Disaster Averted!

Dorothy

I'm going to start at the end, then go back to the beginning and work my way forward.  I'm doing this because It Is Late Sunday night and I still haven't unpacked and gotten everything ready for work tomorrow.

The last thing I did before parting ways with Liz and Erin (keep checking back; the story's coming) was take three pictures: Erin and Liz, Erin and Meg, Liz and Meg.  When Erin tried to take the Liz and Meg picture, my camera decided the memory card was unrecogniseable.  I tried reseating the card, I tried connecting it via cable to my computer....  Nothing would work.

I came home around 4 or so and put the card into my computer reader.  It happily asked if I wanted to format it.

I had a great time with Dorothy Friday night, and Liz and Erin on Saturday.  Twelve stars on a scale of one-to-five.  But I would have liked to have those pictures.

Erin (left) and Liz

[techie on]
I downloaded a free disk editor, HxD.  I saved the card image as a file.  I opened the file with a hex editor and searched for and found images.  I hoped the images were contiguous, stretching from one image to the next.  I wrote a little c# program that looked for jpeg headers: I found 246.  I extended the program to save the data from one header to the next and...  I got 246 pictures!  A couple are corrupt, many are from a long time ago (and I had formatted my card recently).  I didn't get those last couple of pictures, but almost all of my trip is back!
[techie off]

So these are a couple of (cropped but unedited) pictures from one of my best weekends ever!  Click to enlarge.