Days grow shorter until they
grow longer. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the “shortest” day of
the year will, invariably, be followed by a day with an extra minute of sunshine
added to it…minus half an hour of daylight from a torrential downpour at 3.30
in what’s laughably referred to as the afternoon. Why mention this? It’s the “shortest” day
today, and that’s no good to me. Looks like the blog ate my homework. It’s been
a busy month, and I’m only just getting around to blogging. In a little over a
week, I must blog again.
Yes, I’d have preferred to blog on the 1st
of the month. But, in the wink of a blink, it is now the shortest day. There’s glorious
artificiality in creating a yearly archive. Soon I’ll have to copy those dusty template
files over into next year’s farm-fresh folders. Always feels false. Like doing
taxes.
Never falsify your taxes when you can fake
someone else’s.
Plastic cheese levels of artificiality
abound, when it comes to archives. But for the sake of convenience, we divide
sizeable chunks of time into years. Winter weather eerily tells me it is
winter. In Scotland, that sensation can occur in June. December tells me, with
long frosts and short days, that I must carve a new statue from a block of
marble…and call that statue the next year’s archive.
What of the main archive, though? The
collection of files, year to year? How messy is that? There’s an area of the data
factory that is the messiest. It is the part of the whole collection that is
the hardest to deal with…though it contains the fewest files.
And that part is on the dreaded desktop.
I leave files there for convenience in handy
folders with temporary names. TEMPORARY,
TEMP, TEMP 1, TEMP 2, BODY DUMP LOCATIONS, RESERVE COFFEE VAULT GRID REFERENCE,
etc. It’s my duty in life to ensure that they are all temporary files. And
that they don’t contain much.
But…by fuck…getting rid of them is hard.
They are joined by more files. At one end, the folders are deleted or join the
main archive stream. At the other end, random stuff wanders in and clogs up the
system. These items penguin-walk across the screen.
Let us be clear. The “system” is a clean
desktop. Free of file folders. I allow links to pesky services: shortcuts to the
recycle bin, media playing apps, this bit of software, that control panel, and
so on. Links are useful.
Folders, while handy, aren’t a permanent part
of the system. They are tiny fish who come in and make themselves useful to the
shark by cleaning things up. But then I have to clean up the stuff that was
cleaned up.
If I create a folder in the archive itself, away
from the desktop, for this purpose of housing temporary things, then I create a
folder that is in a drawer. Unseen. Easy to forget. Letting files slip onto the
desktop is my way of having an alarm system in my face.
Information builds up. I don’t quite know
where to archive it just yet. Or I must work on it for a bit, and then archive.
Time-specific items sit on the desktop for a day or until a particular date.
Come the appointed hour, I sweep the area as clean as I can.
Well, the big hour approaches. I must always
have an empty desktop in December. At some point in the last two weeks of
December, preferably. Definitely in the last week. Always. This is a
lie…sometimes the quick level of change required from December into January
isn’t as quick as I’d like.
Hell, I’m still eating Christmas treats in
January and cooking tinned food from December in March at the latest. Files
don’t need to be updated by the stroke of midnight as the 31st of
December steps out into the night.
I foolishly decided to research the
shelf-life of tinned goods. There’ll be
supermarket data, I said to myself. Not reams of articles in preparing your
bunker for the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse™.
It’s fine to eat cans left over from
December in the far-off realm of March.
What’s the state of play right now? There
are 67 items on the desktop. Files or folders. I’m not counting shortcuts. One
of these is the file I am typing into and another is the file marked backup that auto-generated when I saved
my work.
We’ll drop that to 65. Let me just take a
load of images away and file them where they need to go. Or delete, as applicable…
A good (indifferent) 90 minutes, and here I
am. There’s one item left – this file. And there’ll be a copy of it as soon as
I save. There. That leaves 26 links. I zapped a few of those shortcuts, as
well.
Oh. And one curious folder that has no properties
but isn’t quite a shortcut. Things are tricky in the world of archiving. You
can’t negotiate with a messy archive. I suspect you can’t really negotiate with
a tidy one, either. There’s less room for manoeuvre, there.
Can I now copy the archive for safety
reasons? I should be able to. Copying never copies the stuff on the desktop.
And so. That’s why I clear the decks. Stow loose cannons. Shiver some timbers.
Scunge the lungeons. Make ready for sail, abaft the Braithwaites…
*
Somewhere along the way, the
sun set on the shortest day of the year. Not as early as it did earlier in the
month during ALL THE RAIN IN FIVE MINUTES, but rain has that effect on the
light sensors.
I also found time to make a brief trip into
the woods, and, importantly, managed to come back again. Things stand in the
way of blogging. Another day may pass before I publish this blog. So how did I
do, in sweeping the digital dust off my electronic desktop?
A few things had to be swept under the
carpet. I moved them to next year’s archive using a spot of time travel, a flux
capacitor, and a cup of coffee. Yes, I like the annual archive to be tidied
promptly. Sometimes I really jump the gun in setting the next year’s archive
up, though. I may be late with blogging, but I am now a bit early for next
year.
*
Up before the dawn, I
resolved to publish this blog today. How fares the desktop? I’d added three
more files there overnight. Easy to move to the “right” locations. So we’re
more or less in the clear again, right?
The image in this blog is from the Tomb of Dracula. (Pencils by Gene Colan,
and inks by Tom Palmer. Colan did a few comics direct from the pencils. No one
inked Colan the way Tom Palmer did. And that...is a Comic Book Fact™. Palmer died back in August. He was 81.)
A copy
of it sat on the desktop, but I’ve moved it to a file inside the archive. And a
copy of the illustration has the starring role of BEING the desktop itself.
That’s the background. You’ll never see the desktop that clean.
This morning, the desktop is almost empty.
On the blank space to the left, I keep all the shortcuts. The blank space to
the right is reserved for temporary file and folder placement. As it is harder
to see things on the central image itself, I try to keep the desktop as clear
as possible.
That’s my traffic management system. As the
files penguin-walk their way across the wasteland, they bunch up against the
image…and then I have to do a spot of cleaning. I recommend this visual
approach to people with cluttered desktops.
Put an image on the screen centrally. Keep
shortcuts on one side and the random stuff on the other. Never the twain shall
meet, and good luck to you with that.
Right now, the desktop contains this file.
It’s here as a reminder that it is here. I work on it. Return to it. I am
alarmed that it is on the desktop. There’s the copy, saved on the desktop. And,
while I am in here, there are several phantom copies as literal temporary files
– with the extension .tmp. Those
vanish when I save and close the file.
What’s left? Finish writing. Save the work.
Transfer it to the blog. Publish. Archive the entry. Stare at a clean desktop.
Start saving everything, all over again. Some of it to the cloud. And all of it
to a portable hard drive. There are two of those hard drives. Copies of copies.
I can snatch one from the shelf if I must evacuate…
But if there isn’t time, and there isn’t,
I’ll rely on the essential material that’s saved to the cloud, to rebuild after
a fire. I have no personal copy of myself in the event of a fire, so, as usual,
I have sixty seconds to be outside once the alarm goes. If I have a hard drive
with me, fair enough. And if I haven’t, there’s the cloud. Also, if I must, I
will reconstruct things from memory. Let’s hope, if it comes to it, that I
improve on whatever I rebuild.
And now, with one mighty sweep of a digital
hand…mouse…the desktop is free…
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