Technical Difficulties
Arriving home to my cute little house in my cute little village on the edge of the temperate rainforest in southern Australia, I naturally was eager to get the pictures off my DSLR as well as try to trouble-shoot the external hard drive. Recall that (A) I bought a new laptop right before the trip since the old one had finally become too tedious to feasibly use with several keys no longer working; and (B) that the external hard drive worked until literally the moment I was setting up for a presentation to a room full of people, and all my presentation materials were on the hard drive! Since the whole reason I lug a laptop around the world is to give presentations, this is the very definition of "you had ONE job!!"
I'm not actually that technically adept. Trouble shooting the hard drive consisted of confirming that nope, it still doesn't work. Plugging it in makes a connect noise on the computer, and the light lights up on the hard drive, but it doesn't show up as a network locaiton. I tried all three USB ports with the same response. That was the extend of trouble shooting ideas I could come up with.
Okay time to try the DSLR. I had neglected to bring the proper cord with me, the camera end connection being the wider trapezoid. The proper trapezoid-to-USB cord rigged up and... nothing.
Okay two memory-through-USB devices aren't working. Try my phone to see if that works. Phone seems to work (though yesterday it was behaving a little odd itself, very slow to read the files). Still though, two devices not working and the third not quite 100%, seems to be a computer issue.
So I dust off and turn on the old laptop, (which I've decided to rename from "Sparky III" to "Rocinante.") and... neither device works there either!! Though also that laptop had lost the ability to transfer pictures from the phone a few months ago (can read them fine but the file transfer of even just one image will often never finish).
Electronics naming aside: I kind of feel like naming the new laptop after one of the "horses of loa" in William Gibson's Neuromancer series but can't remember their names and can't actually seem to google them up... which is kind of ironic. Anyone remember their names?
Bottom line... it's kind of hard to trouble-shoot and isolate the problem when every electrnoic device I have is ancient and unreliable!!! My phone itself has a number of quirks (its from 2013 I think), old laptop is from 2010, DSLR I bought off my cousin in 2012 and it was old then, external hard drive is from 2013 and never had a problem before this. Problem could be in any one of the cords as well, I don't know how old they are, but have used a different cord for each of these devices, but don't have spare cords to try.
My computer savvy friend Mick might come over this evening with some new fully functional equipment which will aid in trouble-shooting.
Since this laptop is brand new and all my documents and everything is on the hard drive I'm currently unable to access any of my stuff.
Anyway in the mean time if anyone has any ideas I'm all ears.