Paul's Comments

Every so often I go around and clean stuff up in my room, usually because it's gotten mixed up or out of alignment. This has been a chronic problem of mine going back years The wiring under my desk is typically always a rat's nest, I just basically put it together so that it connects things. For some reason, stuff tends to crawl or move, and what is often initially properly organized becomes a disorganized mess.

Basically I have to get dissatisfied enough with a problem that I take the time to fix it. Probably would be easier to keep things that way but I don't really try that hard.

On the other hand, if you looked at my closet and my drawer, you would find my clean clothes are always meticulously put away. I realize I do that because if I can't keep my clothes organized it's a big problem for me, so generally when I take them to the laundromat, once I get back I hang them up. Sometimes if I'm very tired after coming back it might not be for several hours, but the clothes do get put away very soon after they're washed.

So I guess it depends on how important it is to me. I note that all of my important music files have been backed up to DVD, and I have older backup copies as well. My books I've written are on my computer, there's a second copy on my new computer (which still has a problem with the on/off switch) and is also backed up on a jump drive. I also have a set of files backed up to one of my on-line accounts that have storage space included. So those are fairly well protected. I just wish CVS or Subversion could be used with a repository via either FTP or HTTP so that I could use that to backup my files the same way. I also have regular versioned releases of my story Instrument of God, going all the way back to version 5, and I'm currently at about version 103. So those are well protected.

Oh, it just occurred to me I need to back up this site. I realized that with limited exceptions, most of my postings here would be lost forever if anything goes wrong here. Not that they probably have much value, but I have put weeks and weeks of my time into creating them, and they are part of who I am. [Update 10/26/2008:] I went into the control panel for MySQL, and had it dump all the tables, which I then captured as a text file. Takes 6 1/2 megabytes; most of it being spam locations and items to exclude for users posting comments as well as some site history; the actual text of my postings doesn't use a whole lot of room. [End Update]

I realize that I post a lot of detail about myself that is probably very personal and normally private, but it's mostly for my own use in allowing me to let my hair down and say things that occasionally someone else will read and comment about and so few people read this that I'm probably not giving much away in a way that would cause me a problem. Who knows, maybe someday I'll get an idea out of this or something that allows me to make some money off of it and help assist me with my money problems. Yeah, right; I've always had money problems, because if I made more, I spent it. But hey, I've learned. At least, outside of a couple hundred I owe on one credit card, I don't have any debt. (I don't count medical bills I can't pay as "debt.")

It ain't as bad as it could be, I do get by, I live reasonably well compared to some people who are so bad off they're reduced to living in tent cities or, where somewhat more fortunate, homeless shelters. At least I have a roof over my head, a few square meals a day, computers with Internet connectivity, and if I could get my other computer to work, TV. (I suppose I could troll Craigslist and look for someone discarding a TV set if I was desperate.)

So I'm not too bad conditions compared with some other people. And I do have some options if I wanted to make the effort to try. Perhaps I should, I've got nothing to lose.