Last night, I went looking for something which I thought was posted to LinkStew, only to find out that it'd never been moved over from my old site. So I went digging through my files, only to find five copies of my old site... And I only looked on two of the computers I have files stored on! So I've been on a mad file deleting rampage since last evening. I've never deleted a web page directory before, for fear of needing it again -- but today I threw out that notion and blew away thousands of files. I destroyed all of the various West High web pages I created but the one. I destroyed everything I ever did for Intelegenesis. I destroyed all of my programming projects from the classes I took at Bakersfield College. I consolodated seemingly hundreds of other directories. In general, I put things into one of three categories. 1. Things which should some day put into the stew. 2. Things which I want to keep, but don't belong in the stew and need to be incorporated into a new place. or 3. The Trash.
And if I hesitated, I trashed it. The reason I even had that much junk was because I'm normally so hesitant about trashing things. So the next step in my insanity is to add anything to LinkStew that's pending and delete the local copy. If my essay about Ford in Brave New World is in the stew, why do I need three copies of the original document? Why do I even need one?
The copy in the Stew should be the canonical copy, and there shouldn't be other copies. This saves on disk space, it saves on organizational difficulties, it makes the information safer, since the stew is backed up regularly, and it makes the information useful to everyone who isn't me.
And after I've done that, (which hopefully won't be this weekend) I'll incorporate everything that's left into an organized structure on one computer. I know where things are scattered between all of my computers, but do you know how much space that's wasting in my head? Think of all the other things I could remember with the space that remembers that I have school papers in hal:school, another:school, rincewind:Documents:School, and rincewind:/Luggage/Documents/School, and some other subdirectories which I don't actually remember.