Geek: Digitization Project revelations from year 2000 and prior
At the end of the 2000's and heading on in my file folder.
I'm SOOO glad I didn't decide to just burn the case of old files. It's not so much nostalgia as a treasure trove of idea gems, and self snapshots extending my long term memory, helping me answer questions like "have I always done that?" or "when did I first started getting into ....". I'm also really glad I didn't outsource this part it to someone else, the scanner occasionally drops a few through a wide variety of reasons, and it's good to be on top of it....as I care the most, For those attempting, the sheet fed scanner does a much better job on most documents than a camera, and flat-bed, the lighting is more even, it 'irons' down the wrinkles. and there are many benefits from this review process, especially as getting to officially self-accepted 'adult hood'.
It's a bit odd scanning at times getting confused with paper space and digital space. The scanner I have looks a bit like a printer, so seeing giant sheets of mostly black triggers that "oh shit I'm wasting ink/toner" when in reality it's just a bit flipped one way or the other. Around page 600 I've also skipped caring if the pages are black and white, color etc. Hard drives are getting so cheap, and going through and recompressing them to something else would be easy, conceivably have a program to autocrop/adjust images etc.
One of the advantages that didn't occur to me from digitizing and *NOT* categorizing into folders as I am prone to do, is I have a folder of 1000+ thumbnails of pretty much everything that hit paper from 1989 to 2000 (I was/am the idea packrat). Floating over a folder of that folders reminds me of brainstorm which ties into another recent revelation about NLP/dissociation I'll skip. It's easy to spot the blank pages and delete them vrs during scanning. In some ways such anal compulsive organizing is pointless, I suspect that rigid hierarchies of folders is going to be replaced by tagging +ontologies in the next decade, if so creative naming the file like "1998, drawing, ..." can serve as an interm for conventional search. I will likely create a utility to cache the drawings to make is similar to flipping through paper, as previewing 35-100MB Tifs one at time is slow on current PC's.
For me every document is a snapshot in time, zooming into the page fullscreen is zooming into the memory. I can usually remember a bit about where I was, what I was doing, and branch out to the rest of life from there. Ironically it's the random notes, and backgrounds that help provide the most context. Like I have drawings on dot matrix printers....with ribbon continous feed paper, which immediately tosses me into the second story office overlooking the living room with the huge monochrome PC and bulbous monochrome monitor. I can still hear the *bbzzzzzznnnnt* as the print head went back and forth, burning through the ink soaked ribbon on the large format epson. I have other's written on paper from work, and though the page is opaque I can almost look through it like a window and see around in the office, the number of rows back, the callpad with it's worn, the funky plantronics headset, everything in neutral grays. Just like in Harry Potter/VR.
In some ways I haven't changed one iota in over a decade..or 2, same metaphors, same diagrams. Which can be frightening or reassuring depending on how I light it.
I have a menagerie of metaphor I've been cataloging. One which I theorize is somewhat related to the little prince - I won a drawing contest as a kid and got the video on VHS...what every 10 year old wants), which I think I only have recently appreciate, and the metaphorical world that he lives in, the indirect forces that play upon him. In my world this abstract little character with a crown, and frequently sitting on a throne on a unicycle, pushed/pulled by little minions or obelisks. In the 11 years I've been using it, he too has evolved as I have. It will make a fun/unique game like Myst + marble madness someday. I haven't seen anything like it yet.
One of my metaphors are everybody lives variations on this paradox, especially true if you can only read 5 words at a time:
The following sentence is false.
The preceding statement is true.
In real life, substituting words for real world things, we often go from word to word, with abject fascination...never making the final synapse/connection that the only way out is not playing by the rules, though in the case of what making us happy, sometimes accepting the paradoxes/nonsense is the only way to 'win'. Journaling/Scanning provides more reference points, helps reveal those cycles, expose greater truths like the core values I live by, make change, or in the case of those which can't be changed avoid or accept them.
There is a certain power in these deep seated behaviours/goals/ida even if in the scheme of things they aren't any more/less objectively important if were to reconsider them today. It's primal in a way, like I remember listening to the an recently digitized audio cassette from my early days (5 years old or so), and the impact was immense, all these dialogs I'd memorize but forgotten I knew, each rediscovered passage shaking me like ratatouiee, it had bypassed all the sophisticated defenses we develop as adults, as almost nothing has that effect/access on me anymore.
