Starting Over
I suppose there’s something wonderfully purgative about wiping your hard drive clean and installing a new operating system. It’s a feeling much like purchasing an entirely new computer, but with your current, used machine—you blast away, sometimes indiscriminately, all the cruft and poorly-managed files, the legacy of ad-hoc decisions, ill-advised choices and temporary, extemporized solutions that somehow grew into permanent fixtures, and get to start over again with a blank slate and a heart full of resolve on how this time, you’ll be fastidious and conscientious and planned and your computer will be an exemplar of organization. Until the next release of OSX, and you format again. In the meantime, the wholesale purge allows you to finally rid yourself of that which you’ve long suspected you never needed, but held onto out of habit or social pressure (eg. Microsoft Office), abandon reliable standbys for newer, better programs (iPhoto -> Lightroom), and finally install that one program you’ve been lusting after but never could justify the expense (Pixelmator). Hopefully, you’ve saved all your old files just in case, but lately I’ve come to enjoy the thrill of making cursory backups and then gleefully nuking it all, my eager anticipation for the New Shiny temporarily blinding my normally all-powerful digital packrat tendencies. Not to say I haven’t been burned by this—I once lost an entire summer’s worth of photos (‘Memories. You’re talking about memories!’) due to a lack of diligence and an overeager enthusiasm for novelty. I promised myself I’d be more careful next time, that I would check and double check and be perfectly sure, but once push came to shove and I had the OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD in hand—well, let’s just say, you really don’t want to ask me if I have my photos from this summer or not.
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