WHEN SYSTEMS CRASH

30 January 2003

Opera has relieved me of tremendous pressure.

I began using the Opera browser several months ago. It has a few quirks (like being unable to run Java, even though it is Java enabled...it's probably my problem, but I can't get Java to work; that's what I keep IE around for), but basically it lives up to its promise to be "the fastest browser on the net." If you don't have a direct connection of some sort and have to rely on a piddly old 56K modem, Opera's the way to go.

I also love the look of it, and the ability to have different windows, with each window having five or six windows (it's easier to SHOW you than to try to explain --

It also has the option to suppress pop-up ads, so I have been pop-up free ever since I installed it, which makes me extremely happy (a fact I realize even more every time I have to go to IE for something or other).

It also has a great bookmark organizer which I've come to rely on heavily. I imported all of my bookmarks from Netscape when that crashed on me (well, it didn't really crash; it just became so unstable that it drove me nuts. At that time someone had been singing the praises of Opera [is that a pun?] and I decided to try it. I never looked back).

The problem with importing all of my Netscape bookmarks was that I had hundreds of them, most of which I hadn't looked at in literally years. But, as with cleaning out e-mail (there are thousands which need to be deleted), it just takes time that I don't have. It was easier to import the whole kit and kabootle.

They sat there, along with all the newer bookmarks that I do use and the clean look of the Opera bookmarks made it easy not to feel overwhelmed by hundreds of unnecessary bookmarks.

Until this morning, that is.

There was a glitch. Isn't there always a glitch? If you own a computer, the one thing you can count on is there being a glitch eventually.

I don't even know what the glitch was (do we ever?), but the end result was that all of my current bookmarks are just....gone. A lot of the old ones are gone too and the resulting bookmark structure is....weird. Haven't quite figured it out yet.

My initial reaction was to moan and groan and do much weeping and gnashing of my teeth.

My second reaction was to realize what a wonderful thing this was!

Gone are all the bookmarks to the journals I enjoy reading but no longer have time to read.

Gone is the guilt!

Gone is the nagging feeling that "I really need to do something to weed out these bookmarks."

It's a whole new world. A clean slate.

Of course I lost all the Palm stuff sites--but maybe that's not such a bad thing either. I won't be tempted...for awhile.

It will be brief, but it will be sweet. I will save my new stream-lined-ness.

Now, before you tell me that I should have been backing up these bookmarks, let me say that the first thing I did (after the crash, of course) was to see how I could prevent losing all the bookmarks again, but I can't find a way to back up Opera bookmarks. If anybody knows and would like to enlighten me, I'll be beholdin'.

But in the meantime, I'm just going to slowly build back up again, organizing better this time...and maybe find an easy way to back things up at least on a database or something.