A MUCH BETTER BLOG

The other day I was working on Flickr tagging a picture of Brielle catching her very first fish. I hit the save button and got a funky error message. I hit the back button and tried again. A different weird error. I was sent to a login screen where it told me to set up a user name. I tried to access my user name, photostream and main account. My heart rate picked up and panic set in as I quickly realized that my account had vaporized……along with over 11,000 pictures of my children.

Why Flickr?

I started using Flickr when Brielle was about a year and a half old. I had been using a photo gallery that my brother set up for me. I had been using the gallery since I lived in Europe and had about three and a half years worth of pictures stored there.

I decided to transfer to Flickr because other members of my family were visiting the gallery to make fun of pictures of me and Brielle (true story). I know it sounds ridiculous and if it happened today I wouldn’t give a crap, but at the time I was still coming to terms with being thrown into poverty, moving a bunch of times, birth trauma, leaving all my friends behind and, oh yeah, that little ‘escaping with my life’ thing.

Being kicked while I was down was too much to bear. So I set up a Flickr account and only made the pics available to those would be happy to see them. Feeling like nobody was lurking in cyberspace to criticize our hair or clothes, I uploaded with impunity. I loved Flickr, sang their praises, tagged like a fool and upgraded to a paid pro account.

Then a few months ago, in a move that still baffles me, my brother transferred all the galleries to a new server but inexplicably decided not to transfer mine. This decision effectively wiped out the photo albums with Brielle’s baby pictures, my wedding pictures and my beloved Europe pictures.

My brother tried to console me by reminding me that the pictures are not deleted but just stored on the old server where I have absolutely no way of seeing them. I am not entirely clear on how that is helpful. It is the equivalent of losing all your photo albums in a fire but being reminded that the negatives are in a shoebox in the basement. I still can’t see my pictures (without a tremendous amount of time, money and effort).

This only served to reinforce my feelings that something as important as family photos should not be trusted to family but rather a corporation, with large servers, backups and the inability to eradicate an account. Or so I thought.

TOS…Wait…WHAT???
So I have been gleefully using Flickr since the fall of 2006. I have my pics in random files on a few different computers but I did not back up my Flickr account. I considered Flickr to BE the backup. Once they were on Flickr, I could breathe. They were safe. I trusted them with everything. I would sit down monthly, dump everything from my phone and camera and even from other people’s cameras and then tag my favorites, tag the people in the pics and breathe a sigh of relief until next month.

Here is where I went terribly wrong. I thought of Flickr as photo storage rather than photo sharing. Is there a difference? You bet. It probably doesn’t matter for my personal pics but I used Flickr to store about 5 or so pics for my website and store. Yes 5. Five out of 11,500. You do the math. I used Flickr for those pics because I was testing the front page design. It is just easier to upload to Flickr than send them to my site when trying out a number of pics.

Here is the deal. Every time someone would go to my homepage, Flickr would have to provide the pictures for people to see. On a worldwide scale, this could cost them tons of money if people use Flickr to host images for that purpose so it is clearly and expressly against their Terms of Service (TOS) which I simply never read. It just never even occurred to me that it would be a problem. I never thought twice about it. I loved Flickr, used them every day and totally forgot that those couple of images were still hosted there.

Once my account vaporized, I frantically Googled why an account would disappear. I figured it was a glitch on their end. I found they will delete entire accounts with no warning for a TOS violation. I thought “I don’t do any of those naughty things” but finally clicked on the TOS anyway. I emailed Flickr immediately (and other than a computer generated reply, I have not heard back). I still hadn’t even thought of the pics on my homepage and could not figure out what I did wrong. I honestly thought Flickr took offense with a breastfeeding or EC photo.

As the realization sunk in, I bawled. I stopped eating. I stopped sleeping. I laid awake all night long until about 5am and suddenly it hit me….it is those four lousy images on my home page (that gets about 900 stupid hits a month). I put them on last July and forgot they were even on Flickr. I checked the homepage in the morning and sure enough, the offending images were deleted.

I visited my blog and could still see the images of Brielle and Bianca and had read that Flickr will delete your account but the images are still accessible if you have the direct link. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least my 3.5 yrs of blogging was safe and the creme de la creme of pictures were still available.

So get this. I have my own storage on my site and store. I have nine self hosted wordpress blogs. I have a hosted ecommerce store. I can store as many pictures as I need to. I did not NEED Flickr at all but I just loved using them. I was not trying to pull one over on Flickr or get free hosting. I am not a criminal or a rule breaker (intentionally).

One email from Flickr could have saved everything. One notice. One warning. One heads up. They can’t see that I have 11,500 pictures of CHILDREN and I would probably do anything in the world to save them? I would have paid five grand to save my pics. I would have done ANYTHING. I would have stayed up for a week straight saving pics and looking for offending images.

