Movie scripts and Supergeek.

The other day, a writer friend and I attended a function put on by Screen Queensland. It was about financing movies, and more for producers than writers, but even so it was very interesting. They held this at the Brisbane State Library which is right in the centre of Brisbane, sitting on the Brisbane River.

It's hard to believe that this river was in flood nearly two years ago, and the devastation caused by the rain. They had been forecasting a bad summer, cooler and wetter and they were right. The river rose so much that most of the buildings on the river were seriously flooded.  Note the "Goodwill' bridge going across the river, it is for pedestrians only, the bridge with the bits poking into the air. An elevated motorway is also there.

This is the same scene when it was in flood. Note the Goodwill bridge. The elevated motorway is much closer to the water here.

This is the city centre just around the bend in the river. Huge disruption was caused to the CBD for some time.

One of the reasons I attended this function is that I am  having a go at writing a movie script. I 've been working on it on and off for over two years, and I am getting to the pointy end of it, ready to show it to someone. And I deleted the file. I deleted the whole flaming file, the whole script! Accidentally of course, but even so, it was gone.

I have been using a program called Celtx to write the script, and for the last month or so when I have been adding to it, I saved in on the desktop. And guess what I did with my desktop? Yes tidied it up because my computer has been going so slow it has been driving me mad.

And accidentally I put the script into the recycle bin, and emptied the thing! I was so mad at myself. I do have an old version still, but not with all the additions I have made over the past month or so.

My computer savvy daughter and I spent a whole day trying to recover this file. We tried things on youtube, some of them didn't work, and some of them were rip-offs, being free downloads, then when you got it downloaded you had to pay quite big money to use the thing.

In the end I decided to get in Supergeek, a company that comes to your home and fixes  your computer problems. Sure enough, at 8 am this morning Ross rolls up to find my lost file.  Well, he tried everything, but the file has vanished, evaporated, ka-put, gone for good. He did however, find something else that was a problem. Some months ago I tried to download a program to use to work on my photos, and accidentally, I downloaded something called Conduit.(It sounds like I accidentally do all sorts of odd things on my computer, but it hardly ever happens, I am pretty careful what I do). It was a tool bar that set itself up and I could not move it. It was a menace, making Google crash all the time and making everything go slow. He had to use some pretty powerful programs to get rid of this Conduit, which is actually a virus that continually reinfects the computer. So I was thrilled to get rid of this thing.

So if you find you have something called Conduit, or see it on the internet, don't touch it at all, and if you find you can't get rid of it you will need some pretty powerful tools to get rid of it.

So, now I have to start the last six weeks work all over again. However, yay for Supergeek for getting my computer sorted out and getting rid of this horrible Conduit thing.