Back in junior high being the uber introverted fatty. I wrote a lot of bad poetry (who doesn't it), unrequited love, bouts depression, social envy and anxiety. Now with hormones less raging love is less of a focus, but I still have the same bouts of everything feeling rather non-descript, part of this I theorize is living in abstracto-land/in my head. To counterbalance this there are intense highs from the creative process, and gaining understanding...often of myself. Sadly these understandings sometimes fail to produce any measurible lasting change in happiness or sadness, partly as I like spock think emotions cloud objectivity or worse as an engineer being cynical helps me see potential problems before they happen. Some bouts I suspect are enviornmentally, e.g. creative mania, stay up till 4am, wake up after 5hours of sleep, disrupting circadian rhythm taking a week to get back on track, then hitting another ideastorm... some of this can be see in the intensity and detail of the drawings.
Handwriting is fun too. I totally forgot there weren't such things as typewriters in junior high accessible to us. Over the years, it's like looking at 3-5 different peoples handwriting. Even a page written a day from each other, my handwriting could at times be just as illegibly messy, or drafting perfect to make me question if it was the same year, Though I know from recent days, the messy is just the first draft, or a concept I haven't fully formed yet, it's the haste of writing in haste...sketching of sorts which never occured to me as applying to handwriting. I used to torment my teachers by writing 3 lines of text...to one line of college ruled paper armed with a mechanical pencil. I would have made a great surgeon. Since I am now having to read it with much older eyes, trying to parse the electron microscope sized, guess I am paying for that 'attention to detail', thankfully scanners have better vision than any human.
The quality of writing in some ways has improved vastly from my junior high days, I was a run on, patchwork, mixed metaphor, vocabulary abuser. Part of this I blame on a voracious reading in junior high, and being overachiever/suckup to english teachers who rewarded by better grades though obfuscation by superior vocabulary; ) ..it worked, I found a transcript and straight A's in english forever. I really wish teachers had given points for succinctity versus extra points for length. I want a class to teach converting the Odessy to Clif notes sent SMS ;) This realization is relieving as somedays, I wonder if my "speed writing" omission of words, patchiness, mixed tense is a recent thing from spending to much time not-breathing during programming, turns out it's just my brain...
Over the years I see the same cycle of goals focusing on 1) creations many that get discarded for various reasons. 2) attempting to financial freedom. For the latter, a few MLMs, Amway, Global Prosperity, 2-3 startups. Impossible dream/insanity or tenacity? Think I've got it this time, but didn't realize I had been working on it quite so long.
I've been doing Information Visualization since ....junior high. Basically casting abstract ideas into something easy to picture to make it more easy to manipulate. Part of this is a visual language my subconscious likes to bubble up to help me understand more complex things. I Some diagrams and metaphors I've completely forgotten about and are quite beautiful/brilliant, if I were to create them today they would still hold up as relevant/eloquent. A frequent preoccupation with growing of lists into hierarchies, heterarchies/ nested hypergraphs. Tyring to learn programming (which was very non-intuitive for me) is kinda comical. My recent work for my Cogs library and the state behavior pattern library is in someways a lifelong puzzle I've been trying to solve, trying to extend MindMapping into the time domain. Looking forward, I am still am in the early days of technology being able to support and being able to benefit from it.
Human Computer/VR stuff. You name it, I've designed it, chairs goggles, projectors, portable devices. Amusing how close my workstation is to what I have currently, and continues to evolve into. It's nice to know where things are going.
Though I have almost gotten all of the pages, and as fascinating as it's been. I'm going to hold onto the physical equivalents them until a backup copy has been successfully put somewhere like amazon. It's been about a 5 days of intermittent effort, I'd rather not repeat. Part of me still wonders what scanning technology of the future will offer, like being able to go back into time based on the thumbprint of time on a physical inorganic item, would make a nice sci-fi concept.
There are songs about x-girlfriends slashing records, which is especially damaging if your a dj, but I wonder how many are now resorting to smashing laptops, xboxes, cellphones and harddrives.