Flickr apparently prefers the “blindside” method. They have some sort of fierce ‘zero tolerance policy’, presumably to set an example from people like me who choose to blog about it. I guess. Who the hell knows why they would not give me a chance to fix it.

Needless to say, what they did was cruel, horrible and rotten. But you know what? It is their party and they have every right to kick me out (it is not the first time I have been kicked out of a club for partying too hard) . They are my pictures but they are stored on their property. Just like you can’t store a dead body at your local storage unit, you can’t hotlink images on Flickr. Their TOS were clear as could be I am just a trusting fool who never took the time to read them. It actually makes perfect sense to me now and in all honesty I SHOULD have known better. I am not saying it serves me right, but I am saying that I don’t hold a grudge against Flickr.

Where do I go from here?
That has been the primary question on my mind. I am NOT going to go through seven years of pictures (probably 13-15,000) to create sets, tags, favorites etc. It is just NOT going to happen. I wont do one year over. I might do a month or two. Seven years? Absolutely not. Ironically, the only pictures I have access to now are the hard copy photo albums from prior to 2002.

I put such an unbelievable amount of time and effort into my online storage. All gone. Wasted time. No freaking way will I do that again.

This whole ordeal has also shaken my love for the internet monoliths to the core. Can I expect the same treatment from Google and Amazon? My livelihood? Vaporized? I can understand not trusting a relative on the west coast with a server in their garage but Google? Amazon? If my darling Flickr can turn on me this quickly….then I don’t think I can trust anyone.

I logged into my blog yesterday to see what pictures are left and I see that Flickr has deleted everything. My blog is empty. That was the final straw. I have no record of the last 7 years of my life. Gone in an instant. I feel despair, depression. I feel like giving up on everything. What next? What else will I lose that I worked so hard for?

Words have come into my head like ‘catastrophe’ ‘devastating’ ‘worst thing ever’ etc. I was hit with the enormity of what I lost and felt like the world had struck me a blow of overwhelming proportions. Then I thought, OK Sheryl….seriously….catastrophe?? I am still breathing. My children are still breathing. We are all very healthy and well. We can still smile. I have all my senses and all my limbs. I am not drowning in oil. I have clean water and food. I did not watch my child die in my arms from starvation, an earthquake, a tsunami or cancer. On a global, historic scale, my distress is absurd. Its a freaking Flickr account. How many billions of people around the world would love to have the problems that I do?

On a more personal measure, I used my standard line that I use to determine if something is “worry worthy” or not. “Will it matter in ten years?”. Actually, yes, it might. I love seeing pictures of myself as a baby and young child and I appreciate the time my parents took to put together photo albums. Now both girls are going to ask, “Why don’t you have any baby pictures of us?” I am going to have to say, “Here is the zip drive. Go for it.”

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I have been seriously considering the possibility that the universe is screaming at me to STOP TAKING PICTURES! Just stop it. Why? Because every time I am looking into a LCD screen or my phone, I am not looking my kids in the eye. If I am holding a camera, then I am not holding their hand or a ball or a frisbee. If I am tagging, then I am not coloring or tickling or talking with my kids. I am the photographer not the actor. I am observing, not living.

I have occasionally seen pictures that Brielle has taken of me when I have a camera held up in front of my face or I am staring at the laptop on my lap. I thought with horror…”holy mackerel….is this how my kids see me?!?!” But I didn’t stop.

Every time I sit on the couch with my laptop and upload and tag pictures, I am not existing in the present, I am existing in the future, when I can look at the final pictures. When I am looking at the final pictures, I am living in the past when the event actually took place. The whole process serves to take me away from what is happening in the here and now. Even if I am working while the girls are asleep, I am taking away quality time from myself by focusing on pictures I took in the past and will look at in the future. It is an exercise in insanity.

I am a huge (HUUUGE) fan of The Four Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss is my hero (but that is another blog post). If you are not familiar with the book, the general idea is how to automate and outsource your revenue stream to free up time for stuff that gives joy and meaning to your life. I am slowly freeing up my work time but I have still been spending a ridiculous amount of time on pictures of my kids. Do you think my little girls care if I am working on my store or tagging a picture? All they see is mommy staring at her laptop instead of doing something WITH them.

I think its time to stop. Life has given me a spanking and I didn’t like one little bit, but it was a wake up call. I think someday when my girls ask where the pictures are, I can tell them that I chose to play with them rather than point a camera at them. I think hope they will understand. There is something exciting, scary and liberating about enjoying the moment and letting it disappear into forever. I am uncomfortably attached to the concept of clinging to every moment with my girls by capturing all of it on film. I need to rethink everything and just savor the precious moments while they happen and if my friends and family want to be part of it, they should visit. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to put my laptop away and go for a Sunday stroll with my girls to have a Mimosa and feed the ducks.

Image source: Since I don’t have any images anymore, I commissioned Brielle to do the artwork for this post.

