the computer - useful for something other than chatting with teenage girls that are actually middle age dudes

I was just organizing my crazy selection of journal articles on my computer, and for the fuck of it I checked to see how much drive space it was taking up. Right now it is just over 800 mb of chemistry goodness in pdf form. There has got to be close to 10 years of crap I've read and wanted to keep for some rainy day or other, both random and researched, in there.

Makes me damned glad I switched from paper to pdf. I don't even want to think about what a drag it would have been to try to sort through and move all that shit halfway across the country. Last year when I finished up my thesis and packed my desk to move I got into the frame of mind a great many people do, and threw out anything I didn't feel like carrying down to the car. I expect that up until a few short years ago, and still now for people who are fond of reading on paper vs. a monitor, a lot of good references got tossed in the name of convenience when moving day loomed near.

Luckily with a computer large amounts of pdf files and pornography don't add any mass at all, and the stuff on the computer ended up coming through unscathed. Of course that has more to do with my being too lazy to cull it than with any actual attempt at efficiency.

Perhaps the craziest part of all is that it's almost all organized. Anyone who knows me or has ever seen my bench would probably freak at how well I've managed to keep order over all that crap.