Fail

What is this instinct to hoard? I really do have a problem with hoarding things and I think it's because I tend to anthropomorphise things so I feel guilty about throwing them away or getting rid of them. I'm dreadful for it and it's something I'd done all my life. It's quite worrying really and probably points to a massive flaw in my psychological makeup.

I'm the same with data on my computer. A little while ago I consolidated all my documents from various machines into one giant folder, and it came up to 17.2gb. That's not including my photo library on the iBook (about 5gb) and the music collection on the Optiplex (about 14gb). Backing up all this shit is becoming a pain. I think the very earliest stuff dates back to about 1994 from college, not the actual work, but the stuff that we created when we were bored.

There's a bit of a gap between about 1996-1998 after the 1.2gb hard drive in my 48mb RAM Pentium 100mhz PC failed and I lost pretty much everything on it except for a few things that were saved on floppies. This was when I learned the value of backups...

After that disaster nothing really happened except for a bit of writing on a Macintosh SE/30. Document creation really started again in 2000 when I got my iMac and since then everything has been stored. Transferring things from a Mac to Windows and then Linux has been a bit troublesome due to some things being in obscure file formats.

The strange thing is that I seemed to get a lot more done on that Pentium PC than I did on any of the machines that came after. I suspect the Internet has a lot to answer for in that respect, especially since broadband came along. Also back then I didn't play video games as much, if at all.

I began tidying up my room today and put some things for scrap but didn't get very far because I started by emptying two bookcases and putting it all back. The problem was that the bookcases didn't just contain books, and so it required rather more sorting than I thought. I still have my very near complete collection of Discworld books in publication order, and I also have rather a lot of Stephen King. Other notable collections in that case are all the James Herriot and Arthur Ransome books. There's also a few Haynes manuals (Fiat Panda, Diesel Land Rover, Jaguar XJ6(!) and Citroen AX), a Greyfriars annual from I think the early 1950s which depicts the scary different world of the era, the original radio scripts for the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I read a million times before hearing the actual thing), and quite a number of completely random books.

The weather has finally deteriorated again. Rain most of the day annoyingly as I was hoping to take the dog for a walk.

Lucretia is probably one of my favourite Megadeth tracks. The bass line is very hard.

Still no sound out of this damn machine. Annoying.