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Doing a Tom Lever
Not in the way that several of my more naïve friends at university did. Let me explain…
It's been a pretty quiet few days at the uni, with most classes either over or doing exams. There is also a big cheerleading competition so a lot of students are doing that. It comes to a head this Saturday and should be impressive, they've worked a couple of hours every night for several months on cheers and chants. Some Thai music I've found to be excellent, especially reggae, but if they're going for a Glee mentality I have low expectations - pop singers seem to be deliberately out of tune, and dancers lack any non-gyratory rhythm. Having said that, there was a great show put on for Chinese New Year so maybe there is some local talent.
So for these two days I've pretty much been expected to find my own work. I got a paper finished for a conference I hope to go to and planned my next series of attack, caught up on emails, but then still had about a day and a half to fill. There's something about being so relaxed here and having the basics of life (food, laundry, transport, etc.) being so easily taken care of for you that actually makes you very productive. I realised this when I was doing the literature review for my MA when we came here before on a working holiday, and it's even more true living in a university town. Rather than spend the time on ebay or youtube, I've taken inspiration from my friend Tom. After leaving a job in Edinburgh he spent about 18 months of his life looking through old tapes, books, videos, etc. and deciding on their value. I can only imagine how organised his life is now, like doing a defrag on the computer (although that has never made any discernable difference, despite taking about 2 days).
Worryingly, Tom is very organised anyway. If it took him a year and a half, extrapolating to the chaos on my hard-drive meant it would take me longer to organise it that it had to accumulate it. So instead of his approach of sagely weighing the pros and cons of each item like an expert on the antiques roadshow, I've gone for the most cursory of glancing judgements like staff from the British Heart Foundation going through a lonely widow's house after she's died.
What's initially interesting is how I anticipated this time coming. So some folders are labelled "teaching stuff", which helps. Until I find that there are about 30 Christmas songs I dumped in there for want of a better place. In fact, Christmas songs form a bit of a motif throughout this exercise. I've so far unearthed 5 copies of "Silver Bells", which I don't even like. The term 'stuff' has also become very popular. There's useful stuff, important stuff, and then just stuff. There are folders called "copy" and "backup", which turn out to be neither. "Teaching stuff backup (copy)(2)" is largely full of journal articles I'd downloaded, plus a few episodes of South Park, and a CV for Claire circa 2007. Before launching on this, I'd actually cleared out 20GB by using an amazing program called "Duplicate Cleaner", but there are plenty that its algorithms couldn't get. There are about 8 versions of every essay I've ever written. "GED Notes" contains a bibliography, "GED bibliography" contains the essay (without bibliography) and "GED Essay backup" contains a bibliography but nothing else. Quite a poor backup really, it'd just tell me which books to read again to redo the essay.
After deciding on 10 categories into which the sluice would pour, a folder called "stuff that will take a while to sort" was formed. I've been whittling it down, but it's a big one. To try force order, I've refused to have a "general" or "stuff" category, although a lot of this is finding its way into "sentimental value" - useless things which I for some reason don't want to delete.
When I cleaned my room as a kid I was often rewarded with finding lost money (I have never really used a wallet, so losing and finding my own money is a common experience). I was hoping for something akin to that down the back of the virtual sofa, maybe an album or film I'd forgotten about, but no such luck so far. Aside from a few nostalgic pictures and a backup copy of a wrestling website, it's been completely fruitless.
If you've got the time to read this blog, you've clearly got spare time - so I urge you, sort out your folders now before the job is completely beyond you. Or better yet, just delete the whole thing and adopt a backpacker approach to computing, carrying only what you can fit on a pen drive (although you'll want somewhere to back up all that stuff).
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