You can see patches of floor in what will be the baby’s room now. We gave away the futon that had followed us since college, moved a worktable out to the living room, shoved the curbside-scavenged cat tree to a corner. There’s still too much there that needs not to be, but suddenly one can see what’s supposed to happen to everything. Our current plan is to cede half of a room we use as an office to the baby, and let it push us out the rest of the way according to its own needs and our own changing priorities. We’re planning to attempt to co-sleep for as long as seems appropriate, but that won’t last forever, and anyway it’ll be marginally easier to identify how clean the house is by the fraction of our child’s things currently in that room or not. Just think of it as entropy — the more evenly distributed the baby stuff is throughout the house, the higher the entropy level and the less tidy the house is. You can fight entropy for a while, by tidying, but you expend more energy than you recover in entropy, and eventually you’ve reproduced the heat death of the universe in the space of a single San Francisco flat. The real thing should take about a googol years. Based on the parents I’ve known, the parental heat death takes about three weeks.
The last couple of room-excavating projects have dealt with accumulated data, in the form of a shelf full of CDROMs and a large box full of floppy disks. Most of the floppies were left over from the early 1990s, when I was a young geekling with a whole life full of data generation and consumption still ahead. That was a transitional period in personal data history — hard drives were finally cheap enough to be widespread, but networks weren’t; meanwhile, floppies were plentiful and cheap, albeit slow and small. Hence they acted much like a packet-switched network; you might overwrite one many times over, so labeling became pointless, and a floppy you hadn’t touched in a month was probably one you wouldn’t touch again except to write over it again. You could still take backups on floppies, but it was a huge pain in the ass, an exercise in multiplicative failure probabilities, and so it was only done for the more important stuff.
This was probably something I should have dealt with a long time ago, but didn’t, so now floppies are obsolete and CDROMs aren’t far behind. Floppy drives are getting scarce. Fortunately, despite past attempts at house-emptying, I found four of the things, one of which worked. Scripted together a recovery process which required one keystroke plus the physical floppy swap, and on to a fun afternoon being reminded of long-lost data, in amongst all the I/O errors.
As it turned out, about a third of the data was beyond readability. Another third was on old 800K mac floppies, which the PC floppy drives I had on hand couldn’t read anyway. The remainder held a few good bits in amongst the random bits of elderly DOS software, install disks for ancient Linux versions, etc. There were bits of my old BBS in there (even USER.LST, which kept Beth occupied for a good while). Solutions to assignments in my early CS classes. Captures from chat systems that no longer exist. My registered copy of {COMMO}. It was all very entertaining.
On the other hand, between the floppy box and the CD shelf, it took about six hours to clear perhaps a cubic meter of space. That’s probably the worst ratio so far in this effort. I suppose it follows, since the complexity of the contents of that cubic meter was so much higher than on the other shelves — pick up a tripod or a rubber ball, by comparison, and you know quickly what you’re dealing with. At a rough estimate, a single unskilled person-hour is currently worth about ten gigabytes of storage, if it’s empty, but valuing nonentropic data is trickier. Was it worth six hours to save perhaps a quarter terabyte? Probably not — like physical possessions, most data depreciates. OS/2 drivers for a PCMCIA ethernet card? They probably took man-years to produce, but now their value is zero. There again, like physical possessions, a few kilobytes here and there will turn out to be genuinely valuable, either as antiques or as useful expressions of facts. It’s hard to know in advance.
Anyway, I saved what I could. And then I broke them down to their constituent parts — piles of steel and plastic, gauze liners, and a mound of ferrite-coated plastic film. A little degaussing on the latter, and now it’s just material scrap for the recyclers. And a bit more shelf space for the baby, who will at least have more mobile forms of storage for the data it’ll produce.
- Devin
