Starting over, as posted in
Bubblews:
Empty New Year
After sleeping through the New Year's fireworks down the road, I woke up like January First was any other day, then went to my desk to see how my computer project was going. I had added a new partition to the hard drive so I could install Lubuntu, a newfangled operating system. I planned to have a choice to boot up to that or to good old Windows, like that would change my life. But I discovered that somehow, I had actually killed my hard drive. So, by golly, it did change my life!
By the end of New Year's Day, I had reinstalled good old Windows, tweaked some settings and installed some programs. But when I went to drag over the personal files I had stored on a separate hard drive, I discovered that it was dead too. Trying not to panic, I told myself that the gurus down the street will wake it up – that enabled me to sleep that night.
I went to the gurus today and learned two things: It would cost thirty-five bucks just to see if they could wake it up and at least another seventy-five to copy it over to a third drive, one I had bought on the way there. Fortunately, that was only twenty bucks – they're a lot cheaper these days. But after that expense and hearing of another hundred-plus to resurrect the past, I went straight home to ponder.
That drive had copies of my entire computing history: almost every email since the late nineties, every story I've ever written, passwords to programs I thought I couldn't live without and a bunch of other stuff that I can't recall, but undoubtedly will. I pondered that as much as I'd like to have all that back, I'm not sure it's worth the money. And I even think I might be better off without it.
For instance, out of those thousands of emails I had stored, how many have I needed to resurrect? Maybe one or two, in almost twenty years. How often do I resurrect one of my old stories? Never. Can I live without those vital programs? Because they make life easier, I might be better off without them. Finally, how bad do I need the stuff I can't even remember? If you don't mind, I'm not even going to answer that stupid question.
In fact, right now, I think I might be better off without that stuff that I've been dragging around since computer living began. And I think this might have happened on new year's day for a reason. I even think I might have done this on purpose, subconsciously at least. It's kind of exhilarating to wake up with no past, like I took an amnesia pill last night.
I haven't lost everything, of course. Thanks to this new thing we call The Cloud, it seems that I have almost all the contact specifics, enough to allow me to compile another twenty years worth of very important stuff that I'll lose one day like I did yesterday. And I can always cough up a hundred bucks to see if all that data is still on that drive – at least until I throw it away.
