Redundancy is the safety net by which we live in this electronic, virtual world. We make backups and copies. We print hardcopies. The computer makes autocopies without the specific directive. Redundancy can save our butts when we accidentally click the wrong button and “update” a piece of software that we didn’t really want updated. The draw back with redundancy is the massive binary clutter it creates. I am currently running a piece of software called Visipics. This nifty little piece of software is mining through all the photographs I have and finding duplicate copies. (Sometimes I have triple and quadruple copies).
Holidays, especially the days in the wake of holidays, inspire me to be creative, crafty or to “straighten up”. I have photos on my laptop, photos on my PC, photos in the pictures folder and others I have loaded into Picasa. My camera, if given the mandate, opens and dumps my SD disk into Koday Easyshare….a piece of software I truly detest. Visipics will go through them all and find all the duplicates. I am not a professional photographer nor am I a hobbyist at photography. I take as many pictures as the average American with a digital camera bought at the local big box store, especially of the things with which I am infatuated: my sons, my food and my flowers. But Visipics says I have just under 24,000 pictures on this PC. Really? Seriously? That is absurd. So, I run the software and it take six hours to comb through it, picking out the nits of duplicates. I give it permission to delete the duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate copies.
I crash the PC because it runs out of memory….loading the extras in a queue for deletion.
I start over. Somehow, dumping boxes of pictures and cedar chests of treasures onto the floor for sorting sounds more appealing. At least I would have gotten that task done. Now, I am back in the process of running the scans and displaced off my PC for the remainder of the time. Redundancy can be a terrible obstacle. It weighs you down, slows you, prevents you from being able to start anew.
I do not want to carry copies of every thing in my life on my back. I do not want to slug through living with a copy of my entire life’s actions on my shoulders. At some point, you have to let shit go. Have a garage sale, drop it off at the second hand store, hit the delete button, add it to the compost pile, stuff it down the garbage disposal, add it to the barrel fire and rid yourself of the extraneous.
I will be back with pictures of Thanksgiving and post-Thanksgiving cooking AFTER Visipics finishes with the scans. I can’t risk adding new pictures from my camera’s stick until after that task is complete. Here is the salad, though.