I'm SOOO glad I didn't decide to just burn the case of old files. It's not so much nostalgia as a treasure trove of idea gems, and self snapshots extending my long term memory, helping me answer questions like "have I always done that?" or "when did I first started getting into ....". I'm also really glad I didn't outsource this part it to someone else, the scanner occasionally drops a few through a wide variety of reasons, and it's good to be on top of it....as I care the most, For those attempting, the sheet fed scanner does a much better job on most documents than a camera, and flat-bed, the lighting is more even, it 'irons' down the wrinkles. and there are many benefits from this review process, especially as getting to officially self-accepted 'adult hood'.
It's a bit odd scanning at times getting confused with paper space and digital space. The scanner I have looks a bit like a printer, so seeing giant sheets of mostly black triggers that "oh shit I'm wasting ink/toner" when in reality it's just a bit flipped one way or the other. Around page 600 I've also skipped caring if the pages are black and white, color etc. Hard drives are getting so cheap, and going through and recompressing them to something else would be easy, conceivably have a program to autocrop/adjust images etc.
One of the advantages that didn't occur to me from digitizing and *NOT* categorizing into folders as I am prone to do, is I have a folder of 1000+ thumbnails of pretty much everything that hit paper from 1989 to 2000 (I was/am the idea packrat). Floating over a folder of that folders reminds me of brainstorm which ties into another recent revelation about NLP/dissociation I'll skip. It's easy to spot the blank pages and delete them vrs during scanning. In some ways such anal compulsive organizing is pointless, I suspect that rigid hierarchies of folders is going to be replaced by tagging +ontologies in the next decade, if so creative naming the file like "1998, drawing, ..." can serve as an interm for conventional search. I will likely create a utility to cache the drawings to make is similar to flipping through paper, as previewing 35-100MB Tifs one at time is slow on current PC's.
For me every document is a snapshot in time, zooming into the page fullscreen is zooming into the memory. I can usually remember a bit about where I was, what I was doing, and branch out to the rest of life from there. Ironically it's the random notes, and backgrounds that help provide the most context. Like I have drawings on dot matrix printers....with ribbon continous feed paper, which immediately tosses me into the second story office overlooking the living room with the huge monochrome PC and bulbous monochrome monitor. I can still hear the *bbzzzzzznnnnt* as the print head went back and forth, burning through the ink soaked ribbon on the large format epson. I have other's written on paper from work, and though the page is opaque I can almost look through it like a window and see around in the office, the number of rows back, the callpad with it's worn, the funky plantronics headset, everything in neutral grays. Just like in Harry Potter/VR.
In some ways I haven't changed one iota in over a decade..or 2, same metaphors, same diagrams. Which can be frightening or reassuring depending on how I light it.
I have a menagerie of metaphor I've been cataloging. One which I theorize is somewhat related to the little prince - I won a drawing contest as a kid and got the video on VHS...what every 10 year old wants), which I think I only have recently appreciate, and the metaphorical world that he lives in, the indirect forces that play upon him. In my world this abstract little character with a crown, and frequently sitting on a throne on a unicycle, pushed/pulled by little minions or obelisks. In the 11 years I've been using it, he too has evolved as I have. It will make a fun/unique game like Myst + marble madness someday. I haven't seen anything like it yet.
One of my metaphors are everybody lives variations on this paradox, especially true if you can only read 5 words at a time:
The following sentence is false.
The preceding statement is true.
In real life, substituting words for real world things, we often go from word to word, with abject fascination...never making the final synapse/connection that the only way out is not playing by the rules, though in the case of what making us happy, sometimes accepting the paradoxes/nonsense is the only way to 'win'. Journaling/Scanning provides more reference points, helps reveal those cycles, expose greater truths like the core values I live by, make change, or in the case of those which can't be changed avoid or accept them.
There is a certain power in these deep seated behaviours/goals/ida even if in the scheme of things they aren't any more/less objectively important if were to reconsider them today. It's primal in a way, like I remember listening to the an recently digitized audio cassette from my early days (5 years old or so), and the impact was immense, all these dialogs I'd memorize but forgotten I knew, each rediscovered passage shaking me like ratatouiee, it had bypassed all the sophisticated defenses we develop as adults, as almost nothing has that effect/access on me anymore.
