Mitch Gann’s

Sooner or later, you have to move on.

Today I cleaned out my trove of 3.5 inch diskettes — nearly 150 of them. For those of you who grew up with giant hard-drives and CD-ROM/ DVD drives, the “floppy disk” was the way computer files were saved and distributed in the olden days.  I never thought of 3.5 disks as “floppy” myself, though many people called them that. Unlike the 5.25 disks, the smaller ones had a hard-case and did not flop.  The 3.5s that I discarded were a mixture of personal data disks and commercial installation disks — including an unused, plastic-wrapped set of MS-DOS 6.2 installation disks and a used set of Windows 3.1 installation disks, about six disks in each set.

I ran magnets across the personal disks just in case they contained sensitive info.  One of them had a label “Novel 1993.”  I assume I wrote a novel that year — or more likely the first chapter of a novel. Maybe I have a paper copy somewhere.

Those 3.5 disks held between 1.44 and 2.0 MB of data.  So altogether, the 150 disks contained at most 300 MBs — which you could put on a tiny USB thumb drive with room to spare.

I still have a box of a dozen 5.25 floppies, the oldest software and files I own.  I can’t bring myself to toss them out.  One floppy contains another novel, or so the label claims.  The rest are mostly devoted to computer programming.  There is a copy of the legendary Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1988, the finest and fastest DOS programming compiler ever sold — and for just fifty bucks a copy.  There is a disk labeled “Play Ball” that contains a baseball game I created for my father, and a couple disks with an extensive and specialized record-keeping program I wrote for his business.

Apparently, it’s still possible to hook a 5.25 drive to your computer. You can emulate DOS, too.  I know I won’t ever bother, but I will keep the box in a back corner of my closet, just in case.

I spent time this week getting my online life organized and streamlined.  There is a certain irony in this, given the real clutter in my at-home office. But you have to start somewhere.  So I started with email.  I was inspired by How to Make Gmail Your Ultimate Productivity Center in ZenHabits.

First, I set up my Gmail account to handle all of my email from various accounts.  Then I resolved to keep my inbox empty.  I set up a label (folder) called “Needs action” where I stick any message I need to respond to but can’t at the moment. Every other message I answer/ delete, answer/ file or just delete or file. 

So far, so good. But it is easier to set up a system than to stick with it over the long haul. 

I tried some Gmail gadgets, but the only one I have stuck with is “Tasks,”  a simple things-to-do gadget from Google Labs.

Now to deal with the actual as well as virtual clutter in my life.  I wonder if Google has a gadget for eliminating stacks of books and papers?

Ah, late summer. The season of  tomatoes, sweet corn, and ragweed pollen.  An article in Science News discusses the genetic basis of allergies. I definitely have the gene.

Saturday was terrible. I stayed inside, with the windows closed and a new pollen-proof filter on the AC. Didn’t help.  The house is apparently not air-tight.  Medications didn’t help much either.

Then finally it rained.  The rain washed the pollen out of the air.

God bless the rain.

Early morning, the coffee brewing and the paper waiting on the front steps.   Sunshine everywhere. Nobody else awake.