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By
Pawl English
Have you ever been given good advice and
simply ignored it? Well I suggest that you don’t make
the same mistake as I did and ignore this.
Being an enthusiastic amateur photographer,
I recently purchased a Sony Cybershot digital camera. It
was bought principally for use during a five-week trip to
my homeland of England, with side excursions to Hong Kong
and Thailand. My reason for going to Hong Kong was specifically
to take photographs for my photographic website www.randomizedimages.com.
I needed desperatly to invigorate my site. At this point
I had been living in Taiwan for about 18 months and craved
variety.
I arrived in Hong Kong first. It was a
photographer’s dream, complete with towering skyscrapers
and exotic streets saturated with life and color. I scoured
the streets, explored all the nooks and crannies, and spent
hours taking multitudes of pictures. My favorite find (having
a propensity for the gothic), was two sprawling graveyards:
one Catholic and one Christian. The Christian graveyard
was dark, wintry and vine covered. The Catholic graveyard
however surpassed this; it had the same dark charm but was
ostentatiously lit-up with Catholic displays of ornamentation,
angels, cherubs, and depictions of Christ and Mary.
I returned to my room and uploaded my
photographs onto the computer. One picture, a sculpture
of Mary Magdalene carrying Christ’s cross, was incredible.
It’s difficult to explain why this picture pleased
me so and for reasons about to be explained, I am not in
a position to show you.
Then I moved on to England. I was on the
train to Cornwall, the beautiful county on the southwestern
tip of England, to visit a friend when the first disaster
struck. I was on a spacious comfortable train, which had
a power outlet that enabled me to do some much needed work
on my site. Incidentally, I hadn’t been able to upload
any pictures yet as my friends that I had stayed with were
either not online or were connected with archaic dial-up
modems. As I arrived in the port town of St. Austell I became
alarmed. My computer would not shutdown. Having to disembark
quickly I pulled out the power cord…
I now recalled that piece of advice given
to me in earnest by a distraught friend:
”Back up your files!”
My computer never fully worked again.
A computer engineer in Cornwall informed me that I had lost
all of my files that were not backed up. My mind reeled
as I realized that the thousands of pictures I had just
taken had gone into the nether—not to mention the
new website I was working on, and other files and artwork.
But then, later, the guy called me and
told me, “I’ve saved your files.” I replied
“I love you.” And I did. So, of course, after
this harsh warning I backed up my files.
Well…actually I didn’t.
Due to the damage to my computer and my
transient state I had no opportunity to back them up. My
CD burner had quit from the breakdown and, having no connection,
I was unable to upload anything to the internet. As it turned
out, the computer-tech saying my computer was fixed had
been a misnomer. My computer had become extremely unstable.
Thailand was divine. Many more photographs
were taken. My computer held out.
I returned to Taiwan living out of a suitcase.
Still, I had no Internet, so I backed up my files religiously
on my external hard drive. I felt almost secure, but my
friend’s advice continued to haunt me. I really wanted
to put the files on CD.
Then unbelievable simultaneous bolts of
misfortune stuck. I was trying to clean up my internal and
external hard drives. I got the bright idea of erasing my
internal hard drive by rebooting my computer. The seemingly
logical idea of relying upon my external hard drive to keep
my files while I completed the two-hour task was my undoing.
It crashed of its own accord just after I wiped the files
from my internal system. |
