disappeared again.

It's been a while since my last post.  At least this time I have an additional excuse - along with being incredibly busy getting ready for a bunch of travel (to SXSW, a W3C meeting, and MIX06), I've been depressed.

A week and a half ago, someone broke the window of my (new) car and stole my laptop bag and my camera bag.  Aside from the hassle of replacing all the other junk that was in my laptop bag (razor, miscellaneous cables, nr headphones), the loss of all the stuff on my hard drive, and the financial loss of the camera (a Canon 20D with the two most expensive lenses I own), the biggest loss was due to not having copied pictures off my laptop for two months.

So, the last two months worth of pictures I'd taken - a few dive pictures, but mostly pictures of my 14-month-old daughter - are gone.  After destroying two cameras while doing dive photography, this is camera number three down the drain (and I'm not counting point-n-shoots - these are all digital SLRs).  It got me really down, and nearly made me want to give up photography.

But, I've pulled myself up out of it, dusted myself off; gotten the car window fixed (twice), got a new laptop, and ordered a replacement camera, which is winging its way from B&H Photo as I type.

Personal lessons learned:

don't ever, ever leave a bag unattended in a car.  Even if it's for half an hour and you're parked right in front of a well-lit busy plate glass storefront; no one saw anything, even though the car alarm went off.  Yes, I was a dumbass.

Back up.  I am in the process of coming up with an automated backup strategy, particularly for my photos.