Last week, I spent a few days in Western Colorado for training. While we were there, we had a chance to go look around the area (we were in Grand Junction). We took a short ride to the Colorado National Monument park. If you've never been, you need to go at some point in your life–the views were spectacular. I took pictures–lots of them. Here's where the technology comes into the story…
Once home, I dutifully extracted the SD card from my little point and shoot and plugged it into the USB card reader we used to have (more on that later). The drive icon popped up, I opened the drive, opened the folder, and the file thumbnails loaded. When I tried to transfer them from the card to the hard drive, the dreaded dialogue box "THIS CARD IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THIS COMPUTER" pops up, with another dialogue box with the option to eject the drive (the flash memory). So, I select the eject button, the icon disappears, and the light on the reader goes out. We've had this issue before–simply reinsert the SD card into the drive, then reinsert the reader into the USB port and all is well. Not this time–I knew something was up when the icon was called "UNTITLED" rather than "NO NAME". I opened the drive, and the filenames were random characters. What's worse is that the filename extensions were also nonsensical. Rut-roh…
For grins, I ejected the drive once more and installed the SD card into the camera, went to the playback mode, and got the following message: "NO READABLE FILES". I took a quick snap of the little cat, who had decided to help me. Went through the whole "insert into reader, insert reader, open file" deal, and along with the scrambled filenames, I got the usual folders associated with the camera.
In the end, of 111 photos of Colorado's splendor, I managed to save 11. I still have to run them through Seashore, but I'm beside myself that the bulk of them are gone, 1's and 0's which just vanished into thin air. I don't often get very mad–I'm too old for that anymore–but I took the troublesome reader and smashed it. I couldn't find a hammer, so I used a pipe wrench…
I didn't do the same to the SD card, mainly in hopes that I can still salvage something. So, tomorrow I'm off to get a more reliable reader. Which is good, because this weeked saw the 25th Annual Atlanta Airliners Collectibles show–this year it was again held in the Delta Heritage Museum at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Staying at the Renaissance has the added benefit of being able to sit on the balcony of the room and do some plane spotting. While the spate of mergers and bankruptcies has really cut down on the variety at the airport, there were still some interesting arrivals and departures that I managed to photograph.
So, once I have my tech glitches rectified, I'll have photos to share–I hope to have them up by the end of the week. Stay tuned…
Until then, be good to one another, and I bid you Peace.