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We are what we think & my blog entries reflect how I think. Have a sip of the poison of my mind.. It's not always lethal.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

'Delete' Buttons Shrink Memory Lanes


A few weeks ago, I was wondering why the earlier half of my blog entries failed to load their pictures on this blog site while the rest of the newer entries were fine & dandy. Needless to say, the thought of all my photo-taking gone down the cyber drain made me shudder. That's a BIG No-No.


Since I created every one of my blog entries on my iPhone using the BlogPress app, I fired it up in an attempt to figure out if there was a way I could rectify the problem. Looking at the number of uploaded posts within the app, I noticed that the number of posts made shown in the app was lesser than the actual true total (earlier entries made were not displayed).

Since the posts not shown in the app still exist on this blog site, that got me thinking that perhaps the app within my phone could only show so many entries due to memory issues. That actually made some sense to me: imagine that 40 years down the road, how would the app be able to handle 40,000,00 blog entries?

Therefore, I arrived at the deduction that perhaps my older blog entries which were 'pushed' out of the list within the app got their pictures deleted somehow.


And then I did a really stupid experiment: in an attempt to see if I could bring back the missing pictures of the older entries which got pushed out of the list, I deleted one of the December entries of last year which was still within the list titled 'Stuck In The Rain In The Middle of The Night', thinking that the entry would still be stored in the blog's server itself. The picture on the right is just a demo of how the delete process of a blog entry looks like within the app.

So did that solve my problem & bring back my missing pics? Nope, it didn't. And then I discovered that the mentioned entry I deleted to conduct this experiment was GONE FOR GOOD. It disappeared from the blog server as well.

The purpose of my blog is to record my memories since as a collective whole, they weave my life story. So one of the recorded moments of my story is now gone just like that because I touched that freaking 'Delete' button. Such an innocent little act gone so wrong.

Sure, I can rewrite that entry but it wouldn't be the same. The thoughts & feelings during a rewrite weeks after the incident would be different from the thoughts & feelings during the moment when the happenings of that entry were occurring and first-person perspective would become third-person. I would become my own spectator instead of being the participant involved in the moment.

And in the end, the solution to the missing pics problem turned out to be clicking the round 'Refresh' icon on the upper right corner under the 'Edit' button. That made all the old pictures come back up again on the blog server.

Precious lesson learned. So simple but yet so costly. Imagine if I was even more stupid & deleted more than one single entry for the experiment.

Shudder.

I'm still mighty pissed about it. It's like I tore off a page of my own story by my own hand. Actually, that was exactly what I did. It was entirely my own fault, Blogpress is still a wonderful app.

Fuck it. I can't even kick myself in the butt for it because that would give my legs a nasty cramp.

- De Lion Speaks

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