Vanished into the air

Computer technology is supposed to improve our lifes. At most points it does. We can be at the other side of the world in only a matter of seconds, we know the latest news, can share thoughts, stories and other personal things without meeting anyone face to face (though I'm not so sure if that's a positve thing) and many, many people rely on the modern day technology, because it is such a big part of our lifes. We don't know how to life without it. Multinationals, other companies and bussinesses excist and survive only because of this technology.

But in the personal zone it is causing annoying troubles - though world wide we've also shared a fair number of technological dissasters, think of all viruses that come along with Internet and everyone's worst fear coming true by hackers getting into high security systems (I've read that 10 milion medical files in the States are 'stolen').
However, these problems can be closer to home. For instance, PC's that don't work like you want them to, notebooks that loose power after only have an hour, photo's that can't be retrieved anymore because the notebook's system is incomprehenisble to the average John or Jane Doe.

This last part is exactly what happened to me today, I figured 'hey! lets watch some photo's from the summervacation of 2006!' We were in Italy at the time and my father had just bought his Nikon D70 Digital single-lens reflex camera, and was using it, of course. The qualitly of those pictures was enormous. They had so much colour (color? O *sigh* the annoying difference between American English and British English!), they were so much brighter and so sharp, every detail was beautifully visible.
Anyway, I wanted to see those photo's, because I remembered there were a couple of nice pictures of me in a nice dress. Yes, yes, I know, I sound a little vain. So you can imagine how utterly annoyed I was when I discovered that those pictues were nowhere to be found! I checked every possible space, but that file was missing.
Usually, my father keeps a copy of all of his photo's on his notebook, and guess what he did not two weeks ago? Precisely, thinking that everything was on the shared drive, he erased all of the photo's on his Notebook. And now, the photo's of me in my pretty dress are gone and since neither of us knows how to get them back, we have no way of seeing them, ever again.

The memories aren't gone, but the specific sight of a certain place are not always correct in our memory, that's why we have pictures.

It's a shame, really.