Do memories die? Well, it certainly is going to feel like it soon. Yahoo! is shutting down Geocities effective today (October 26 in the USA). That was where I learnt HTML to create my first homepage on my spinal injury. That was in the late 1990s. I had wanted to share my experience with the world. I created a few pages but it was a chore having to write all the codes manually.

When Wuan and I began dating, I created another website at Geocities dedicated to her. It was called Poems for Wuan. The website had a flash animation on the welcoming page. Valentine in MIDI format played in the background. Altogether, I put up eighteen poems that I wrote for her there.

In the initial years when I got online, Geocities and a few other free webhosts were the BIG thing in cyberspace. Blogs have taken over that role now. The only vestige to remind me of my days in Geocities after its demise is the Yahoo! email that I am using now. A .geo suffix was appended to my Geocities ID after Yahoo! took over and the email accounts were merged.

After I got my own domain name and hosting to start blogging, I replaced the main page at Geocities with a link to my new domain although I still maintained all the original files of the website there. The spinal injury website is now at sci.petertan.com. It has been in neglect since I started The Digital Awakening. I also got Wuan her own domain name and hosting. Poems for Wuan has been taken offline and replaced with Wuan’s photoblog.

I have moved on in my cyber journey that Geocities first ignited. It had been a fortuitous one. I have made many friends along the way, learnt many valuable lessons and gotten many opportunities that I never thought possible. Farewell Geocities. Thank you for the memories.

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Look what came in the mail – two GSC Signature at The Gardens Premier Class movie vouchers from HSBC! It is prize for fulfilling one of their credit card campaigns a while back. We have never watched movies at the GSC Signature before as each ticket costs RM20. That is a lot of money for two hours of entertainment when I can get a disabled person ticket for RM6 only for the normal halls.

Most times Wuan and I book the couple seats for RM26 plus RM1 surcharge. I prefer to watch movies from the back of the cinema. We frequent the GSC at 1 Utama which is very accessible for wheelchair users. This two tickets will give us an opportunity to check out the accessibility at the GSC Signature. Most probably, we will use these two tickets to watch “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs” later next week.

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One of the surviving digital photographs taken with the Nikon Coolpix 3100.

My first digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 3100. I must have taken some 8,000 shots with this tiny camera until I upgraded to the Canon Powershot A610 some time in end-2005. Most of the images taken with the Coolpix 3100 were kept in the hard drive of my desktop computer in Penang. Unfortunately, the drive failed when I wanted to back up the images to CD-R. All I have left are the images stored in Wuan’s computer the times I visited her here in Kuala Lumpur before I moved down.

Theoretically, digital images last forever. However, their longevity are dependent on the media that they are stored in. Most of my hard drives last an average of three years. CD-Rs last a little longer if they are properly stored. I tend to leave them lying around unprotected. They usually accumulate dust and scratches over the years. I lost some images that way too. Those lost images leave a gaping hole in the chronicles of my photography journey. I am determined not to lose any from now on.

I have learnt my lessons. Between Wuan and I, we have 40,000 digital photographs. For us, backing up images has become a continuous process now. The images from the cameras are downloaded to my 160GB external drive or Wuan’s 40GB external drive. From there, the images are then transferred to DVDs. They are stored in two separate copies and those copies stored in different locations. That is what we are doing for our existing digital photographs. I am also looking at a 1TB external drive for primary back up as the current 160GB external drive is fast filling up. At the same time, I am looking around for better quality DVDs for this purpose too. Please do share with me how you store your digital photographs.

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