Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Bowled Out

I am reminded of a Tom Clancey's Novel titled "Netforce" where he paints a distance future of a special squad that goes after Net Terrorist and how they go about tracking, tracing and piecing together information scattered trough out the Net. In one of the chapters, because of the supposed death of the Netforce Director, one of the agent (tho against the law of that time) reconstruct the body of knowledge from the Director's website (which presumebly he has documented as a journal) into a virtual Director so as the agents can look for direction and advice from this information store.

As I sat there trying to recollect the details of the Novel while nursing the injuries inflicted on my ego and hand in participating in a bowling game with friends, I am also reminded of the implication and consequences of missing spares in a bowling game. In bowling, you need to take every chances, if you keep missing strikes and spares, you end up getting way-way behind because of the method of scoring.

Now, what is the reason of me bringing this matter up? The reason is this, i was with a friend who has lost all his work and 4 years of journaling perhaps due to some contribution of my inactions. I had thought that on that day, I had wanted to lend some support to this guy by carrying out other non IT related activity. Call came in, got distracted and plans were shelved. Meeting adjourned, caught up with him and though he is a macho kind of guy, you can see the sense of panic and despair in his eyes when he told me that "I think I may have lost 4 years of my Blog"

I was shocked and we spend some time figuring out how to recover the database but to no avail at that time. The impact to me is this, "How does one feel when he sees 4 years of his lfe of interaction and journalling gets lost". The documentation and articulation of thought which gives reader insight into this person ala the Netforce Director. To think I could also be a contributory factor to these actions......i was one quiet person that day.

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