Digital world

I entered the digital age back in 1985 or ’86, as I recall.  Up until that time, any correspondence I produced was on a typewriter and all photography was shot on film.  I even built black & white darkrooms in most houses I’ve owned and must humbly admit, some prints I souped back then still look pretty good.  My music, of course, was still on phonograph records, though Wikipedia tells me music on compact discs was available as early as 1982.   

I wouldn’t call myself a luddite, but I don’t embrace new technology all that quickly.  Truth is I’ve never had lots of money, and new technology, at least at its inception, is almost always pricy.  As mentioned on these pages previously, when I finished my masters degree in the mid-80s, I treated myself to a new electric typewriter when I could have bought myself an up-and-coming computer.   

Oh, but how things are different now.  The vinyl record collection still exists, but it is relegated to the furnace room stacked in boxes and selected few albums are played only on special occasions.  Music these days is all on my computer.   I still like to buy physical CDs for the liner notes, but most of my new music purchases are through iTunes or Amazon music. 

Photography, likewise, has gone completely digital for me.  The darkroom is now the train room on the lower level of the house, and I’ve done what I can to scan slides and negatives from the old days into usable digital images.  When I retired almost ten years ago, I made a big investment for a Nikon scanner thinking I could translate all of my best analog stuff into digital.  Unfortunately, such hasn’t worked out as well as I had hoped.  

The printed word was the first to go digital for me.  Good old AppleWorks was packaged on that first Apple IIe we bought for the kids, and boy did I enjoy learning how that program could allow me to create lovely classroom documents without having to fix things with WhiteOut.  Those were the days! 

But things have gotten much more complicated these days and I’m not happy about it.  

Steve Jobs professed years ago how the desktop computer would become the digital entertainment hub in every home.  Music, photography, data -- even movies -- would be accessible there for the whole family’s use. 

I’m here to tell you that day has come at our house.  Most times that’s just fine, but lately it has caused quite a headache.  

As all faithful readers of The Back Porch know, I’m a Mac guy.  Always have been.  Never regretted it.  Back last winter, though, I decided it was time to increase the size of my iMac’s hard drive, giving it more room to do what it needed to do.  My computer was about three years old and needed the upgrade.  

To make a long story short, the new, bigger drive failed within five months of installation.  All data was lost.  But never fear:  I had Time Machine on my system and all data was backed-up.  

Or so I thought.  

Through a comedy of errors, the new hard drive installed on my system was not loaded properly by the local technician.  While my data appears to be okay, the applications I rely on (word processing, photography, printing, and tons of others) appear to be lost.  It would seem applications don’t get backed up on the back-up drive.  All I can say is Why not?  

I write this today on my laptop computer because my desktop machine doesn’t know how to open word documents.  It doesn’t know what to do with most of my data, unfortunately, and I fret over what important stuff I rely on in my life that may be lost forever.  

I’ve been here before and it isn’t very comfortable.  In the past, I could berate myself for not backing up my data.  But I learned my lesson and do, in fact, back everything up both at home and at an on-line service.  

But I’m still not whole after a month of trying to fix things and I am not a happy camper.  

If I could, I’d drop the whole digital world thing and do my tasks another way.  But that would make me feel like I was a real luddite and to be honest, when things work, digital stuff is a whole lot of fun.  And darned useful. 

So I feel pretty stuck and cranky today.  Sure, I have my laptop to keep me going, but all of my original photos, poems, essays, and most of my blogs are locked inside the iMac on my desk and are inaccessible.  I head down to the Apple Store in Cincinnati tomorrow morning to see if some Genius there can fix me.  

But in the meantime, I wonder what I have lost by depending on electronics so much.  Right now it feels like I’ve suffered through a house fire where most of my important possessions have been lost.  

It doesn’t feel very comfortable from where I sit on the back porch today, I can assure you.

How’s the digital world working for you?  

Today’s elder idea:  Logic is an organized procedure for going wrong with confidence and certainty.

Charles F. Kettering