The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
April 8, 2008
IF IT WASN'T FOR DUMB LUCK...
If you missed it, the first annual Community Clean Up Day was Saturday, March 29th. I attended to take photos for the paper and offered to document the event for the organizers, which sent me all over town following various volunteer crews as they scoured the ditches, roads and streets for trash.
Although it was primarily meant as a cleaning up of Princeton, I noticed right away a number of Area H residents who were involved. I made a mental note of that and after spending three hours snapping photos I went to the office to download the 100+ photos I had taken.
Then it happened.
The camera program said there were only 30 photos on the memory card. I knew there were far more than that as I had previewed some of them before I took the last set of 30. I wondered if all the talk of trash on Community Clean Up Day prompted my camera to trash those very photos.
Slowly frustration set in. Followed by disbelief. Then a little anger, quickly replaced by frustration again.
I repeated the download process and the program reminded me there were no photos on the memory card. I tried a downtown card reader and got the same result.
Frustration was replaced by defeat.
Although last week's paper only contained a few of the photos taken at the end of Community Clean Up Day I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that those other photos were still living on the memory card, but hiding somewhere.
I'm not sure why, but I went onto the website of the manufacturer of the memory card thinking maybe there was some magic code or password or prayer or sequence I could access with all those fancy buttons on my camera to make the photos reappear.
Then I found it! A downloadable program designed to recover missing, deleted and damaged images from a memory card. I could not believe it. I had never heard of such a thing and the first time I've encountered such a glitch I stumble onto the solution.
Or so I thought, until I started reading the disclaimer which I did only after paying for the product with my credit card. Here's a helpful hint: Do not read the disclaimer, regardless of what it's for. Chances are whatever you hope the product will do for you will be listed as not possible in the disclaimer, or possible only with some sort of risk attached to it.
Call it dumb luck if you will, but the product worked so well it pulled up the last 400 photos on my memory card! Three hundred of which I know I deleted. This magic program did the impossible.
Just like the 100 people between the ages of 8 and 80 who cleaned up the streets, ditches and sidewalks of Princeton March 29th. And now I have the photos to prove it.
