sick of being held ransom to technology - secret to fighting back

so monday night i was finishing off some work for a big day tuesday. ichat wasnt working properly and i was trying to video conference back home with parents so i rebooted... as we made it back to desktop the complete fuzzy screen was staring back at me. not cool.

had to go to bed knowing all this... i have decided to stay calm in these situations now. things have worked out in the past and the cards will fall where they fall in the future. so i have decided i can act best when calm.

annnnyway... i am probably stating the obvious, but it certainly jolted me about reliance on technology. also unlocked a thought and a way to lessen the reliance. usually the reliance is based on stored information - contacts, files, email etc. so i have been on a backup binge after that happened yesterday (i was able to fix it with a reinstall of tiger). i now have online and dvd backups and finally get to see my machines as just functionality. they dont have the control they had yesterday - it kinda felt like that scene in spider man 2 where spidey gets through to the man with the big arms who have taken over his brain. the power is now back in my hands. like bill gates said, knowledge is power. i think i now get that he wasnt just talking about humans. the more they can get you to trust and hold all your knowledge on a single machine, the more you are held ransom.

so... the key.. work out how to backup your key information. because when your computer has a meltdown, you wont have one as well... you will give a sigh and might take a financial hit but it wont be the one, two blow of losing all your stored knowledge as well.