Oporto 2013 Blog Restoration

Last modified 2022/09/14 11:14

Today I plugged in my old X40 laptop, I purchased this laptop in Portugal after my bicycle was stolen while I was at the start of my loosely defined and ultimately failed “tour around the world”.

I had prepared for the tour, I was leaving in February, and I was just going to carry on cycling, I thought about crossing Iran and going to India. It was cut short however when my bicycle was stolen in Oporto, Portugal. I retrieved the bicycle and some of the inexpensive things (my clothes and tent for example) but my passport, laptop, wallet, cash and everything else was gone.

This was perhaps the first tour where I started writing more than a paragraph or two each day, unfortunately the blog posts were stored in a database, which I thought was lost until today.

The database was for the Doctrine PHPCR-ODM and the application I built around it was an experimental proof of concept for the Symfony CMF.

I was not able to get the application fully working, and I’m not sure it was working when I stopped using it, I was able, however, to create a command to export the blog posts to markdown files and I found the stash of photos on my X40 laptop which I was able to cross reference with the blog posts.

The database I have seems to be incomplete, a backup, but it still captures 30 or so days of the journey.

The distance, duration and max speed for most of my cycle rides (according to the cycle computer) were recorded. In addition there were photos with geo-locations which enabled me to draw lines on the map.

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