I’m Sorry Notes
— Additional Information and Images —
The first digital versions of the I’m Sorry flower were lost when I accidentally formatted the wrong hard drive, back in May of 1998. I also lost several other art pieces that had not been backed up yet. I also lost a set of new web pages that were nearly ready to upload to my web site. To this day, that 1998 format disaster is my biggest loss of digital works and data.
To me, at that time, that format disaster felt like a heart–sinking major loss, and I still wish that I had some of those lost art pieces back. As for those lost web pages, perhaps that was for the best. The structural design that I had used for those pages was doomed to lose favor. In fact, I think frame pages were already on their way out, I just hand not gotten the message yet. Frame pages were cool, but they had a big flaw that made them less than desirable when other people linked to the wrong frame, or worse, they linked your entire site into a frame page at their site. The search engines of that time hated frame pages too. Soon, no one, or nearly no one, was using frame pages anymore.
As for the I’m Sorry flower, I had lost all of my original digital drafts of that work in that hard drive format disaster. If I had not sent a third draft copy of the I’m Sorry flower to my dear friend, Salma Massoud, that art piece would have been completely lost, forever, like those other lost artworks.
Fortunately, Salma still had that copy of the I’m Sorry flower, and she kindly sent a copy of it back to me. This event happened before I started using web based email, so when that hard drive was reformatted, I lost all of my Inbox and Sent folder content too. All of those lost email messages is also still a wound I feel deeply to this day.
The copy of that third draft version of the I’m Sorry flower, shown above, has had the background color changed to match this page’s background color, and I have added my copyright stamp to it, but this version of the I’m Sorry flower is essentially how it looked when I sent it to Salma, all those years ago.
The I’m Sorry flower has been worked, and reworked, many times since its return to me. There are full–sized versions and small versions, all of which exist because I was able to get that third draft copy back.
Written:
Revised:
Michael A. Crane, Jr.
Artist/Webmaster/Writer
