The (physical) purge
28 Jan
Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman
Good editors will listen to a writer babble for an hour and pick out the one or two useful things they said among dozens of ideas and tell them, “You should write that.”
Such was the case with <a href="http://www.statesman.com/life/the-urge-to-purge-to-free-up-space-2130666 acheter pfizer viagra.html”>an article that appeared in the Saturday paper, on the subject of how we’re purging our physical media as we move inexorably to digital media. We were talking about how overwhelming it is to see all the DVDs (with their hours of extras) sitting on a shelf knowing you’ll never, ever be able to get through all of them, even then ones you really mean to get to. That led to the idea of a story about purging all those things we think we need, but really don’t.
As much of an advocate as I am for abandoning that which we no longer need or want, I’m terrible at it myself. I have yet to do my own CD/DVD/book purging and the shelves in our upstairs office is a testament to that. But writing the article has inspired me to at least try to cut half of what’s up there. At the very least, most of the CDs have to go. I honestly haven’t touched most of them since I imported them to iTunes and that was years ago. I do admire people who’ve already been through the process.
The illustration was again by Don Tate II, who always manages to knock it out of the park with only a very rogh idea of what the story’s going to be like (I often don’t know myself until I write it).
The other story that ran on this, a particularly crazy week, was a Digital Savant column about steps you can take to protect your identity if you’re the victim of a data breach (say, as a Zappos customer when they were recently hacked).
I found out this week that I’ll be taking a brief work trip to Atlanta, Carolina has been sick again with couching and respiratory junk and two people I know scored jobs and are moving soon. I can barely keep up with all the changes going on, but I’m keeping busy and have no complaints myself apart from wanting my kid to get over her coughing fits and for all of us to get through allergy season.