Brielle and i had our second movie date yesterday and we went to see Alice in Wonderland. I pretty much went in knowing absolutely nothing about the movie. I had sort of seen the previews out of the corner of my eye while I was working but that is as much information as I had going in. I honestly expected to daydream through more Disney fluff.

I was blown away. This movie was absolutely fantastic. I am not a movie buff and I don’t have time or the attention span to sit through most movies without thinking about work or my to do list. I watched this movie from start to finish and totally lost myself in it. I didn’t even realize until the closing credits that it was a Tim Burton movie. That totally explained it of course. Tim Burton kicks ass. The Tim Burton/Johnny Depp combo? Yeah…nobody better. Period.

The cast was out of this world, the plot incredible, production values and graphics state of the art. It was just great. As for positive, strong female role model? I can’t think of a better one for Brielle to see than Alice. Alice rewrites feminism in a quiet, confident, dragon slaying kind of way. She does not do what women are “expected to do”. She kicked ass.

The icing on the cake was the 3D which has improved dramatically since the last time I saw anything in 3D about fifteen years ago when I used to frequent the Disney theme parks in the early 90s. My things have changed.

Was it appropriate for a 4 year old? Sure. I get uptight about certain things but fantasy films where a dragon is slayed in the end don’t fall under my list of violent movies. Brielle loved it. She thought ALL the characters were great. She sat through the whole movie and asked a few questions but was pretty much as intoxicated as I was. Scale of one to ten? Fifteen.

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This is the trailer for a new documentary on formula feeding in America. The documentary which is in the process of filming and scheduled to wrap in April of 2010 explores the prevalence of formula feeding in North America and the health implications that follow.

According to the Formula Fed America Documentary website ,

“Why are we ignoring our natural biological function of breastfeeding? Why are doctors, who more often than not agree that breast milk is far superior to infant formula, so quick to prescribe it when a mother experiences difficulty breastfeeding? Why do we continue to sexualize the breast and stigmatize its actual and intended use? Why are there not more widely available human milk banks where a mother can go and receive that precious liquid gold for her baby rather than free cans of formula our mailboxes? If infant feeding is a choice, why are we not making an informed one? This documentary will provide an insightful look into our culture’s attitude towards the breastfeeding mother and its acceptance of infant formula.”

Thanks to Dou-la-la’s blog for the heads up on the trailer.

After we were done with our coatracks, we had lots of jewels leftover. We bought a couple of organic pumpkins and a bag of feathers and made a couple of less than traditional pumpkins.

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Stupid me. Once upon a time, I had the most basic of cable. I paid a whopping $4/mo. Seriously. FOUR dollars. I had requested only the first 21 channels so Brielle would get PBS but Charter piped in 80 channels anyway. I didn’t even realize that I was getting extra channels for free at first but when I did, I never said anything about the oversight. Boy would Charter Karma bite me right in the ass for that one. (more…)

• http://twitpic.com/e8jci – Potato funeral #
• Swine Flu Vaccine Linked to Paralysis, Leaked Memo Reveals http://bit.ly/4D0l0S via @AddToAny #
• Currently Browsing: http://is.gd/2pk23 #
• Currently Browsing: http://is.gd/2qb2E #

• Zambian Journalist On Trial for “Obscene” Childbirth Photos #
• Sex Codes: The Top 31 Acronyms For All Your Sexist, Racist Fetishes (this is really appalling) http://short.to/lroi #
• Why Do We Spend $34 Billion in Alternative Medicine? http://is.gd/21Hh0 #
• California octuplets case dismays fertility experts #
• Caffeine May Prevent and Help Reverse Alzheimer’s Disease http://is.gd/21HmA #
• Another terrific post from Rixa about litigation and the obstetric mindset. http://short.to/lby2 #
• Should We Tax Sodas and Junk Food to Pay for Health Care? http://snipr.com/onmzp #
• 13 million abortions in China each year- Sex among young people losing taboo, but birth control education lagging http://snipr.com/ohntu #
• The Rocker Mom and the DJ: Breastfeeding Goes Public on Twitter http://digg.com/u1AMuU #
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Yes of course I was going to blog about this. How could I not? Apparently our friends over in Spain have developed a breastfeeding doll that makes sucking noises when held up to a halter top with little flowers that represent nipples. The proximity to the flowers and the proper breastfeeding position activate a breastfeeding response in the doll.

Naturally this is creeping out people on our side of the pond for a number of reasons (none of which I understand). All I know is that anything that encourages the daughters of today (mothers of tomorrow) to hold a hungry baby to their chest rather than inserting a piece of silicone or latex in the baby’s mouth is a good thing. (more…)

• RT @tweetmeme Ikea Banishes Breastfeeding Mom to Bathroom : Eco Child’s Play http://bit.ly/Nr6qi #
• Proposed Ohio law would require biological father’s consent before an abortion- I am not sure if I like this or not http://short.to/l2jv #

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