archives

hmm.

so i’m finally getting around to cleaning up some old files that have been accumulating — just wondering what the hell to do with it all. for example, my eudora folder from 1997 – 2004 (roughly my Reactivity time) is 577 MB (with no attachments). sort of ridiculous. should i keep it around? delete it? i don’t know. it’s not like books & letters — doesn’t take all that much space & isn’t that heavy to carry around — but it’s not useful, for sure.

although, looking through the oldest file i could find in that bunch cracked me up — my brother’s resume from when he was in college and included: "Summer 1994   FRANK AND HENRY’S FAJITA HUT  Rockwall, TX". too funny. reminds me of so many ridiculous jobs i’ve had. fastfood cook at Quick Wok; ride operator at Jungle Jim’s Jamboree.

i guess the occassional humor value is maybe worth toting around gigabytes worth of stuff. (question to ponder: would i rather have all this stuff just archived at google forever & ever? quick response: ick. no. 2nd response: maybe. 3rd response: i’m not sure i care.)

4 comments

  1. Are you a packrat in life as well as in email? I am. I just recently moved and finally gave away my graphics, computer languages, and systems textbooks even though I’ve been a UI designer for 2 years and am headed to grad school in the fuzzy psych anthro side of HCI, if anything. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to give away my AI, computer ethics, or gender sociology course readers. My email is this way too. My gmail has 10s of thousands of messages JUST in the inbox, and I like knowing the archived stuff is out of the way, but still there. I still have essays I wrote in high school. The only time I’ve gotten rid of computer files was when the divine forces of hardware failure ripped them from my iron grip.

  2. Oh, found your blog from Bob Sutton’s blog, btw. 🙂

  3. Are you a packrat in life as well as in email? I am. I just recently moved and finally gave away my graphics, computer languages, and systems textbooks even though I’ve been a UI designer for 2 years and am headed to grad school in the fuzzy psych anthro side of HCI, if anything. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to give away my AI, computer ethics, or gender sociology course readers. My email is this way too. My gmail has 10s of thousands of messages JUST in the inbox, and I like knowing the archived stuff is out of the way, but still there. I still have essays I wrote in high school. The only time I’ve gotten rid of computer files was when the divine forces of hardware failure ripped them from my iron grip.

  4. Oh, found your blog from Bob Sutton’s blog, btw. 🙂