2007/05/02: The downside of migrating ... and some administrivia

Administrivia first - It seems as if blogger ate my comments settings so I didn't receive the auto-notify that I had comments awaiting moderation. Many apologies to those of you who commented. I've got everything reset now.

So. I've discovered the downside of migrating. It's reading the old documents you wrote and cringing in embarrassment. Way back in the day I used to write a column for San Diego Sidewalk. Remember the Sidewalk sites? They were Microsoft's answer to Yahoo local. They ended up getting bought by CitySearch. The column was called "Styletramps" and it appeared in the GLBT section of the site. I was the queer Vanna White of online shopping. The idea was to find fun, interesting things (fashion, music, whatever), and write about them. It was a fun gig -- they paid me $100 per column and the columns were small at 250 words.

I just pulled out the disk which had my columns and writing. Ach. The horror. The horror. Here's the bio I wrote for them:
I'm Laura Smart. Yes, that is my real name. No relation to Maxwell, but I was jealous when he married Agent 99. Barbara Feldman was not only a babe but a snappy dresser to boot! Like almost everyone else in this state I came from somewhere else -- London, Ontario to be precise. When I'm not style-tramping I'm a librarian (a.k.a. "Information Diva"). My multifarious dabbling includes playing keyboards, writing bad poetry, drawing, constantly redecorating my various spaces, matchmaking (always a bridesmaid, sigh!), and fashion on a shoe-string. Susie Bright is my hero. I'm dying to become Slater-Kinney's lead groupie and the first commercially successful female drag-queen. Maybe it's really a secret yearning to become Pamela DesBarres? While I convince Malcolm MacLaren to manage me, I'll continue my quest for San Diego's kookiest accoutrements.


I guess there really is a big difference between age 25 and 35. I am sooooooooo not that person anymore. Now days I spend my time training for long-range cycling trips with my wife and daughter, renovating my house, meditating at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, and making luscious raw vegan cuisine (fyi, i eat 80% raw ... but no, I'm not a vegetarian. I just play one on t.v.)

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posted by Laura @ 12:27 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

2007/04/26: Migrating - Have you checked your files lately??

I'm in the process of doing spring cleaning in my office(s). I pulled out a bunch of 3.5" floppies and zip disks. A big bunch. I'm cursing myself for ignoring the situation. I should have reviewed these files and migrated them years ago. Fortunately I still have access to both types of disk drive.

I found papers dating back to my undergraduate years -- that's 1990-94. Most of my electronic files have updated easily to current formats. The older ones were a bit trickier. They were in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. They ended up having some garbage in the text when I converted, which was a pain. Now I'm just enduring the tedium of viewing the contents of the disks, deciding what to keep, then wiping the disks so somebody else can use them (anybody want a pile of free disks?).

I'm going to move my files to dedicated server space rather than keeping them on fixed media. I think this will help with future refreshing and/or migrations. I definitely will visit my files a bit more frequently than every 10 years. I suppose I should do it each year when the time changes from standard to daylight savings and vice versa. Just like changing batteries in your smoke detectors.

I'm lucky. I didn't lose anything I value -- except perhaps my time. This is probably better done more frequently with fewer files.

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posted by Laura @ 1:26 PM 2 Comments Links to this post