Wow. I haven’t sat down to blog much in over a year. Part of that is due to my continued writing/editing of the The Cosantóirí Chronicles. Part of that is due to a rather large set of life changes; I won’t go into my divorce here as it’s not germane to what I’m thinking about and the job changes are, sadly, a part of that divorce. While my life is much better now, there’s still stuff I’m not going to discuss in such a public forum as yet. Suffice it to say I’m far happier, and to detail some of the stuff I went through and put up with isn’t where I’m at right now.
No, what’s on my mind is the aftereffects of some of all of the above and the effect its had on my trusty MacBook. I looked at the hard drive on said trusty MacBook not that long ago and discovered I had…oh, about 27 GB left. 27 gig of a 250 gig hard drive. I looked at that and what came out of my mouth is not something that a former pastor should be caught saying...ever. Where did it all vanish to?
Culprit number one: My Nikon. Shooting in RAW is wonderful stuff. But it eats memory like I munch on Reece’s Pieces (or any other form of chocolate). Pull 29 files of photos from 2014 off-plus some duplicates in iPhoto and a lot of shots from my old and new iPhones-and that gives me some space. A friendly reminder: always back up your work, kids. And yes, I have a nice new iPhone 6 that my partner Traci got from Verizon. She got her kids, herself and I new iPhone 6’s as part of Verizon’s Edge deal; we share a plan to save a few bucks.
Culprit number two: Those former ministries I held. I finally removed the last of the files from Master’s, the files from my pastoral work the last few years, and my dissertation files. Years of work logs (I logged every paper I graded, to account for my hours), classes I taught/took, sermons, powerpoint presentations, photos from various events…all neatly filed onto DVD’s. That gave me back even more space.
Culprit number three: Yours truly. Years of other files, scans, other photos that hadn’t been cataloged (and now have), other files that I need to keep for various reasons, and so forth had to come off. I mean, I use the MacBook for everything: work, music, photos, letters, my books, and so much more. And you don’t think about a few KB here, a few MB there. I mean, 250 GB was a lot of memory. A program here, a few dozen photos of the family there (shot in RAW, of course), an update over there, and suddenly the hard drive’s filling up like a teenager at a fast-food joint. The only difference is that the hard drive has a limit to how much it can hold. All that stuff has to come off and get filed.
I still have a lot of stuff to go through and file or get rid of. Some programs have hidden files they keep; and I’m starting to consider trying to save or delete a number of apps for the iPhone I’m not using as there’s nearly a fifth of my hard drive getting eaten by the little buggers. But what I really need to find is what is eating nearly 100 gig; I don’t have that many programs for a reason and I’ve already discarded several-plus an older copy of Xcode-I’ve either not used or don’t remember where I got them.
But at the end of the day, I have a sneaking hunch that I’m going to have to remove a fair number of other photos and documents and file those as well. Still…I’ve managed to recover enough memory to account for almost 40% of the hard drive. That is a win in my book.
Enough for now.
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