Cleaning Up

Cleaning Up

About 7 years ago I bought my first laptop. A Twinhead Slimnote 9 with active matrix screen.... that means if you stood upside down, you still see clearly.  It was state of the art, had an infrared port, TV out jack, printer port, a fast speed 8x CD rom drive, 32mb Ram and 1.5g harddrive, pcmcia card with fast speed modem and a lot of other dooheekies.  And it was relatively lightweight 5.6kg.   I worked with it, rather well until it started burning a hole in my lap, and then I upgraded to another Twinhead (what can I say... it’s a barebones system and the service guy is only a phone call away) Efio 12KT.

Then came the inevitable.

I put it off until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Everyday my daughter says the same prayer before she goes to bed: “when are you going to give me that old laptop”.  Today I decided to go through the documents, and transfer them to my new laptop.

Uh oh...

New laptop (henceforth New) has no floppy drive, no parallel ports, no serial ports, one modem, one wireless ethernet and couple of RJ45s... and a few more USB2 and a spunky DVD burner.

Old laptop (henceforth Old) has no USB, there is a PCMCIA card slot with no card modem.

So how is the transfer between OLD and NEW ever going to happen?    I thought about it, I bought a huge bunch of gadgets, none of which worked...what I thought was a serial port on NEW     turned out to be a VGA out.  So, as a resort I am now saving old files onto the reliable floppy... and eventually will burn these floppies onto CD via my desktop (henceforth Desk) which fortunately does have a floppy AND a CD burner.

But gosh isn’t it interesting.... looking at the old files. By old, I mean 7 years ago, in the last century – it’s like take a stroll through your attic.  All those subscriptions and hey...wait a minute, I’ve posted notes to myself that I’ve hung things on the internet through my websites (and these are free websites) and they don’t exist anymore!    I’ve been ripped off.... where are my documents?  

You know how they say that data is no more than on and off electrical pulses... like 1 is on and 0 is off (or is it vice versa).   Do deleted data just die or do they reinvent themselves as something else?  I would like to think that they are just floating around, happily somewhere in the universe ... creating another lifeform perhaps... there could even be another universe, “peopled” by deleted data... a brave new world of bits and bytes – my deleted folder on Boy Mechanic would surely prove useful.