Every time stuff gets über-stressful in my life I start doing one of two things, throwing stuff out or "getting my affairs in order". Last week I plowed into 8 storage boxes that had sat in the back bathroom for the past 12 or so years, reducing them to about 3. I'm by nature an incorrigible pack-rat, so much of the stuff was things that 90% of people would never have put in a box in the first place.
Tonight it was somewhat of the other option. As long-time readers of this space are probably somewhat aware, I used to write poetry. I used to write a LOT of poetry, most of which, frankly, is pretty damn good for what it is. Unfortunately, the vast majority of it was sort of the literary crystallization of dark emotional states, which was creating something of an NLP-like feedback loop of unending, soul-crushing negativity. It was probably easier for me to quit drinking than it was to quit writing poetry, as for years and years I wrote 250 poems each year like clockwork, and the writing was a major part of my self-image.
Several years ago I started working on a big poetry site that was going to eventually have ALL my thousands of poems up there (see http://i.am/btripp), but stopped work on it back in 2002 (for the very silly reason that MSIE didn't show the navigation block "nicely" and I was going to switch to an image map, but could never get motivated to go back and re-code the hundreds of pages already up with the new code block, and I didn't want to move forward until I'd "fixed" the existing pages). I recently was showing somebody the site, and was randomly pulling up poems, and quite liked them ... which got me thinking that I really ought to do something to make sure these don't get "lost in time like tears in rain".
Fortunately, I've been OCD for a long time and have my old poetry files nicely organized on 3.5" floppies (which I'd wisely copied the files onto from the original 5.25" floppy disks about 17 years ago) and tonight I decided to transfer all those over to a new 4gb flash drive I'd picked up.
OK, so all this is pretty much a set-up for me having a "amazing tech moment" ... it boggled my mind to realize that my $7.99 (delivered) 4gb flash drive would hold the files from four thousand 3.5" floppies. If I hit a day when I find myself bored and unable to bring myself to work on anything new, I may just have to load this up with the hundreds of old floppies that are in various storage cases around here!
Now I just need to find that program that will convert those old PFS:Write files to .txt or .doc!