Proof positive: An announcement every night at the main stage of the Folk Festival that "The Festival now has a Flickr site!", followed by a decent attempt to explain what exactly that meant to the 10,000 people gathered.

Looks like there are 40 members in the group so far, and 712 photos, 24 hours after the festival closed, so I'd say it's been a success already. 40 members out of those 10,000 people might not sound like a lot, but frankly I shudder to think what it would be like to wade through every single photo taken on every single digital camera at the festival. Noooooooo!

I gotta say I'm fascinated and impressed by how quickly Flickr is taking the world by storm. Last fall when I was in the UK, none of my cousins had heard of it, and all thought I was weird for obsessively posting pictures from my trip. They're all signed up now... as are many of my non-geeky friends. Testament indeed.

My worst fears confirmed: I know enough about my computer to be dangerous, and not enough to protect myself from fuck-ups.

When my dear brother bought me this laptop for Christmas, he bought it with the standard 40GB hard drive, which has proven patently inadequate for me and my purposes. So I have an external drive, to which I periodically back up my user folder. I was always kind of leery of trusting that process, though, so I didn't delete much from my main hard drive.... until it just got WAY too full to avoid it anymore.

So last week I carefully backed up my user folder, making sure that all the photos I've taken recently, and all my beloved photos from the past, were saved. And I started deleting things from my laptop hard drive. I deleted all photos from prior to 2006, and managed to buy myself a bit of space. But then today my hard drive was once again so full that it actually couldn't even open new programs, so I decided to do another backup (better safe than sorry) and start being even more vicious with my deleting of stuff.

But something went wrong, and after my backup this morning, what I am left with is a carbon copy of my CURRENT user folder... and nothing else. In other words, everything that I have deleted in the past week (LOTS of old photos, mostly) is gone. Just gone.

OMG WTF. BBQ, even. I'm distressed! I mean, I won't die – I do have enough perspective to know that it's not the END of the world – but it sure sucks. I only really started using Flickr last September, so anything that pre-dates that, or that I didn't post to Flickr (save a few things I do have saved on CD) is gone. Which sucks.

Makes me wonder yet again about the long-term problems of data storage. If I'm overwhelmed by it now, only a couple of years into owning a digital camera, then I'm not quite sure where I'll be in 20 years? Drowning in data, if I don't figure this stuff out. And in the meantime, I'm reliant on my increasingly poor memory to remind me of my colourful past.

Lessons in non-attachment. Dammit.

My friend Dan proposed the following in a recent email to me.

Someone should start a lens co-op. There are, blessedly, so many kids getting back into real photography now that DSLRs are inexpensive, but few of them want to drop $3,000 on a nice bag of lenses. Just like a car co-op, a lens co-op could pool lenses (likely Canon and Nikon only, or maybe only one brand if it was tied to one of these brand-loyal communities) and grant access for a small fee. It would work well especially with semi-serious photogs, because we tend to own specialized lenses that we don't use all that often.

When I had my D1H, I also had a 24/2.8 (the normal lens, even though I didn't like it that much), an 85/1.8 (far and away my favourite, although useless for anything but portraiture, basketball and concerts) and a 300/4 (even less useful most of the time, but matchless once a month when I felt like shooting a football game or stalking rabbits in the river valley).

The point is that I wouldn't have minded the 300/4 being out with the co-op most of the time, because I needed it only very rarely, but I still couldn't do without it. You can't shoot a football game with an 85/1.8. It's a waste for that lens to sit around the rest of the time, though -- and man but I would have loved to borrow someone else's 14/2.8 on occasions. This would work better with lenses like the 14/2.8 and 300/4, because you can get working-but-ugly copies of them for $400. Something like an 80-200/2.8, however, is both so expensive and so universally useful that no one's going to want to let go of it, which is why you restrict yourself to the toy lenses.

Long-winded explanation, but that's just Dan. My question is... does anything like this exist? And do you think it would fly?

Irritation
Originally uploaded by sarahfelicity.

I miss having a digital camera. It's making me feel like such a FlickrFailur, not to have posted anything original in so long.

So hey, if anyone out there knows of anyone looking to get rid of their great camera in favour of an even greater one... let me know!

Boots - Covent Garden, London
Originally uploaded by sarahfelicity.

(I'm testing out my ability to post directly to my blog from Flickr.)

Let's pretend that these are magic boots that will allow me to walk right out of my own reality and into a fantasy one, where it's warm, and money grows on trees, and chocolate doesn't make you fat, and everyone is peaceful, and life is sweet and easy. :)

With last week's conference craziness over, and Kris, Robert and Boris off in Torino, I figured I'd get to relax this week. But it hasn't worked out that way so much, as I seem to have taken on rather a lot of work and it all needs to get done right about... NOW. Ahhh!

(Speaking of work... one of the things I'm doing is coordinating a Branding Workshop for Not-for-Profits and social mission businesses. If you work in either of those sectors, and think you could use a little high-end help getting yourself and your org started on a path of clearer messaging about your work... then you should register yourself quick. Check out http://www.knowledgegreen.com.)

On the plus side, Vancouver has been unendingly sunny for days now, which is awesome. On the down side, I have spent basically NO time out playing in it. Just me and my laptop, together forever, indoors.  

Also on the down side... I lost my digital camera a few weeks ago, which is why the photostream to the left there has been so stagnant. Sad story!!! I miss being able to snap pictures of life as it goes by.

But back to the plus side... as the days get longer, and especially with the sun, I've been getting up much earlier again. It feels good to be getting an early start on the day. Makes it possible to start putting some yoga back into my mornings....

Just checking in from the keynote addresses at Northern Voice.  Robert Scales just took a great picture of me and Kris and I thought I'd stick it up, since I generally don't link enough images in here!

Moosecamp yesterday was fun - frenetic, unstructured, but fun. There's a ridiculous amount of Flickr-ing happening. I taught a yoga class. KK led a very successful photocamp. We had a picnic in Stanley Park, with mucho sausages, condiments galore, many photos taken, and probably hundreds of freezing fingers and toes in aggregate. (Beautiful day it may have been, but damn it was chilly come 8pm last night.)

I'm looking forward to the rest of the day, particularly the How Your Blog and Change the World panel. More later, likely...