First Tries, Purges, Digital Rubbish

I am having some mild buyer’s remorse over this Sony PCM-D100, which has been in my clutches for a few days now. I got a good deal on it but the process of actually getting it at the discounted price took a couple of months. The wireless remote control is not the wonder I thought it would be. It does not work through any type of material, so I cannot use the remote if the the D100 is in a bag or even its carrying case. For some reason they eliminated the “DIVIDE” button, which was something I used regularly. It has been replaced by a “T-MARK” button which lets you set markers within the WAV files. That sounds handy but the DIVIDE button will be missed.

But more importantly I’m just not sure this is the kind of gadget I need for recording at the piano. A 2-track or even 4-track device might make balances easier to negotiate afterward. In this my voice is too soft, and all in all it’s amateurish. I’ll figure this out.

It was never lost on me but I understand better than ever now why people do podcasts. It’s just easier than writing sentences and paragraphs. Grammar concerns are, for most people at least, considerably more relaxed in spoken conversation and monologues as opposed to the written word.

I’ve been thinking, again, about digital hoarding. I’ve accumulated and re-accumulated images and books and files of every kind, thousands upon thousands of them. This fact is echoed by a quantity of physical media which I’ve been energetically throwing away. I bought thousands of slides and photographs from eBay and local thrift shops, cataloging them up to a point but mostly just laying them out there as raw material. I learned a few things along the way. Who knew that the fat tailed sheep is found in Afghanistan, or that the Upper Canada Village is a place where you can experience authentic 19th century lifestyle? I learned of these and other things from browsing the slides of people I will never know or even know of.

One last gasp of industry went toward transcribing a number of the handwritten annotations people put on some of the slides. With so little space to write it was like they were tweeting in the 1960s. This metadata, if one could call it that, sometimes explains a lot about why anyone would have taken a particular photograph. That’s the kind of thing that gets lost in digitizing slides.

I did a lousy job of storing the slides, which formerly filled the top shelf of my closet all the way up to the ceiling. I have a few more boxes in storage, waiting for me to throw them out. I also must consider what to do with the unexpectedly mountainous quantity of receipts I threw into that storage locker. But next on the purging block are those old music magazines. I will keep copies from 1900 to the 1930s, which I think represent the golden age of “The Etude“. But everything from the mid 1930s on can just go.

This matter of digital hoarding has been weighing on my mind lately. It’s become like an insidious cancer. I wade through files from as far back as 1992, looking for what I do not know. There is so much there it would take years to even consider it all.

Here is all I have to show of a collection I started 10 years ago but never continued. It’s probably a good thing to have let pass. I was going to collect every occurrence of the word “analysis” when it was truncated in a browser tab to just show “anal”. Hilarity, right?