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Living the e-Life


As the year end approaches, as usual, I end up trying to clean and re-organise stuff. My room's cupboards, shelves, and my desk receive a little attention, but the focus here, as you can guess, is electronic data.

Thanks to me starting to watch anime, my 500GB portable hard disk has been filled to capacity. My old NAS was only half filled, but it had my games and other applications like Photoshop in them. It's really difficult to organise e-data properly I tell you... You can't exactly take a look at them anytime you want since you need a computer to do so, and you can only look at a small portion inside a window. There's no way to like "take a step back and see" like the way you would in a library. And next, there's just sooooo much of e-data. Not in size, but in terms of files. The number of files I've accumulated is a damn lot. And with so many, it's difficult to look through all in a huge list, so out pops folders, and with folders you get a huge tree if you want to organise them in an easy-to-find way.

To combat the storage problem is easy. I went and got myself a 4-bay NAS storage running RAID 5 (for redundency sake) giving me an effective 6TB worth of space. That should last me some time I suppose...
But yea check this out. For media I have besides movie files, also TV series files, small clips (like downloaded off youtube or other cool stuff from other websites) music files, pictures that are computer generated, a collection of "fail pics", pics of my favourite animes, and pictures snapped from my holidays, outings, photoshoots, etc. (pictures are like the most difficult to organise. They run in numbers and have no description. So even the search function will be difficult to use.)

For documents, I have: documents from homework from school, documents on templates for homework for school, documents for university applications, documents ABOUT university applications, documents for scholarship applications, documents ABOUT scholarship applications, documents of my achievements, documents on research projects I did, documents for extra reading, documents on internet routing (IP address allocation for my home, outside, and open proxy IPs), documents to help me build a better computer (price lists, articles, com parts list), electronic parts datasheets, circuit diagrams, gaming cheat codes lists, game data analysis, HTML tutorials, TI-BASIC tutorials, my Lucid Dreaming e-Journal, and music scores.

Then I have a rather large folder of online stuff: My website — 1 file for each webpage in this site (including those you don't see) and including headers and footers, my previous website (the entire file structure), thumbnails of pictures in the gallery, pictures in the gallery themselves, and a backup of all my blogposts that I make here. My forum stuff (when I used to be a moderator): Includes a stickied post which I updated regularly, header and footer for the forum, the style sheet, screenshots of future developments (handed to me by other admins), avatars and signatures.

The number of files to organise and backup are just staggering. Most of our lives practically exist in electronic form now. Think of the uni apps for example. Practically all applications have a majority of their part online. Our data is e-data — bits (or should I say bytes) of information on magnetic or non-magnetic media. And a growing proportion of it is going online. Most people use online web mail, and are members of at least one e-social network. Many are also members of forums (which is also an e-social netowork, but with a different purpose mostly). Our thoughts, our voices, our records, are all online, and stay in cyberspace. Facebook is growing, a bit too big I might say (but that's just me being paranoid), and with it the amount of data of our lives. Our status updates, our organised events, our pictures, our comments, are all on it. Google docs also brought work online. Now it's possible to access your documents anywhere, anytime, with access to the internet.

If someone or for that matter, something, were to suddenly "pull the plug" on these data, years of history will be gone. Just think about all our information online that has been a record of us. Websites can go down without even a moment's notice, and all of these could be gone before we could realise it. It's a reason why I've started to backup all my facebook photos. These are memories we're talking here. Memories that can last longer than we ever could. Memories that are also a part of history.

It is really interesting now, for all our activities and a great many of our possessions (including our money, did it just occured to you?) are all formless now, untouchable and invisible. They are just but bits and bytes on storage media. When you take a step back and see that by through cables and wires, we get messages across to others, we transfer and share emotions, memories, and experiences, we even grow closer together (I'm referring to online games here), you can see that we have indeed gone into a new age of communication.

19:33 26 Dec 2010
Thoughts

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