Dame Barbara Cartland Is Dead

Last night my 3 year old daughter informed me that she was ‘dropping Tina off at Barbara Cartland’s house.’

Tina is a cabbage patch doll with it’s face coloured blue and Barbara Cartland is a dead ‘…successful English author, known for her numerous romance novels. She also became one of the United Kingdom’s most popular media personalities, appearing often at public events and on television, dressed in her trademark pink and discoursing on love, health and social issues.’ So says Wikipedia.

If she were alive today I’m sure she’d be presenting a show on sexually transmitted disease on BBC3.

My wife and I were amused and perplexed as to how our daughter had come into contact with Barbara. Perhaps her Flemish speaking pal from Antwerp whose hair length is directly related to her constant running and getting lost in museums (according to my daughter), had told her about the dead pop romantic wordsmith? Unlikely, but then sometimes things just happen for no good reason at all.

Much like the death of my Macbook last week. Like Barbara it often appeared at public events and enjoyed discoursing on love, health and social issues. Like Barbara it is dead.

Given my trade in webology, I should have backed up. I even had the Time Machine hooked up and ready to go until a sharp ‘ping’ sound emanated from the Macbook prompting me to re-boot it and leaving me with nothing but a flashing grey folder with a question mark on it.

Nada. Nothing. Gone. Photos, invoices, pitches, proposals, ideas, business plans, the carefully disguised document with all my passwords carefully disguised within it for all my carefully disguised applications, banking and general logon-ness.

Apple Genius Bar were efficient and replaced the hard drive within 24 hours. Somehow being in their store lusting after an ‘I will break it’ Macbook Air made the news that all was lost easier to take.

Days later and now Time Machined up, the new Macbook feels like a new start, sort of digital slash and burn to promote new growth.

It may even make me a better person. I haven’t lost days sifting through my RSS reader or mourning all my lost feeds. I’ve even avoided looking at Techcrunch for 4 weeks, in part due to my wife supplying a son to accompany the daughter and in part due to my dearly departed Macbook. I’d been meaning to delete my Boing Boing feed and my Digg feed for sometime, there’s only so much total crapola you can sift through. I have vowed to treat the web and my reader with more respect.

You will see a new Adam emerge post-ping. My property porn addiction has gone the way of the financial institutions. No more private browsing. I will read only blogs and view only sites I would be proud to introduce to Dame Barbara Cartland, if she were alive and if she were my Gran or something.

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