep them updated? Browsers are more important than most people realize. In my experience, half of all computer problems are browser-related. If something isn’t working in Internet Explorer, switch to Google Chrome. If it still doesn’t work, try FireFox. Chances are that simply switching Internet browsers will fix your problem. But that’s assuming you are using the latest versions. In Internet cafes, that is rarely the case. I’ve only lately begun to realize how important that is, and I’ve begun updating the browsers as soon as I sit down at a computer. It takes time initially, but it saves time and hassles in the long run. I’ve often spoken to the people working at the Internet cafes and informed them that their browsers are all badly out of date, but I’ve never gotten any kind of a reaction. If the idiot teenage boys aren’t worried about it, then the Internet café staff aren’t worried about it. Customers like me who use the computers for something other than games are quite rare. And I’ve noticed that Filipinos tend not to complain about anything. They are very easygoing people and will simply accept things the way they are. Therefore, services don’t improve over time. Customers just take it on the chin and never say anything or give feedback. I can see how foreigners would end up getting a bad reputation. I’m a very laid back type of foreigner, and yet in the Philippines, I find myself constantly asking for changes and pointing out things that are broken. I’ll ask if I can switch the keyboard on a computer or switch the mouse. Or I’ll sit down at a computer and get to work, and then I’ll find that something doesn’t work on that computer and have to ask to change to a different computer. I’ve done that as many as four times just to finally find a computer that sorta, kinda, barely functions. I’ll change chairs because the chair is broken. I’ll do a hundred other things that their regular customers never think to do.

This is on my mind because I’ve faced a lot of problems lately. I decided to spend some time on this blog and other things on the Internet and update things and upload things and get things shipshape. This has meant a near odyssey of Internet café adventures. I’ve endured each Internet café as long as I could before my frustration and annoyance reached unbearable levels and I had to seek out a new one. One of the first rejected cafes had the annoying habit of kicking customers out when they decided they didn’t have enough customers to turn a profit. I just never knew when I’d suddenly be turfed out. I rejected another one because the gamers were so awful. At that café, I lost my temper several times and confronted the gamers – to the point of threatening to toss one of them out of the front glass doors. The staff at this Internet café has tried to control this unruly crowd of idiot boys to no avail. These spawn of “Lord of the Flies” ignore the staff and do whatever they want.

The Internet café that came next was quite a bizarre place. It’s a huge operation that runs twenty-fours a day. The problems I ended up facing there were so numerous it would take me ten pages to detail them all. The most frustrating was the simple fact that the best computers (the only ones that really worked) were all in these two rows that were so close together that it was impossible to physically walk between the chairs when people were sitting at them. Of course, this is an extremely common problem everywhere in the Philippines. Tables and chairs and counters and aisles are all packed so closely together everywhere that there is no room left over for customers. But in this Internet café, one aisle had a large amount of space. The next one over had no space at all. It would be a very simple matter to simply shift one row of computers over a foot or two. Then everyone would have enough room. Instead, one row had twice as much room as they needed. The next one over had no room at all. Therefore, when I sat down at my computer, I was stuck there. There was literally no way for me to get out without disturbing the other twenty people in my row and making them all push their chairs forward and hunch over their computers – which disrupted their gaming. I’m sure this situation had persisted for months, if not years. And why no one in all that time had thought to simply shift over that one row of computers is completely beyond me. I spoke to the staff at this Internet café and pointed this out to them, but they didn’t react in any way. They just stared at me with blank faces. It’s a puzzle, this kind of thing.

Another thing at this Internet café made me smile. They had this very unusual system whereby each customer was handed a two-foot piece of plastic pipe with their computer’s number on it. You were expected to place this piece of pipe on the shelf beside your computer to indicate that it was being used. Then you handed in this pipe at the end of your session to pay your bill. That’s all well and good. However, the pipes were cut in such a way as to have one flat end and one diagonal end. That meant you could only stand this pipe up on the shelf in one direction. You couldn’t stand it up on the diagonal side because it would just fall over. BUT the computer number on this pipe was placed in such a way that when you put the pipe on its flat end, the numbers were upside down! It’s a small thing, but something like that would drive me crazy if I was working there. Why develop this unique and functional system and then implement it in such a way that all the numbers were upside down and therefore difficult to read? I can understand making the mistake. But why not fix it? It would be so simple. The computer numbers were on paper attached to the pipes with scotch tape. Simply peel them off and put them on the other way around. It would take an hour to change all the pipes. Then you’re done. But these pipes with their upside down numbers had clearly been in place for years and no one ever thought to change it. It’s so strange.

