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Lost – Writing partner

Nabu, Where are you?

Nabu, Where are you?

I walked into my writing room and suddenly realized there was a void in the dust on the dust atop the book-case. The space where my writing partner sat was bare. (You remember him from an earlier post. He took over my blog to get a new name. The name he chose was, Nabu, the Babylonian god of wisdom and writing which was suggested by Eagle-eyed Editor.)

What seemed most odd was that there was a trace of dust in the void. My uncanny powers of deduction indicated that my partner had been missing for some time. Now guilt struck me because I had not noticed his absence sooner. The excuse I have settled on is that I was so engrossed in writing that I simply overlooked his absence. I know, weak but passable.

I searched high and low, starting in the obvious places. As the god of wisdom and writing, it would make sense Nabu would go somewhere like my office or the other bookshelves in the house. However, I could not find him. I restrained from calling out to him for fear of what my two cats and the domestic CEO might say. My having a skull as a writing partner is still new to them. For several days I scoured the homestead. I even traveled to the cabin in search of my cohort.

One evening, the domestic CEO entered my office to find me desperately digging through a file cabinet. She calmly closed the file drawer, gently reached up and took a hold of my face, and screamed at me, “What the hell are you doing?”

I explained my plight, that I searched for my writing partner and that I felt guilty for not noticing his departure. The domestic CEO patted my cheek and smiled at me.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I put it in the garage with the other Halloween decorations.”

She turned and walked away leaving me staring aghast after her.

Relief washed over me as I realized Nabu was safe. However, the task of finding him among the myriad of decoration boxes would not be easy. Uh oh! He had been missing for months. My feeble excuse would not fly. Ah, a new idea came to me. The domestic CEO had aged another year, taking her into the realm of geezerhood. She had placed him in the decoration boxes. I would tell Nabu that her mind is going and she had forgotten what she did and where she had placed him. Yes, yes, that just might work.

I will head to the garage this weekend to release my partner. I hope he buys my story.

 
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Posted by on January 20, 2014 in Other Strangeness

 

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Out with the old, in with the new

A while back I posted that I had just completed the remodel of my home office/writing room. There is a lot of inspirational things in the room. Unfortunately, my computer is nearly ten years old. So old in fact that it has a 3.5″ floppy drive.

Some of you will remember these data storage devices before cloud-based online back-up, thumb-drives, dvds and cds. When the 1.44 Mb High-density/Double-sided floppies first came out I thought, “Wow, I can store my entire hard drive on less than twenty of these!” They can fit into a box roughly the size of two packs of cigarettes. My old 5 1/4″ floppies were finally obsolete.

Time passes…back to the present.

With the new room completed, the domestic CEO stated, “It is time we get rid of that piece of sh*^t desktop and get a new laptop.”

“Excuse me? Did you say we should purchase a new computer?”

“Yes, I …”

The car was started before she finished.

Two hours later, I look like a little boy petting his new puppy. It is so shiny and new and fast and new and cool and did I say new?

So I started the process of converting data from the old desktop to the NEW laptop. I took my time and cleaned as I went. Then, something dawned on me. I have a paper box filled with 3.5″ floppies filled with data I don’t want to lose. However the laptop does not have a floppy drive. So, yesterday, I transferred files to the laptop and scrubbed 263, 3.5″ floppies. 1.44Mb X 263 floppies equates to 378.72 Mb of data. That’s just over a third of a Gb. In today’s world of memory, it’s nothing. The smallest thumb drive I now own holds 1 Gb. But, those floppies represent 25 years of my data.

I ultimately dumped a lot of old data, old file types and outdated software. However, the really good news, is that I found some old writing files that I had forgotten about. Over the next few days/weeks, I’ll reorganize the files and try to post a few of them.

Now I have no excuse. Well, other than I type slowly.

How about you? Do you have old storage files that need clean-up? You might be surprised what you will find.

 
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Posted by on September 25, 2012 in Musings and Odd Thoughts

 

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