My Internet library burned down two weeks ago and I didn’t even know it until this morning. I’ve been compiling it since Google Chrome was invented. I didn’t realize until this morning that I deleted all the bookmarks I’ve ever been compiling on Chrome.
That means basically, all my research references are gone for any endeavor I’ve had since about 2006. A search to retrieve Chrome bookmarks shows me the best there is is an undo workaround for a single browser session … http://www.howtogeek.com/111784/how-to-recover-accidentally-deleted-bookmarks-in-chrome-firefox/ .
As as heads up, the way this occurred is that I was logged in as my wife (I thought) when trying to set up her computer. She complained that she didn’t need all those bookmarks. Thinking that since I was logged in as her and that Google had just duplicated my bookmarks when it created her account, I started deleting all the stuff that was mine that she wouldn’t care about. Basically, I had it all in one folder that was hierarchical and there were a few other top priority bookmarks. Deleting these made room on her book marks bar. It also erased about 5000 hours of my work. I have discovered this morning that it is not retrievable.
Currently, I have a car that has been in the shop for two weeks because of an air conditioner problem. Actually two shops. I brought it into the first shop, they vacuumed and charged it with freon and gave it back for free. That was nice. Then I started using it over the weekend and the a/c went out again after the car heated after about eight rides despite the fresh charge.
So after five days testing until the problem duplicated so that the first shop could locate the leak and then another five days waiting for the appointment with the inspector that the warranty company required, the problem was still not fixed.
This is, of course, the third major problem I’ve had with this used Kia since I bought it April 30th. I had to replace the shocks six days after I bought it and I had to replace the fuel pump assembly a month later because of a fuel reserve leak that required me to replace the fuel pump and all of its related parts. The warranty covered the fuel pump as it is listed but the warranty company refused to honor the warranty because it was not the pump itself that was damaged.
But that’s just the car. There’s also the people. Many of my friends know that my wife, who never smoked or drank and stayed physically fit, had a stroke when she was 38, leaving her partially paralyzed for life and chronically unemployed. Others know about my sister and her stroke and that she is the reason we moved to Tallahassee as her husband abandoned her in a nursing home. Not so many people know about my sons. Not every story gets told. I’ll simply summarize by saying something every parent knows – much patience is required, much time, much expense.
Then there are lost friends. Three of my wife’s four bridesmaids no longer talk to her. The reason is that they don’t like me. They don’t like me because I refuse to quit. They believe I should have a normal job and be like a normal person and think more like they do. They won’t talk to her because they want her to leave me or me to change or something like that, as if I could. Her half sister did the same. It is very lonely being the wife of a relentless entrepreneur. People are controlling that way but for her it is a very great loss. And for me it is a very great source of sadness thinking that my wife has lost so many of her very best friends on account of me. I have to comfort her when she cries.
In my life, I’ve had computers break down on me at times when I could not afford back ups and back ups I’ve paid for that failed when I attempted to restore them. The bottom line is the loss of the majority of the work I’ve done in my life. I toted around jazz drives, Syquest drives, floppy sequential back ups, and five large computers for years, carrying them to at least seven places we moved to in the hope of restoring the data. I took it all to a computer repair shop about ten months ago to see what I could retrieve. I had managed to save some of that data onto an external Seagate drive that I had collected back ups to. At last I had the hope of having all my remaining data on one drive. I asked to have the retrieved data be added to the other data I had already saved, but they made a mistake and wrote over the other data. This made me lose all my recent data. And the previous data was too corrupt they said to copy. It left me with very little.
Other data losses were due to deliberate sabotage. It’s easy to sabotage people when they are low on cash and can’t afford proper redundancy. At the turn of the Millennium I had started a business from my home. I invented something that was in high enough demand to launch itself to the 105th most visited web site in the world at that time without having to pay for advertising. Lisa and I watched the WebTrends Analystics with amazement together. My service provider informed me I would need to pay for a server farm to handle the accelerating capacity. I lacked the cash for that for the rapid site development I needed and, as if to kick me down a little further, it was at that same time that my developers accepted a contract from Jeb Bush for MyFlorida.com and ceased all private sector work.
I had to hire new developers very quickly at the same time that I needed the new servers but on a shoe-string budget. First I accepted a bid from a group from India. They were nice but they were incapable. Time was ticking. A month later I accepted a bid from a group from New York that was also doing the work for SesameStreet.com. They agreed to work for $10,000 and 5% equity. I gave them access to the site. What they didn’t tell me was Sesame Street had backed out on them. When that happened, they became cash short like me, so before they went bankrupt they started outsourcing their work.
They hired some developers from Russia and as their company continued to fail, they wound up not paying their Russian developers. They gave access to the Russians to my server through a piece of code called a “back door.” When the Russians didn’t get paid, they got angry and systematically imploded all eight of the cartridge back ups and destroyed my entire business from within and left me a calling card, “Russian Hacker”, among the files in the data that remained. The 30,000 members in my database were then held up as hostage, as they proceeded to send an email saying they could restore my data if I paid them. The business had already been destroyed by then. I had already sold my car to pay the developers. It was all I had.
The loss of my data now makes all of this impossible for me to prove. Only my wife remains as a witness to what has happened in my life. Only my own soul survives as I look to rebuild.
Somehow these great losses are symbolic of how my brain works. When I talk with people, I don’t use my memory. I use my soul. It is my soul that remembers. This is why I rarely express the same thing the same way twice. It’s why I don’t memorize speeches. I have to recompose everything that I say and think on a continual basis. My data centers work differently than those of other people.
