Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 2009 Issue December 8, 2008 Time for Computer Housecleaning Blurry digital photos I will not print, mediocre music I will not listen to, documents I will not read again, and software I haven’t used in a year. It is time for these wasted bits to go. When a terabyte hard drive costs $100, it is tempting to fill the trillion bytes with every digital picture I have taken and every song I might want to hear at least once. I could also store every assignment I have written as a student — and every paper I have received as a teacher. If it can be stored, why not store it? There are several reasons to not store everything, despite the temptation to do so. Organization is important to me. Keeping everything makes it hard to locate anything of value, even with the help of software. Also, old files might have been created in an application that’s discontinued or incompatible with a newer version. My annual cleaning ritual lets me remove old docum...
technology • teaching • writing