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On September 17, 2008, Tony emailed me to remind me to update a configuration detail on the webserver I ran. I keep my inbox pretty clean, using it as a todo list as emails which need action come in. I never got around to fixing the server, since I hate messing with servers and the problem just never happened again, so that email was never archived. Others came and went, but it stayed, often alone.
Last summer that server died, and the web content got moved to a server managed by someone else. I still didn't archive the email, because I needed to ressurect the file archive part of that system for my personal use, and it served as a useful reminder.
Over Christmas break I finally retrieved all the contents of the file server, but I hadn't set up a server so I didn't archive the email.
Earlier this month I set up the server. I got the contents reinstated in it, even the ones that had been corrupted and had to be retrieved from ancient backups. I got my image indexing system running again, and modified it so I could still export images and groups of images to the web, even though that was now on a remote server. I set up an external drive, and scripts to back up the entire server to it, since 600Gb really isn't that much any more, so why not? (And an external drive is a lot easier to grab in case of a fire.) I went through the backlog of images that had built up since last summer, indexing them all. I even went through all my various external drives and laptops and found all the scattered bits and pieces that hadn't been consolodated properly, having built up over the last 8 years since I moved to Canada for grad school and no longer had the local file server to easily put them in.
And then... that was it. Everything was as good as I could make it. There were no more tasks to be done. My file and web infrastructure is complete again, better in many ways than it ever was before.
Tonight I archived the email. My inbox seems awfully empty without it. I didn't even remember what gmail looked like empty -- and I had never even seen mobile gmail empty, since it predated Android. It had become a symbol of the impossible goal, the task that you will never give up on even if you don't think it will ever actually happen. And yet it's done now. I feel kind of lost.
Last summer that server died, and the web content got moved to a server managed by someone else. I still didn't archive the email, because I needed to ressurect the file archive part of that system for my personal use, and it served as a useful reminder.
Over Christmas break I finally retrieved all the contents of the file server, but I hadn't set up a server so I didn't archive the email.
Earlier this month I set up the server. I got the contents reinstated in it, even the ones that had been corrupted and had to be retrieved from ancient backups. I got my image indexing system running again, and modified it so I could still export images and groups of images to the web, even though that was now on a remote server. I set up an external drive, and scripts to back up the entire server to it, since 600Gb really isn't that much any more, so why not? (And an external drive is a lot easier to grab in case of a fire.) I went through the backlog of images that had built up since last summer, indexing them all. I even went through all my various external drives and laptops and found all the scattered bits and pieces that hadn't been consolodated properly, having built up over the last 8 years since I moved to Canada for grad school and no longer had the local file server to easily put them in.
And then... that was it. Everything was as good as I could make it. There were no more tasks to be done. My file and web infrastructure is complete again, better in many ways than it ever was before.
Tonight I archived the email. My inbox seems awfully empty without it. I didn't even remember what gmail looked like empty -- and I had never even seen mobile gmail empty, since it predated Android. It had become a symbol of the impossible goal, the task that you will never give up on even if you don't think it will ever actually happen. And yet it's done now. I feel kind of lost.