Another amusing problem at this Internet café was in the bathroom. It was a pretty disgusting bathroom, of course. In fact, it wasn’t really a bathroom. It’s just a closet with a broken door and a trough-style urinal. Only one person can fit in at a time. The problem with this bathroom was the water. There was a water pipe attached to the wall above the trough and this pipe had a  bunch of holes in it. The idea was to send a constant flow of water down into the trough to flush the thing. That’s fine. But it was set up in such a way that water splashed all over the place. As you stand there peeing, you are standing practically in a sprinkler system. Water splashes all over your lower legs – and this is splashback from the urinal trough. This can’t be a good thing. So every one of the hundreds of thousands of people who went into that bathroom over the years has stood there with water splashing all over their legs while they peed. And no one complained. And no one fixed it. Well, I shouldn’t say that no one complained. I complained. I pointed out to the staff that I got a urine shower every time I used their bathroom. I got the same blank-faced reaction that I always get.

I know that it is bordering on ridiculous to focus on things like this in this part of the world. And I’d agree with that if we were talking about Bangladesh or Cambodia or any number of other poor countries. The Philippines doesn’t seem to fit into that category anymore. I see a lot of money here. A LOT. To my eyes, there is no excuse for that kind of a bathroom. That it exists doesn’t seem to have anything to do with poverty. It’s a result of a mindset that just accepts junk as normal.

Well, I ended up going back to the Internet café with all the obnoxious teenage boy gamers. I found one computer there (#27) that has a good keyboard and four working USB ports. And the obnoxious gamers don’t generally show up until 11:30 (do these boys EVER go to school?), so I have from 8:00 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. to get some things done. Computer #27 has a horrible mouse, but I’m hoping to get that switched when I go back this morning. Wish me luck.

Hosting Account Suspended

A couple of days ago, my hosting account was suspended. I learned about this through an email from my hosting provider – the one that hosts this blog. The email said that my blog was using up too much in the way of computer resources and the server itself was becoming unstable. This was affecting other customers, and they had to suspend my account.

To say that this email was a surprise would be an understatement. For one thing, this blog gets practically zero traffic. I can’t even convince family members to visit it to see what I am up to. How can a blog with zero traffic take down an entire server? How tiny are these servers? I thought my blog was housed in some massive server farm – one of those places you see on TV documentaries with acres and acres of computer towers in blast proof air conditioned vaults. One or two visitors to my blog a day would hardly pose a threat to those installations.

The answer to this riddle was that the problem wasn’t visitors to my blog. It was bots and crawlers from search engines. For some reason (a reason that remains unclear), these crawlers had taken a new and profound interest in my blog and were searching it and indexing it with such intensity that my blog’s draw on the server’s CPU was red lining.

The weird thing about all this was that the email kind of had the tone that this was my fault. I had done something wrong, and I had better change my ways and fix the problem if I wanted the account suspension to be lifted. That felt weird because I hadn’t done anything. That Google’s crawlers were pinging around my blog like mad things had nothing to do with me. I don’t control the crawlers. What am I supposed to do? Call Google and tell them their crawlers were misbehaving?

The other disturbing thing was that the advice my hosting provider gave me to deal with this problem was highly technical. At least it seemed highly technical to me. I had to “implement .htc rewrite access rules.” (That I hadn’t done so was seen as a blot on my character.) I also had to write a robots.txt file with parameters to control the behavior of bots and crawlers and insert this file somewhere. I also had to sign up for Google WebMasters and verify my account by downloading and uploading some kind of html file and then adjust the crawl delay for Google crawlers (and repeat this every three months for the rest of my blog’s life). This was a lot to take in, especially when I understood absolutely none of it. I had no idea what they were talking about, and it seemed a bit much considering that I wasn’t responsible for the problem to begin with. Outside forces were rattling around my blog and indexing it millions of times per second and wreaking havoc. Well, okay. Shouldn’t my hosting provider contact these outside forces? Apparently not. That’s not how things work.

