Rediskovery

Every time I get a new computer, I go through that ritual of copying files from the old computer to the new one.  That means all the software I use, as well as documents, pictures, music, information, and unfinished projects. 

Everyone does this, but it's worse for me.  I've always been a pack rat in real life, and that trait has transferred to the virtual world too. I'm forever shifting around a snowballing load of data from one hard drive to another.  This process originally had to be done by floppies and the magic of PKZip.  Then it was a pile of CD-ROMs. I still have a drawer of them, both purchased disks of applications, and the disks I'd burned of my own data.

With my most recent new computer, I had to go through the process again.  And since I also have to install Linux, there's even more work to do.  It took a while, but I got my personal files transferred, and all the applications I regularly use installed.  That night, as I was putting the computer (a laptop) away, I picked it up and felt the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever tray give a little under my hand, and it only then occurred to me: hey, this computer has a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever drive.  I mean, yes I did know that; I had taken notice that it had one before buying it.  But here I had done all that installing and copying without using the drive.  The software was mostly downloaded, and my files were copied with either thumbdrives or back-up hard drives (or in some cases, cloud storage.)

In fact, it was only today that I finally opened the tray and used the drive. This was to go looking for fonts from old CD's of graphics and word processing programs.  Wow, when did CD's get so big?  And jewel cases are so thick and heavy.  You can't fit that in your pocket, how are you supposed to carry it around?