Digital Archeology

So, I’ve been in a bit of an odd mood today. As a result I haven’t really done much constructive, which includes failure to blog, despite a sense that I really ought to be. One of the things I did end up doing was trying to reorganizing my files on my computer. Probably the most cluttered part was my desktop and in looking through it I saw my “Recovered Files” folder from the time about 6 months ago when I ran rm -rf * in ~ rather than ~/.Trash (in layman’s terms, I stupidly permanently deleted nearly all my files). I actually canceled (by ^C) the operation but not before it chewed through 9th Grade, 10th Grade, 11th Grade, 12th Grade, Desktop, and part of Pictures. After this, I tried desperately to recover anything I could with a copy of Prosoft Data Rescue II. I successfully got most of the pictures and some of the school stuff, but I lost a lot.

This has tend to be what happened with my (family’s) computers… we aren’t known to back up much. As a result, what can be located is kinda sparse. I long ago gave up on the files lost that time, but seeing the folder I had used for recovery, I grew curious what other digital relics that I still care about are on various CDs I have burned across time. Thus, my current employment is going through my sparse “backups” and seeing what I recover. Since all the things I decide are worth saving shall surely reveal something about me, and a blog is nothing if not a random window to a person, I decided I’d archive what all I find here as I go. The following list will be/was written as I pulled them off, so I have no idea how interesting it shall be/is. Here we go:

• Recovered an MP3 of Yellowcard’s “October Nights” from a mix CD. Yellowcard has never really been a favorite band of mine, but I do generally like them. I found their album Ocean Avenue to be fantastic! Not only are several of the songs great in their own right, but the album itself has a feel of a journey from the break-out opening of “Way Away” to the closing, reflective strains of “Back Home”, it really gives the feel of a journey of self-discovery… I think its really cool. Their albums since have not measured up in my opinion. “October Nights” is from the album before Ocean Avenue, entitled One for the Kids. I’ve never listened to most of that album, but I think the ones before it are rather atrociously repetitive and cacophonous. “October Nights” was one of those tracks that just appears on a computer from a borrowed mix CD or such.. its a really nice song, though; it invokes a lot of the feeling of the then-coming Ocean Avenue, both in the reflective, semi-romantic subject matter and the heavy use of violin that gives it a stand out tone from a lot of punk/pop music of the era.
• Tons of Linux Install Media. Okay, so this doesn’t actually count as something I recovered and saved, since I am throwing most out. Still, interesting personal history. I found my original set of Mandrake 8.2 discs that I acquired at Cybercamps many years ago, several further versions of Madrake up to 9.2 at least, some of the last versions of Red Hat before it split into RHEL and Fedora, and of course, several Knoppix CDs back from when Live CDs were novel.
• An MP3 CD that either is or is similar to the first CD I burned entitled “Da Mix”. It has several “classic” tracks that I take for granted that I have, but actually don’t have a copy of on this laptop. Amongst them:
  • “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day
  • “The Rock Show” by Blink-182, “Fat Lip” by Sum 41
  • “Sadie Hawkins Dance” by Relient K

  It also contained a few signs of the times that I recaptured:

  • “Back Here” by BBMak
  • “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” by Nine Days
  • a demo of “In the End” by Linkin Park (version goes “It starts with one and multiplies til you can taste the sun”).

  Further it contained some VERY dated things that I let go:

  • “Mirror Mirror” by M2M
  • “He Loves U Not” by Dream
  • “All You Wanted” by Michelle Branch

  along with a variety of Creed, Avril Lavigne, and others. Some of these were worth a listen, but not worth cluttering my HDD. Regardless, this recovery is going to clutter my iTunes Library.

• My Portfolio for the Technology Academy at Landstown High School in Virginia Beach. Though this portfolio gained me admission, I did not end up going here as I found the program to be too vocational. My portfolio was way overzealous. We were supposed to pick 3 of several “challenges” and implement them. I chose databases, web design, and a technical resume, then combined them all into a PHP/MySQL site which I ran off my own desktop, configuring it to be world viewable.I am relatively certain that everyone else who applied did the database challenge in MS Access like they expected. This is the first example of me going WAY over on an assignment with a simple technical component.The other big examples are when I wrote http://wip.donaldguy.com from scratch for my Works in Progress folder in 11th grade when everyone else used a PBwiki, and the http://english.donaldguy.com CSS/XHTML design I made for my Senior English Portfolio when almost everyone else used MS Publisher (which unfortunately only renders properly in Firefox 3 and Safari due to standards compliance).

  None of these are actually particularly impressive when compared to many projects of my future MIT classmates, but they certainly were compared to my high school classmates. This portfolio was also probably my first playing with PHP, making it in effect my first independent programming project. Also, what I considered noteworthy on a “technical resume” at the time is laughable.. I’ll leave it at that.

• A Whole Heap of 8th Grade Work: some of the highlights includes a biography on Buddy Rich, some awful compositions (though the piano theme is decent and the drum set has an interesting fill… they are not necessarily a whole lot worse than my piano composition from AP Music theory this year: Compassion ), a report and flash video on cloud seeding, a paper that explains quadrilateral categorization by a frame story about a theoretical MMORPG named “Quadwarz”, a rap about the Constitution and the role of a citizen including 10 verses on the bill of rights, and actually decent English essays on Fahrenheit 451 and The Good Earth
  
• Beginnings of several other websites including “Phoenix Central” a forum for my middle school, a website for my Boy Scout troop, a mysterious site named “Blue Steel” (which I do not believe had anything to do with Zoolander), and a begining of a site for my high school which was probably eventually realized as the “Dolphinbook” schedule matching system I ran the last 3 summers.
• Several (3) revisions of the open source text game Province that a friend and I were trying to write. We checked it into SourceForge, and its still there, but its awful..

So, some things I learned about myself: I seem to “back up” music a lot more than anything else; I have a lot of odd, unlabeled CDs (Hiren’s BootCD, a disc of Windows optimizing utilities, combination Panic! at the Disco album/High School Musical soundtrack, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to name a few); some of my 8th grade work was actually half-way decent; and in middle school, I liked to start a lot of “technical” projects and not finish them.

Well .. I’ve been at this for a couple hours now. I hope this random window into my life was moderately interesting.

Until Next Time,

~Donald