Casual Friday: Digital Packrat

I have a tendency to keep everything.

In real life, this is a problem, and one which is solved by the fact that my wife has no sense of nostalgia and will throw my garbage away behind my back.  I pretend not to notice and we move on peacefully.

In the digital world, though, it has amusing results.  In a fit of nostalgia, I recently stumbled onto the oldest archived version of my first “web page,” from 1995.  In it, I mention someone as a good friend.  Fifteen years later, I cannot remember who this person was.  There’s something sad about that, don’t you think?  The Internet never forgets, though.  I’ve found much older stuff out there, archived on weird mailing lists or whatever, stuff I have trouble believing came from my keyboard but obviously did.

I also have carried the same text files from computer to computer since the first PC-compatible machine I ever got, in the late 80s.  Since I was an awkward teenager in the late 80s, you know what this means?  I still have all the awful stuff I wrote as a misunderstood loner in high school.  Lyrics to heavy metal songs that never got set to music.  Nasty unsent letters.  Poems that would delete themselves if they could, they’re so bad.  The beginning of a horror novel which thankfully never got finished.

Yup.  It’s all there.

And I back it up nightly on Mozy too.

My name is Dave, and I’m a digital packrat.