Saturday, August 25, 2007

Technology Rocks

With the recent disaster I had, losing files when my laptop crashed, I learned a valuable lesson. That sucks but sometimes I need a knock on the head to wake me up. Several friends encouraged using flash drives and even my sweet, technology challenged hubby suggested the same because they use them at work. So I did it. I marched my rear end to Staples Office Supply. But I guess our local high school has a school to work program because the only employees were VERY young (or I'm getting VERY old) and were hanging out gossiping in front with a "customer". I tried to get their attention but got frustrated and left. I had no idea which size or brand to buy and hate to return stuff. Off to WalMart. The little guy there in electronics listened patiently (bless his heart) while I explained what I needed and why. He tried to talk me into buying a 4G flash drive at around $80. He didn't work on commission so I thought maybe he might be correct in his thinking...but man. I bought the cheap one because I thought it looked easy to use. And ok...I'm cheap.

I managed to get the stupid thing out of it's tightly wrapped package and only managed to cut myself once. Hey...that's an improvement for me! After I knew for sure my files had been loaded I double checked on the kids pc. Yeah for me. After saving 1/3 of my ms to the drive I've only used 6% of the memory. And it is only 1G for $20.

Technology is incredible. I thought maybe I might use one stick per manuscript and write the title on them with permanent ink. They are so little I can put them in our fireproof/waterproof safe. I also thought about our pictures and stuff we would copy and put on one as well.

Oh well...hope you guys are having a great weekend! We went to see Becoming Jane. It was wonderful if you like that era. I'll try to blog about it tomorrow or Monday because Jane Austin is a favorite for me.

6 comments:

Chicki Brown said...

Isn't that amazing? Technology is getting faster, smaller and cheaper.

Another thing you can do is upload your work to your briefcase (if you have Yahoo as your ISP) or your filelocker ( if you have Comcast). I'm sure the other Internet providers have the same thing.

Chelle Sandell said...

Good idea...I had emailed myself my chapters to print them out and that is why I didn't lose as much as I could've.

bettye griffin said...

Chelle,
I laughed out loud at your description of only cutting yourself twice on the packaging. I despise those clear plastic packages. Those edges are like razors, aren't they?

Glad you've gotten your backup drive. One gig is plenty of memory. Just remember, if you don't use it, it can't help you, so get in the habit!

Chelle Sandell said...

LOL Bettye...It sucks cause I'm accident prone. I'm almost 40 and my mom won't let me use scissors if she's in the room. LOL. What's bad is that most of the kids toys and products now come in that stupid plastic.

I've been really good when working on my mss and now use flash drive everytime. It's killing me cause I really loved one of the chapters I lost and now I'm having to recreate it. Ugh!

PatriciaW said...

Sorry you lost your laptop Chelle but sounds like the recovery hasn't been too painful (except for those plastic cuts!)

And congrats on your pitch with Harlequin!

BTW, I tagged you for the middle name meme.

Chelle Sandell said...

LOL Patricia...I'll check it out and gladly tag on! Thank you on the pitch!! Are you still going to try to submit for the next contest?