Winter XXIV. Time and money + Flash drive

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XXIII. Summer in winter

Time is money -- says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth -- money is time. I think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different my whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune? Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman. Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this sort of purchase. He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough. What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other.

Alpha.

Two weeks ago I bought some flowers at a little stand, in an alley, I pass by many times a week and almost never stop at. Two of the flowers I bought have wilted -- though I still have them as I like the look of them as they age -- but the other two still look surprisingly fresh... I just now trimmed their stems and changed the water. But the flower stand is gone. It had been in that (admittedly unlikely) location for as long as I can remember -- at least 10 years -- but when I walked through the alley this morning on my way to the gym, there was no sign it had ever been there. I stopped and stared... like an idiot, I imagine. I walked around the corner to drop some letters at the post office and came back and stared again. Perhaps the owner retired. Perhaps the building decided it no longer wanted a ramshackle flower stand clinging to its flank. Who knows? But it's gone and that alley, and the city, is just a tiny bit poorer for it.

Flash drive.

Sometimes a year will go by between occasions when I need to use a flash drive, but today I had to locate both of the drives I own for different tasks. I used one to transport a pdf file I needed to print for my building. That was the small capacity drive -- which is actually physically larger than the big capacity drive I took to the computer repair place to recover files from my burned out laptop.

My first hard drive, in 1985 or 86, held 20 megabytes, was as large as a good dictionary, and cost over $300. If you had shown me the gigabyte drive I now so rarely use, back in ‘86 I would have guessed it came from much further into the future than just two decades (more or less). Today, a quick search informs me, I could buy an 8 gigabyte flash drive for $5. 

The reason I so rarely use these miraculous devices is that I store, and backup, files to the Cloud now instead of to a local device. My biggest problem with losing my laptop is that it still held several files I was continuing to use with a local application. I had moved most everything to Cloud based apps (for just this reason) but now I have to get access to an older spreadsheet application just long enough to open some files and move the contents to the Cloud.

Recently I thought, mistakenly, that I had deleted some text in a file before I had actually transferred it to this blog. After an instant of panic, I remembered Google's Revision History feature, which I think I've used once before. I was quickly, and easily, able to browse through previous versions of the document -- seeing what had been changed and finding the passage I didn't actually need. When I recall the time I've spent in the past recreating text (or code) that today I could easily retrieve from the Revision History of a document... well, it's just better if I don't think about it.

Think what gibberish this would be to H.R. He despaired of typewriters. Aside from the monetary aspect of the thing, I wonder what he would have thought of the whole world having ready access to his musings (on that Project Gutenberg site, for example). Would he have seen this as a godsend and marvel, or as a Mephistophelean curse? Would he have reveled in the sudden expansion of his library to include everything on the Gutenberg site? Or would he have grieved the disappearance of the physical book? Perhaps both.

Next: Winter XXV. The Virtue of being self-centered.