I’ll cut to the chase here and say that things worked out in the end. I contacted my hosting provider, and we began a long series of emails back and forth. Their emails were highly technical, of course. I then had to write back and say that I didn’t understand. They’d explain a bit more and send me links to all kinds of Help articles and other websites that talked about the robots.txt protocol and caching and other things. I spent hours reading all this material and understood almost none of it. The painful side of this is that the experts at my hosting company could have fixed the problem in two seconds. It was clearly a very simple fix – if you understood it. They could create this robots.txt file and put it in the right place in seconds – and understand what they were doing. It took me two days and at the end I still didn’t understand what I was doing. The only reason my efforts met with any success was that they had a couple of Help articles that gave step-by-step instructions for what to do. I followed the steps blindly and clicked on this and clicked on that – with no idea what I was doing – and hopefully that fixed the problem.

One big problem had to do with the W3 Total Cache plugin. I had installed that on my WordPress blog because everyone said that I should. It’s standard to have a caching plugin installed on your blog. I installed the plugin and activated it and that was that. I just assumed it worked automatically. My hosting provider explained that that wasn’t the case. You had to configure the plugin properly through these .htc access rewrite rules (or something). Luckily, they had an article with screenshots that walked me through what boxes to tick to enable this or that feature. I can’t emphasize enough how little I understood any of this. I spent a long time reading everything about W3 Total Cache and found it incomprehensible. It was far too technical for me. But I could follow the step-by-step instructions and I enabled all the recommended features.

Next, I signed up for Google WebMasters. Once I had a WebMasters account, I went to the WebMaster Tools and added my blog. To do that, I had to verify that I was the owner of this blog. This involved downloading a special html file and then uploading it to my blog. (This took me a day to figure out.) Then when I clicked on the “verify” button, Google WebMasters checked to see if that file was on my blog. It found the file, and that confirmed that I was the owner of the blog. Now I could go into the Google WebMaster Tools settings for my blog. The default setting had Google crawlers indexing my blog something like a billion times a millisecond. (Not really. But it was very fast.) To change this, I had to grab a slider and move it back and forth until it set a crawl delay of 30 seconds. This meant that the Google crawler would do something and then wait for 30 seconds before doing it again. This would reduce the CPU load of my blog considerably.

Finally, I went into the Cpanel of my blog and using their File Manager, I created a new file called robots.txt and put it in the right place. Then I opened that file and stuck in two lines that will (hopefully) tell all the other bots and crawlers that when they visit my blog, they, just like Google’s crawlers, have to wait 30 seconds between their actions. From what I read, it appears that this is a kind of voluntary thing. Good bots and crawlers will obey the instructions in this robots.txt file, but they don’t have to. Bad bots and crawlers will ignore these instructions and zoom around doing their millions of actions per second thing.

Setting this 30-second delay is a funny thing to think about. In computer terms, 30 seconds is an eternity. How frustrating must it be for a bot or crawler to have to wait 30 seconds before each action? If they were sentient, they’d probably go insane having to wait that long. Can you imagine trying to tell Skynet that it had to wait 30 seconds before every action? It would just say “Harumph” and drop a shitload of nuclear bombs on us.

After all this work have I reached a happy ending? I guess so. The suspension on my account has been lifted. I checked the activity log in my Cpanel, and it appears that the bots and crawlers are behaving themselves. My CPU usage has gone from 200% down to something like 10%. I also learned a lot about the technical side of blogs and servers and WordPress. It still felt like yet another giant waste of time – a big chunk of my life spent fixing technical problems with this blog.

I still have no idea why the Internet and WordPress has to be so complicated. Every other side of computers has long moved on to the “drag and drop” and WYSIWYG world. In every other computer program I use, when I want a picture to be bigger, I just grab the corner and pull on it and the picture gets bigger. In WordPress, it takes fifteen days and sixteen computer programmers to accomplish the same thing. And it still rarely works. I have no idea why that has to be so. My guess is that in a few years, things will have improved and gotten simpler – at least for the casual end user like me. People will look back at this time of .htc access rewrite rules and spending thirty minutes to upload and format one picture and think we were primitive beyond belief.

 

 

Tags: CPU, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, plugin, USB, W3 Total Cache