On 9/14/00, at 3:15 AM, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>And, yeah, lugging less stuff around does really free the mind.
That explains my recent mental sluggishness a lot...I'm up to about 35,000
volumes. Eugene spent "several $100 just for shipping" last time he moved;
I spent $700 or so just for the boxes to put the books in. (After each move
I keep the boxes for the next move; there's a 10-foot stack of flattened
boxes in a back room.)
While there's definite utility to on-line storage -- grepping through
my library! -- paper still wins out for a lot of purposes.
Chief is the hedonistic, materialistic pleasure of going downstairs and
being surrounded by *my* *own* library. (Okay, I'm shallow. At least I
own up to it.)
OTOH, I had a flood last year, and lost 1000+ books. OTOOH, I have
replacement cost insurance. I figure I'll move on-line gradually,
as the technology gets there. Starting with journals, which are often
already available on-line but more expensive than my typical acquisition
costs.
I'm more eager to migrate the 3000 videotapes to digital format. While
paper has some advantages over bits, tape has none. VHS tapes make
lossy copies, take up enormous space, have a short shelf-life, and there
are no good storage solutions for large collections.
Basically, I'm an information junkie. I would read 300+ newsgroups a day
if I had the time. Even pruned to my bare minimum, I still get 1 MB of
email a day.
Extrapolating current trends, when I get to be a Jupiter-sized brain, I
imagine I'll need a star cluster just to store all the crap I've
accumulated. Not even counting my collection of Keith Hensons....
-- David Lubkin.
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