Homeless

At the moment I'm homeless. In fact, I've been homeless since August 1st.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not standing on a corner with a pile of Big Issues by day and sleeping under a sports stand at night. In fact, I have the whole third floor of a Georgian townhouse, once occupied by William Pitt, in the centre of Bath. There are tourists who have travelled from the other side of the planet to enjoy the view that I see every morning when I get out of bed.

But I'm a guest here. And that raises some questions.

A bit like my possessions being housed in a lockup, not having somewhere that I call home at the moment is making me stop taking these things for granted.

Bod

I have scanned all of my paperwork. Every photo of my children, every business invoice, every school report, every divorce letter, all the pages of instruction manuals to appliances I no longer own. This statement normally elicits one or more of the following three reactions

1) That must take forever

2) You'll be sunk when your computer crashes

3) I bet you can never find anything.

In fact,none of these is true

1) The first scan is from xxxx about a computer virus called Melissa. Nowadays, I stick all of the mateiral that I wish to scan into a wooden clothes peg. On a Sunday, after I've finished with the Sunday paper, I will dig out the scanner and process the week's paperwork. In the spirit of accurate research, I've timed each of the last three sessions. The average is 34 minutes.

2) There's a two word response to that. Back up.

There are currently two complete sets of scans on two different machines, each in a different location. They are also all backed up to the cloud, using Jungledisk. At the time of writing, the whole lot takes up about 11Gb of space.

As well as that, using a macro in XP, each of the databases is compressed down. A 1mb file now takes up about 100k. There are three additional sets of that database - one on a netbook, one on a different machine, one on a USB thumbdrive which goes everywhere with me.

3) Well, that's not true either. Each scan is numbered and then there's a database with a summary description of each file. A search using "find" in a spreadsheet program will reveal the number of every photo or every Orange invoice. And then I can refer back to the database and find what I'm looking for. It depends on the quality of the description in the first place - which is no different from any storage system anywhere. But this could be so much better

Return to Stuff

I didn't manage to write what I was hoping to last Friday. And I'm sitting in a basement at the moment squatting on someone else's connection so now isn't the right moment either.

Suffice it to say that I went back to the lockup to get five things; my passport; some heel balm, a new protector for my ipod touch screen; my old iphone and a bag of paperwork.

I arrived at Dave and Sarah's with a sleeping bag and one holdall of stuff. I've brought a few jackets on top of that, otherwise, that's all I've needed in the last week.