Day #83 - 6/4/2011 - a final day in Glencoe

An unusual form of disaster struck last night.  I still can't believe it.


I had been down in the basement, working on a blog post on my netbook.  The netbook  had survived 2+ months of travel, much of it in a pannier, several times falling to the ground within a tumbling bicycle.  I left the netbook open on the sofa where I had been typing.  At this one moment, Bill and I were standing next to the sofa.  Bill reached up to a shelf to retrieve something and a small object fell from the shelf onto the netbook.  The netbook promptly blue-screened.  


And that was it.  3000+ high-resolution digital images - and a handful of high-def video clips - from the Great Bike Trip: gone.  I had been shooting medium resolution JPGs and high-resolution Canon RAW files and moving them all regularly to the netbook.  At the same time, I was backing everything up to Google's Picasaweb.


But, it turns out that Picasa was converting the hi-resolution RAW files (18 megapixel) to medium-resolution JPGs.  The hi-resolution images were gone.


There are specialized companies that deal with data recovery from damaged drives, but their services are expensive.  It would have to wait until I returned to Florida.


Oh well...could be worse.

We went out for dinner - again - meeting Howie Parnes, another  classmate from medical school.  Howie, who I had not seen since medical school was the chief of the Prostate and Urologic Cancer Research Group at the NIH.  He was in Chicago for a meeting.
 

Tomorrow: to Boston to catch up with my wife and son and to find an apartment for Lani.