Bow Down before iGod - The God of Technology

How heavily we do we rely on technology?

People always ask this question and everyone shakes their heads, waves their ipods and blackberries in the air and says "A whole lot". But, do we really appreciate the extent to which our lives are tech dependent?

Well last night about midnight, I got my techno-nightmare wake up call. For no reason that I can figure out my computer decided to eat itself. Yep, one minute I was sitting there reading an on line forum, next minute, not a damn thing, My computer had reset itself to the day I bought it in 2002. Every file was gone and my email was not set up. Now contrary to popular belief, I am not terribly skilled when it comes to doing things on a computer other than writing. So needless to say, I pretty much shit myself.

Doing what I do, means that at any given time there are a number of scripts in assorted states of completion as well as project budgets, contact lists and other assorted bits of information that being a filmmaker requires I have at my finger tips. It was all gone and from where I was sitting, it was never coming back.

At the behest of my wife who is a computer programmer, I did back up all of my work files onto disks at the end of January. However the most recent work I did this past weekend (the re-write on our current project) was gone with the wind as it were.

So after not sleeping a whole hell of a lot last night I got in touch with my partner “P” who is a computer guy (more importantly a Mac guy) and together with his buddy who is a Mac specialist, we managed to find the files my computer choose to move somewhere else and avoid the aneurism that was fast approaching. So now I have backed up EVERYTHING on to seperate discs.

I believe this was the warning shot across the bow telling me my overworked and abused iBook is not long for this world. Next time it gets personal . So I am planning on purchasing a new PowerBook in the next day or so.

This whole thing got me thinking. Before our lives were tied to computers and electronics by this all powerful wireless umbilical cord what did we do? Well I have a vague recollection of carrying a notebook with me everywhere. Dating and writing things down that I might need to know later and then storing away those notebooks when they got full. Of course the danger there was that if you lost the notebook all that info was gone. That is what made the computer so appealing. All that info was always in the computer. UNLESS IT GOES AWAY ….

I don’t know if I have a point. I do know that I am going to spend more time backing up my electronic life from now on.

Maybe even buy a new notebook …
A spiral bound one.