Wow, so I’ve recently just had a terrible run with hardware. First my Nokia N60 totally flipped out on me and would do nothing but reboot itself.

To add insult to injury, it would the message notification would come up and it would be operable long enough to get into but not to read any of them, before rebooting again. And I was expecting an important message! T-Mobile replaced the phone but there was no way to recover the data, so that was the end of all my contacts, texts, pictures taken, video clips…

Not even 2 weeks later, the hard drive in my Powerbook just died. No warning, no reason to suspect any problems. Just rebooted one morning and it wouldn’t come back up. And so that was the end of that and to top it off, I didn’t have any backups.

Yes, shame on me, I should have had a least one backup but I didn’t and so I bitterly had to kiss goodbye 100gig worth of data. Ordinarily I would be traumatized by a loss like this but this time I decided to look at it as an opportunity to start fresh. The biggest loss were the Rails applications I’d developed but they needed a serious overhaul, and what better way to do it than start completely from scratch! :)

I also stumbled across this post around that time too and well, it resonates…

Ellen Ullman has a new gig as a columnist for The American Scholar, which she kicks off with an elegant piece titled “Memory and Megabytes,” sparked by a decision to buy a new computer (and, coincidentlaly, to remarry), and a struggle over whether to copy all the old files from her old computers to her new one. The end is worth quoting:

Though I knew I did not want their contents perpetually before me on my ever-renewing machines… I also felt they did not belong on the floor of the guest closet– or cast out on the curb with the dead stereos and forlorn monitors.

For I understood that each was a sort of diary, a record of time bounded by the writing of a book. The arrangements of the folders, the feel of the keyboards, the look of the screens– these were as particular as handwriting, able to stun me back in time. What they held was not “data” but experience. And I knew they should be saved the way you save those other records of experience, journals, which is to say carefully but not too ceremoniously, neither thrown away nor read too often, opened only on those mysterious days– and they are always mysterious– when you can bear, and suddenly need, the shock of remembering.

So I cleared a space for them on the bookshelf and stood them up, vertically, like the notebooks they are. And they took their place among the other diaries and journals, treacherously holding the past, their power units crouched behind them like small, sleeping rats.

Yeah, I like that. So, instead of looking at 160gig of empty space and seeing loss, I see it as a new beginning. The digital forest fire that now gives way for new life.

Haha, to that melodramatic note I should add that I should be getting back to regular posting soon…

• IEEE Spectrum: Open Source Poster Boy Speaks
  a “Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do. Parakey is designed to exist on the Web and on the desktop at the same time,”
  (tags: os web)