During the month leading up to the posting of this column some sort of inexplicable, and unidentifiable, mistake in my Inbox made the numerous (please don't ask me to tell how many) e-mail messages there inaccessible. What's more, I couldn't even download mail. This wasn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. On the same computer, in a different mail program, I have a few MB of mail which I'm unable to view. A move to a different mail program at work somehow wiped out a couple of MB of mail on that computer, and at least once I lost mail in a similar manner in a previous place of work. (And of course there's mail on my Mac as well which I presently can't get to.)
Not wanting to throw all this mail out (yet?), yet somehow unable to copy it (see that title, again), I did finally succeed in renaming it so that my mail program didn't recognize it, and I was able, after much too much effort, to once again download mail.
Mail wasn't my only problem. I use a number of "virtual disk drives".
I don't need them all, but each of them offers a slightly different interface,
and I'm still looking for the ultimate and simplest tool for true sharing.
But the dot.com crashes of late haven't smiled on these virtual drive companies.
(How could they? Essentially they offer something for nothing, and most
of us are more than happy to take what they give!) The last month or so
has seen the demise of a number of tools that I've used, or at least taken
some time to check out. One of these was Driveway where I stored
about 2MB of information. This wasn't the greatest loss, but retrieving the files I'd parked there that I was still interested in saving (and I'd put them there because I wanted to save them) was still a time consuming activity. What's more, I'd grown accumstomed to this tool, and losing it meant having to devote the time and effort to getting better acquainted with another.
And as if losing part of my e-mail and access to files I'd stored online wasn't enough, during this same period of time an old friend announced that it was shutting down.
True, it had been more than a couple of years since I'd last visited The Trojan Room Coffee Machine at Cambridge University, and it certainly wasn't a web site for which I had much use, but still, it was sort of an old friend. Years ago there was something special about a web camera that was focused 24 hours a day on a coffee machine. Today it's an anachronism, though the web camera is being taken down not because nobody's interested in it anymore, but because the department where it's housed is moving to a different building.