PIA and PSA

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Firstly for the PIA - let's get the bad news out of the way.

As you may have guessed from the photo above, this was supposed to be a post about the Sydney Sewists High Tea on Sunday.  I took heaps of photos: sewists at the table, Gail and Maria and I posing in our new frocks, tiers of food, several combinations of darling little cakes, a macaron and lemonade scones on a plate, Gail's first cup of tea whose only ingredient was hot water, Lizzie strutting her stuff at the second High Tea venue, my new DKNY dress and coat) - you can imagine it, right???

Thank you to the chief organiser, Kristy, and also to Christy, whose blog post alerted me to the get together in the first place (and it only took me about 4 weeks to RSVP, sorry Kristy). We had so much fun - cakes, champagne, great company, inspirational sewing in all directions, a pattern / fabric swap, then a second venue when the first kicked us out - that I wish I could show you some of it here.

After so much photo taking my hardworking little camera's battery needed to recharge, so I took the equally hardworking smartcard out, popped it into its reader, plugged them into the computer and started transferring photos. And... drum roll....  disaster struck. Card, reader, USB port - I don't know which is to blame. But ALL of those photos have been corrupted.  All those high tea photos, plus a couple of special birthday girl photos that I hadn't yet moved to the computer.

I'm so sorry Maria, Gail and Lizzie too that I can't email you the photos I took of you.

I've now spent hours testing demo versions of different photo recovery tools (RescuePRO, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery, and PhotoRescue PC) and while I seem to have been able to "recover" some files using RescuePRO, they're so badly corrupted I can't see the images, which feels kind of pointless. I've messed around with file repair software too, but the results are looking hopeless - mixed up strips of photos combined with large expanses of grey - and I still can't see any of the photos I wanted to share.

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And now the PSA.  If you still subscribe to this blog through Google Reader, you might want to quickly look into some other options before Google Reader disappears in a few days time! If you search on Blog Readers you'll see there are a lot of options, but I've chosen to follow the herd and have signed up with BlogLovin'.  My blog subscriptions were all automatically copied over and it's been completely smooth: everything is just there :).  Bloglovin' is quite different to Google Reader in the way it shows your unread items, but it turns out I really like seeing a preview photo for each new unread post - it helps me prioritise what to read next!