Back in junior high being the uber introverted fatty. I wrote a lot of bad poetry (who doesn't it), unrequited love, bouts depression, social envy and anxiety. Now with hormones less raging love is less of a focus, but I still have the same bouts of everything feeling rather non-descript, part of this I theorize is living in abstracto-land/in my head. To counterbalance this there are intense highs from the creative process, and gaining understanding...often of myself. Sadly these understandings sometimes fail to produce any measurible lasting change in happiness or sadness, partly as I like spock think emotions cloud objectivity or worse as an engineer being cynical helps me see potential problems before they happen. Some bouts I suspect are enviornmentally, e.g. creative mania, stay up till 4am, wake up after 5hours of sleep, disrupting circadian rhythm taking a week to get back on track, then hitting another ideastorm... some of this can be see in the intensity and detail of the drawings.
Handwriting is fun too. I totally forgot there weren't such things as typewriters in junior high accessible to us. Over the years, it's like looking at 3-5 different peoples handwriting. Even a page written a day from each other, my handwriting could at times be just as illegibly messy, or drafting perfect to make me question if it was the same year, Though I know from recent days, the messy is just the first draft, or a concept I haven't fully formed yet, it's the haste of writing in haste...sketching of sorts which never occured to me as applying to handwriting. I used to torment my teachers by writing 3 lines of text...to one line of college ruled paper armed with a mechanical pencil. I would have made a great surgeon. Since I am now having to read it with much older eyes, trying to parse the electron microscope sized, guess I am paying for that 'attention to detail', thankfully scanners have better vision than any human.
The quality of writing in some ways has improved vastly from my junior high days, I was a run on, patchwork, mixed metaphor, vocabulary abuser. Part of this I blame on a voracious reading in junior high, and being overachiever/suckup to english teachers who rewarded by better grades though obfuscation by superior vocabulary; ) ..it worked, I found a transcript and straight A's in english forever. I really wish teachers had given points for succinctity versus extra points for length. I want a class to teach converting the Odessy to Clif notes sent SMS ;) This realization is relieving as somedays, I wonder if my "speed writing" omission of words, patchiness, mixed tense is a recent thing from spending to much time not-breathing during programming, turns out it's just my brain...
Over the years I see the same cycle of goals focusing on 1) creations many that get discarded for various reasons. 2) attempting to financial freedom. For the latter, a few MLMs, Amway, Global Prosperity, 2-3 startups. Impossible dream/insanity or tenacity? Think I've got it this time, but didn't realize I had been working on it quite so long.
I've been doing Information Visualization since ....junior high. Basically casting abstract ideas into something easy to picture to make it more easy to manipulate. Part of this is a visual language my subconscious likes to bubble up to help me understand more complex things. I Some diagrams and metaphors I've completely forgotten about and are quite beautiful/brilliant, if I were to create them today they would still hold up as relevant/eloquent. A frequent preoccupation with growing of lists into hierarchies, heterarchies/ nested hypergraphs. Tyring to learn programming (which was very non-intuitive for me) is kinda comical. My recent work for my Cogs library and the state behavior pattern library is in someways a lifelong puzzle I've been trying to solve, trying to extend MindMapping into the time domain. Looking forward, I am still am in the early days of technology being able to support and being able to benefit from it.
Human Computer/VR stuff. You name it, I've designed it, chairs goggles, projectors, portable devices. Amusing how close my workstation is to what I have currently, and continues to evolve into. It's nice to know where things are going.
Though I have almost gotten all of the pages, and as fascinating as it's been. I'm going to hold onto the physical equivalents them until a backup copy has been successfully put somewhere like amazon. It's been about a 5 days of intermittent effort, I'd rather not repeat. Part of me still wonders what scanning technology of the future will offer, like being able to go back into time based on the thumbprint of time on a physical inorganic item, would make a nice sci-fi concept.
There are songs about x-girlfriends slashing records, which is especially damaging if your a dj, but I wonder how many are now resorting to smashing laptops, xboxes, cellphones and harddrives.