Geek: Digitzation Project
I've had a goal to go completely paperless for awhile. Mostly got the creation completely digital, but have been lugging around a pile of history. When I left college, being prolific I started with a 55 gallon drum (!!!) and over the years have whittled it down to about 3 crates left. But since scanning is timeconsuming. I've been busy, and it's never ranked high on hte importance-o-meter., thus those boxes have been sitting in my closet for 2 years, Since we at the Ogden8 are in the process of apartment upgrades, and one of mine is a new closet system to replace the stupid one I have and the boxes are getting in the way of the closet, and the closet system is clogging up the room...time to dig in.
Today's crate has been one of the personal mishmash of agees. Various sizes and colors of scribbled notes, doodles, piano books, trips to Nasa, church days, dixieland music days, containing chapters of my life I've haven't thought about in awhile, some on paper that is taking the soft crumbled dusty appearance of leather and skin, about 50GB over the last 2 days.
In looking at 2 decades, I suppose it's possibly remarkable in how little I've changed, I've always seemed to know who I was and striving for what I wanted usually slightly saout of reach and abstract. Turns out I've been it forever, the notes, voice recordings, doodles and drawings go back to..as soon as I could draw and hit record on my audio cassette. I suppose newer generations will take this for granted, with parents blogging etc.
Since I've been carrying the pile of paper for up to 2 decades, moved numerous times shuttling it from dark spot to dark spot (closet garage/etc), but never disturbing their contents. At times I think it would be more prudent to just light a match and celebrate flushing the past in a blaze (though likely weakly burning) of glory But I figure a harddrive is cheaper than regret/wonder. Since both my mom and step mom have passed on, I have 1/2 or less of embarrassing stories. I strive to always understand more, myself included, and journalling has been a valuable tool (at times) to avoid repeats and recreation of the same ideas, . Of late I'm so future focused preoccupied by the creative process, sometimes I'm forgotten what I did yesterday;) It also helps to look through these piles, to remind myself of all the amazing places I've been and gotten to experience, the people I've been there, sometimes I forget.
Over the last decade, this is I think try 5 to get through this scanning process. You'd think scanning paper would be easy right? Insert paper, wait, repeat. First few tries were twarted by crappy scanners (most consumer scanners are crap!) , turns out scanning is not something a high IQ sane person can do by itself, as it's sometimes tedious as traffic jams. hurry up, wait.....wait....wait... !!#!$ glossy paper jammed. scanner or machine needing to be restarted, prone to nostalgia, or fascination paralysis. But ironically it can lead to a flow state while working on something else, as it's something to distract me when my other system is rendering video, restarting etc.
After getting a beter scanner and a personal assistant I thought it would be easier, and done over a year ago. But I realized that the aspect of organizing it before scanning was just as important, and I couldn't delegate that well so had lots of "where does this go? questions". Oddly paper's bandwidth when you consider flipping, and having the widescreen of a whole floor covered with notes is *way* faster than on disk/pc (though this will change..). Today's box was rather personal things (e.g stuff from my mother/grandparents) that I kinda felt better to do myself, reevaluate the worth.
As far as tools to journal and personal wiki. Last 6 months I have reinstituted keeping a drawing journal, which helps me looking back over the months to see how wide my thoughts vary, compared to my tablet PC.. it doesn't ever run out of batteries. I've also started using journaling via voice recording intially to train the speech recognition, but I've found it has the side benefit of capturing the nuance of my voice, and practices good speaking/breathing..if the speech recognition can't understand me, odds are noone else can either ;)
Getting close to the end of the scanning process, In some ways I think that having my entire history on a single harddrive, and backed up to the internet is a sort of parallel to some religions notion of a soul afterlife.
Today's crate has been one of the personal mishmash of agees. Various sizes and colors of scribbled notes, doodles, piano books, trips to Nasa, church days, dixieland music days, containing chapters of my life I've haven't thought about in awhile, some on paper that is taking the soft crumbled dusty appearance of leather and skin, about 50GB over the last 2 days.
In looking at 2 decades, I suppose it's possibly remarkable in how little I've changed, I've always seemed to know who I was and striving for what I wanted usually slightly saout of reach and abstract. Turns out I've been it forever, the notes, voice recordings, doodles and drawings go back to..as soon as I could draw and hit record on my audio cassette. I suppose newer generations will take this for granted, with parents blogging etc.
Since I've been carrying the pile of paper for up to 2 decades, moved numerous times shuttling it from dark spot to dark spot (closet garage/etc), but never disturbing their contents. At times I think it would be more prudent to just light a match and celebrate flushing the past in a blaze (though likely weakly burning) of glory But I figure a harddrive is cheaper than regret/wonder. Since both my mom and step mom have passed on, I have 1/2 or less of embarrassing stories. I strive to always understand more, myself included, and journalling has been a valuable tool (at times) to avoid repeats and recreation of the same ideas, . Of late I'm so future focused preoccupied by the creative process, sometimes I'm forgotten what I did yesterday;) It also helps to look through these piles, to remind myself of all the amazing places I've been and gotten to experience, the people I've been there, sometimes I forget.
Over the last decade, this is I think try 5 to get through this scanning process. You'd think scanning paper would be easy right? Insert paper, wait, repeat. First few tries were twarted by crappy scanners (most consumer scanners are crap!) , turns out scanning is not something a high IQ sane person can do by itself, as it's sometimes tedious as traffic jams. hurry up, wait.....wait....wait... !!#!$ glossy paper jammed. scanner or machine needing to be restarted, prone to nostalgia, or fascination paralysis. But ironically it can lead to a flow state while working on something else, as it's something to distract me when my other system is rendering video, restarting etc.
After getting a beter scanner and a personal assistant I thought it would be easier, and done over a year ago. But I realized that the aspect of organizing it before scanning was just as important, and I couldn't delegate that well so had lots of "where does this go? questions". Oddly paper's bandwidth when you consider flipping, and having the widescreen of a whole floor covered with notes is *way* faster than on disk/pc (though this will change..). Today's box was rather personal things (e.g stuff from my mother/grandparents) that I kinda felt better to do myself, reevaluate the worth.
As far as tools to journal and personal wiki. Last 6 months I have reinstituted keeping a drawing journal, which helps me looking back over the months to see how wide my thoughts vary, compared to my tablet PC.. it doesn't ever run out of batteries. I've also started using journaling via voice recording intially to train the speech recognition, but I've found it has the side benefit of capturing the nuance of my voice, and practices good speaking/breathing..if the speech recognition can't understand me, odds are noone else can either ;)
Getting close to the end of the scanning process, In some ways I think that having my entire history on a single harddrive, and backed up to the internet is a sort of parallel to some religions notion of a soul afterlife.