Searching the Lost and Found

The internet is my own personal playground. From the moment we got our first computer and Paul showed me how to find the REAL lyrics for “Blinded by the Light” and an interview with one of my favorite authors, I was a goner. There was SO MUCH TO SEE that I was overwhelmed! So many sites! Then I learned about bookmarks…

I became the QUEEN OF BOOKMARKS. I would find an interesting site that I didn’t want to take the time to intimately explore right then, so I’d bookmark it for later perusal. When I got heavily into rubber stamping and other paper crafts, I was overjoyed to find SO MANY WEBSITES for this stuff. Also blog sites, galleries, etc etc etc. And I bookmarked EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Then we’d have a crash or something and I would lose ALL my bookmarks. It was like someone close to me had DIED! I MOURNED! Paul thought I was nuts. (he was right)

That didn’t stop me from trying to find all my sites and bookmarking them again, though. At one point Paul suggested putting all the bookmarks in a file so if something happened, I would be able to access them again. I don’t know how many times I did this for Internet Explorer, Chrome and Mozilla. And every once in a while I would go through some of the lists and weed out ones that were no longer viable, or I had duplicated.

Then came the most recent crash. Once again, I lost everything that was current, but I had the files with the backups. Only problem was the newer sites that I had not backed up. I had gotten slack in that because I thought Carbonite saved EVERYTHING. And they do, just not bookmarks for the actual places like IE, Chrome and Mozilla. There was one particular site that I really wanted to find again. It was a place where I could use pictures and make them look old, or like a painting or in pixels. All different colors, all different back grounds and other goodies. I had used this site for a couple of altered books I’d done and REALLY wanted that one back.

SO….came the search. I didn’t realize right away that the newer bookmarks were gone. I thought I had them when the computer guys told me how to get them back on my browser. I didn’t know that all I was doing was taking the files of BMs (stop laughing) that were already stored. I went through ALL OF THEM ONE BY ONE to see if that one site was there. And of course I had no idea what that site was called. The last few days I’ve been going through EVERYTHING from all three browsers, even though I knew it wasn’t in the very first ones. I had decided that the time had come to CLEAN HOUSE. I went over every BM. A lot were no longer around. A few that I had completely forgotten about I was pleased to see were still around. I deleted a lot that no longer applied to me or I wasn’t interested in anymore. By that time I knew the site I wanted was not to be found in any of my lists. I ended up finding a couple different sites on my own that can do some pretty neat things with pics, and I will have to be content with that. And yes, they are in a permanent file. Lesson learned.