Inside View from Ireland: Waiting to Be Found

I HAVE A TREASURE trove of artefacts waiting to be found. Some of those artefacts lie in a drawer in my home office, secreted inside mini discs, fat USB keys, 3.5" floppies and cassette tapes. Others sit unopened for years on the hard drives of old laptops. One of those laptops is a IBM Transnote, a touchscreen laptop with Windows 98. I'd like to restore its power supply and also pull records off it from 2002, my second year of blogging.

A little record-keeping exercise I started suggests I am carrying around a stash of stuff waiting to be found, like in the things I've snapped in the photo (above right). I have gigabytes of audio files, including years of interviews, ambient soundscapes, and mash-ups produced by creative multimedia students. They sit unarchived on my Sony ICD MX-20 and I have to do the right thing and harvest them immediately.

Found Track: Elektric

My time-tested Bihn bag contains a small leather case bursting with memory sticks. I must set aside time to archive them as well then use an electronic system to catalogue them.

More than 1000 text or email messages hide on my Nokia E90. I'm sure I don't need to keep all of them so it's time to discover which of those thousands of snippets need to be found and saved.

Last year's Iomega USB hard drive contains piece work, some original texts and a lot of unprocessed video. There is enough content among the 48 GB of raw video to make a short film.

And then there's my iPod, now probably incapable of serving up found stories because it's giving me the click of death. That's a shame, because I have two audiobooks on the iPod that I haven't heard, along with several presenters whose work I tagged in Huffduffer.

All these things considered, if I set aside an hour a day to explore my unfound stash, I'd be able to write some very interesting blog posts. It's time to scratch around among my found files.

Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2 Typepad service in Abbeyleix, County Laois, Ireland.

Previously: "Time Capsule in the Barn", March 21, 2009.