Vacations: Beauty and Fault Tolerance

Well, I'm back from the first major trip of my Sabbatical and it was amazing. The first outside the US trip in probably a decade was a guided tour of the world of Norway, with a focus on railroad trips through the country. So I'll talk about it for a bit, then about how I almost locked myself out of my phone and the ole' Internet :-)

I have never been to a Scandinavian country and before a couple of years ago never really thought much about it. Then I learned about what they call "Slow TV" which are relaxing and interesting shows they put on their local television. One in particular caught my eye, it was a simple camera eye view of a train run from Bergen (a city on the west of Norway) all the way to Oslo (on the eastern end). It was beautiful, just 7 or so hours of watching the scenery go by. And I thought (in 2012) that this was a thing I wanted to do. Some nights I would just fall asleep to the video, then wake up at particular "stations" along the route....

Finally got to do it. We flew from JFK to Reykjavík, then on to Oslo. And it was *beautiful*. Oslo is amazing, I did a lot of walking and checking out museums and the opera house, and even saw a ballet (Onigen).

Then off to Bergen where I did a lot of walking....Here I enjoyed an excellent meal at a local restaurant recommended by a friend (thank you Steve!)

A trip through the Fjords on a ferry to Flam (note: The ferries there cruise at 30 knots, which is about 40 mph. It's.... fast.

Yes, it was moving fast, And the fjords are beautiful. And I understand why most of the men there have short haircuts :-)

Then it was off to Voss (fun place to rent a bike and get lost in the mountains)

Before returning to Oslo and taking a bus down to Dr?bak to see Oscarsborg fortress (the place where the guns above sank the German battleship Blucher).

Note to the world: Do not sail your warship past a fortified position. People keep forgetting this, and the consequences are.... bad.

I guess people learn eventually.

But this is not just a post about the amazing scenery, it's a story of fault tolerance.

For this vacation I did something different: Normally I would bring a (granted light) Thinkpad Carbon laptop to write on and keep in touch with the office if needed. Sure it's small and such but I figured I should try to be as lightweight as possible and decided to do the trip with only my phone (Pixel 3). Now this was a change in a number of ways, including if I lost my phone I would be in trouble since this is a digital world and most things are now done on the Internets. So as a backup I brought an old Galaxy 6 tablet just in case...

Turns out I needed it. One morning I woke up, wanted to turn off the "turn on if you see a person's face" option on my phone and had to go into security center. It prompted me for my unlock code, I entered it, and it didn't work. "Odd" I thought as I put it down, then I got up and tried unlocking the phone to use it. No dice, it was locked.

This was bad, and I spent the next half hour trying to get it to unlock. Would not do it. I knew the codes, yet it refused to unlock and started doing the "wait 30 seconds" to retry. I disabled remote unlock and other methods when I got it (security person I am) so I was pretty much stuck.

Time to go to the backup system. The Galaxy did work fine (different codes) and apart from Slack (which only runs on the latest Android OSes) I was able to get into email and Discord and all that stuff. It would be difficult, but I could just go out and get another phone, re-sign into Google (which would not be possible as my MFA tokens were on the locked device but the older Galaxy could function as a second token in a pinch) and at least get myself going. Big loss would be all the pictures I had taken (I don't sync to the cloud, security reasons).

So that evening, after a day of walking around and enjoying Bergen I went back to the room, picked up the device, and without thinking about it (I was looking at artwork on the wall) keyed in my codes. And the phone unlocked.

My attention snapped back immediately and I realized I had entered a different code than the one I "knew" worked. I immediately wrote down that code on a slip of paper, then realized I could now unlock again without a problem. What the heck happened?

Well, when I was sleepy and was prompted by the step up security on the phone my mind went back to an older code I used to use. And that code got put into my main memory as "way to unlock the phone". It was wrong but my mind refreshed the value and the proper way to unlock my phone was lost.

However, when I entered the code without "thinking" in the evening my muscle memory still had the proper code loaded in it. So I was able to load the "wrong" code in which of course was the "right" one. And (after eating the slip of paper that held the code, security and all...) I was now able to put that element back into my working memory instead of the "wrong" answer.

I think this has applications in real life: We try to change things about ourselves, then after awhile find ourselves reverting to our old patterns again. It might help to know that one's "memory" is actually a highly integrated fault tolerant system that includes not only what we call our "mind" but also our habits and history. Changing these elements can be difficult and if we find ourselves backsliding in behaviors or methods it might not be that we "forgot" the new way to do things but that our mind still has areas of fault tolerance that take longer to correct.

In this case though, that "fault tolerance" saved a lot of stress on my vacation. I wonder how it impacts other areas of my life...