Argh!

My absence of late has not been due to my desire to lose all my readers to blogs that post more frequently. I know you're surprised, but I've just been busy. After coming home from work, eating dinner and watching an old Babylon 5 episode with my parents, I'm often ready for bed.
At least, I'm not ready to think in coherent sentences. Perhaps coherent and tangential are orthogonal notions, but getting proper sleep reduces the amount of drool between the keys.

Before I relate all my wonderful adventures, I must provide you with another installment of image storage angst. Last night, I attempted to copy about a month's (since my last blog post) worth of pictures directly from my Canon SD500 camera to the laptop, using the USB cable. This had worked fine on my laptop at work. It didn't, however, seem to be working this time. I then moved the Sandisk 1 gig SD card to the little USB SD card/compact flash/other stuff drive that I've been using for years. It couldn't read the images. I put the card back in camera and it displayed a "Memory Card Error" message. Naturally, if you've read my previous post, I was thrilled. I tried four, yes four, different software data recovery tools and was not able to recover anything. I tried F-Recovery for SD, PhotoOne Recovery, RescuePRO Demo and PC Inspector Smart Recovery. I liked PC Inspector Smart Recovery best, but that's largely because it's fully functional freeware, rather than a trial version. Of course, I have no idea how these things work when they actually find something on the card. The plus side of this is that I have a whole bunch of floppies that have images from my old Sony Mavica camera and now I should have something to help me with the disks that can no longer be read.

One very important thing to note is that I did not have the drivers installed on the laptop for connecting the camera directly. The camera box actually warns against connecting it without the drivers. That didn't appear to be a problem at all on my work laptop, but perhaps it installed a different driver. In any case, should that have corrupted by entire SD card? Is there something wrong with my SD card? Is there something wrong with my camera? I really don't know, but it's very disturbing. I'd very much like to have done something wrong, because I don't want to send these things back. I wrote to Canon Support and hopefully they will provide me with an unbiased opinion of what's really to blame, based on my description.

At least I can still rely on my trusty .3 megapixel camera in my Treo 650, which I've only had to replace once. It really does handle low light conditions better than anything else.

In any case, I won't be able to share my Halloween pictures or some of the gorgeous fall color photos taken around my house, because they appear to be gone forever. I took some good pictures of FIFO last weekend, but he should be willing to pose again.