Friday, September 30, 2011

Couple Days Off

That's the theme for yesterday and today. 

No real reason, just "mental health days" as I like to call them.  Need to get away from the work environment for a day or two just to prevent mind fatigue and avert going-postal behavior.  Fortunately I have the type of job where I can be gone for short periods and colleagues will pick up the overflow. 

So what fun enjoyable activities am I engaging in?  How about getting into the study and doing more clutter reduction?   I pulled our old Dell desktop PC out of the dust (it was put out to pasture at the end of 2008 when Geogal got me an iMac to use as our primary system).  Before wiping the drive she wanted to make sure we have all of the photographs off of it so a good chunk of yesterday was me firing up the CPU and making copies of all image-related folders.  A twofold process.  First I copied the pics to USB drives (not very difficult at all), then burned backups of those files onto CDs. 

(An old saying I recall from the college computer lab:  Blessed are the pessimists, for they hath made backups.)

Before much longer these pictures will all be copied over to iCloud.  We also will send quite a few to our Kodak Gallery account and likely have many of them converted into prints (we simply aren't photo-intensive to have our own photo printer and the related ink expense). 

The last task was to connect the old Zip drive (via parallel port--gives away its age, doesn't it?) and check the six or seven disks I have and make backups of any photos.  However time seems to have taken its toll as the Zip drive clicked clicked clicked obnoxiously away but would never open the contents of the disk.  At least I was able to eject the 100MB disk from the drive, hoping there's no damage to the contents.  Next I headed over to the iMac, pulled up Ebay and checked prices for used 100MB Zip drives.  Not too bad, there's several available.  Might be wise to get one that's USB since I could make use of it in my present setup.  Theoretically anyway.  I'm not sure if I would trust important files to a Zip in this day and age, especially with cloud storage being readily available and inexpensive. 

So overall not a bad way to spend a day.  I didn't have any yard work beckoning and the other outdoor chores are not exactly urgent. 

And what of the old PC?  I have a vague concept of wiping the drive, reinstalling the OS, and making it into a dedicated DVR for the bedroom TV.  This would require buying a tuner card and popping it into the back of the CPU, both Geogal and I could easily do this. 

However.....I need to make sure the chip and the memory would support this task.  Looks like I'll be doing more research.  Wonder if the Dell will just be placed into our basement storage next to little Geoana's old PC (long since beyond useful).  What was all this about decreasing the clutter?

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