Location: Old Faithful parking lot
Miles: 6117.6
I’m loading the first 101 pictures off John’s camera; we’ll see how they look. Don’t worry, you won’t have to look at them all. If the tiny little thumbnails are to believed, some of the pictures will not suck. I got here early this morning, but not as early as I would have liked. Getting up at six this morning was as uncivilized as I could force myself to be, though.
It’s hailing right now, but it’s mild compared to my Canadian adventure. With new tires and new wipers, the rain is no longer my enemy.
Oh. Balls.
The pictures are gone. All of them, without a trace. It went through and and said it was importing them, but there is simply nothing there. It even showed the little thumbnails as it went, so I know it was reading the files. But now they are quite simply not there. It looks like today is a practice run, because I was really digging the early-morning light and the way the cold air enhanced the steam from the fumaroles.
Balls, balls, balls.
I am reminded of one of Gerald’s great techno-geek moments. We’d just acquired a new computer, and we’d saved everything from the previous computer on ZIPs. When I transferred my stuff off of the ZIPs, I copied them. But when Gerald transferred his stuff and Pat’s stuff and most of the joint stuff, he found a way to do it all using the mouse, and he didn’t copy, he moved. I told him he would be better off copying than moving, because it would mean there was a backup. But he liked moving better: It made a way cool display on the screen.
The problem arose a few months later, with a convergence of circumstances. First, while I was up at Five O’Clock Somewhere, Pat didn’t keep the anti-virus software in Albuquerque updated, so that computer got hit by one. Then, when I got back to Albuquerque to try to remedy the situation, it was at the point where a system reconstruction was the only way to fix things. I tried a non-destructive reconstruction, and ended up in an infinite loop. I ended up having to wipe the entire hard drive clean. All the while, I was generating error reports to Microsoft.
The day after I had to lose all of my data, I got a thank-you for the error messages. The day after that, I got a message, sent out to all Compaq owners, that there was an inconsistency with the Compaq operating system that would cause a non-destructive reconstruction to fail, and that I should immediately download the patch.
But in the meantime, I’d lost a lot of data. Those files from the ZIPs that had simply been copied were still available so I could restore what had been lost. The files that had been moved were totally gone — even a deleted-file-retrieval program couldn’t get them back.
So part of the question is, did your picture-retrieval software automatically delete pictures from the camera as they were downloaded? And if it did, is there some way to keep it from doing so in the future?
That’s what you get for “using” John’s camera. You should have just sent it out in the car, and let it download the photos itself, or with the help of the remote. It was yer organic interface that ruined the whole thing.