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Steve's Day with Disks
So I have some time to kill, since
I’m unemployed, a lot of time.
The computer classes that I took from
4th-8th grade could easily be carried out nowadays from a teething baby.
It’s insane how fast kids can process the technology. My fourth grade
class basically consisted of moving a white “turtle” back and forth and
left to right. I remember getting to computer class 10 minutes early.
Upon arriving to the computer lab, aka back of the library, the fifth
grade class was doing something similar except, the turtles were a mass
palette of different colors. Some Blue, magenta, and even green!! And get
this; the lines were a different color! I remember telling the other 4th
graders about this when they came into class. They were dumbfounded. I
remember actually conversation with them.
“There’s no way we could ever do what
they do!”
“It sounds so hard. How do they do
that?”
When I was working in the school
district 2 years ago I remember there was a third grader who was sent to
the office because he was downloading music and burning them. He wouldn’t
have really gotten in trouble, but he was using one of the teachers
computer, “Cause it had a bigger hard drive and wasn’t as slow as the
other computers” kids really know this stuff. It’s scary.
 I
first learned of backing up files way back in 5th grade at Mililani
Uka
Elementary school, Home of the fighting nene birds. So in 5th grade, I had
my 10” floppy disk, the ones the size of a record jacket and as flimsy as
a pre-Viagra Rafael Palmeiro, and accidentally stepped on it. The
computer couldn’t read it. I got in trouble.
I remained fairly computer hassle
free throughout high school. My dad’s Compuadd (piece of crap) was a
fairly reliable piece of computer machinery that bode me well in word
perfect, golf, and Earl Weaver. I don’t know if it could have done
anything else. Most of my problems occurred with the dot matrix printer
getting caught up with the liner holes on the side and cause the lines to
tilt and sag in a Katherine Hepburn kind of way.
College: Lost a lot fewer
documents than I should have based on the fact that I did every report at
the last minute and written all at once.
Post-college: Between the
shifting of files between roommates computer and parents, and with the
advent of a sister in her pre-teen years, I lost a lot more files than I
can recount. I’ve learned, when bored, that I should back up my files. I
have backups to backups to backups. I’ve named them my Ty Detmer and
Larry Johnson files. Most of these backup disks are lost. So I have to
back them up periodically.
But this is a first. Since I’ve
never backed up any floppy disks from the college years and I have 20-30
or so of them lying around doing what floppy disks do now a days, be
coasters, Frisbees or stuff in boxes to take up space, I’ve decided to
finally back them up just in case.
I’ve needed to transfer data to these
for a while. Have of them have managed to stay in remarkable shape due to
the shoe box storage device I put them in. The others, which have been
put in junk drawers, files, a plastic cup with cedar chips, in a pair of
track shoes, under-storage bin in my car and other places I have yet to
look, haven’t really fared as well. So I figure I should a least try to
save some stuff before the disks degrade any further.
I have a Mac, and therefore no floppy
disk drive. But when I got my Mac from the nice people from MacMall I
received a free Macally floppy drive with purchase of any G4 based Mac
(along with pirates. It’s a $30 value, therefore making it the most
expensive crappy coaster I’ve ever had. I really can’t bag it that much.
But I know that once I’m done with transferring all my data it will be
rendered as useless as Arli$$ reruns.
The Disks
Disk 1:
Yellow Fujifilm, with 3m technology. Successful on first attempt. Old
word perfect files circa 96-97. I was one of the last to join the
bandwagon of Microsoft word, and firmly bit me in the ass when our late
night computer labs, didn’t have them, leaving me scurrying at 1 am trying
to find someone with a translating program for a paper that was due in at
8.
Disk 2:
Black Imation, with 3m technology. Attempt one unsuccessful.
attempt two successful in
transferring. But little metal hinge thing gets caught upon ejection from
drive. Delay’s transferring for two minutes as I have to pull out, using
surgical precision, the little metal thing. Hee hee. Pull out.
Yes I’m 13.
Disk 3:
Black (metal hinge thing already off): 1st attempt unsuccessful, as were
3rd and 4th attempt. It might have something to with the
distinct cola ring stain on the label as well as the rest of the disk.
It’s so funny how noises that were
once considered normal for a particular product now would be cause to
worry (the spinning thing to read floppy disks) to the embarrassing
humorous (dial-up modem noise. My sister called a few years back calling
me to convince my parents to switch to cable, “Steve it’s so Embarrassing,
when my friends come over to log ON! You know how terrible it is to have
dial-up nowadays?”
Disk 4:
Aqua Fujifilm, with 3m technology. 1st attempt not successful. see disk 3
results.
Disk 5:
Translucent imation. 1st attempt successful. Decent jpegs that I will use
as a future article soon. This is part of the most recent pack of disks I
purchased. I believe late spring of 01. do you need to know this? No.
Disk 6:
Black straight up 3M logo, assuming with same technology. Apparently it’s
not even mine. It’s a bootleg copy disk #3 of MS windows 3.1. Not even
going to attempt to transfer it. If I ever need windows 3.1 I’d probably
be in a drunk state trying to load Earl Weaver baseball....speaking of
ideas...
Disk 7:
Black BASF. Not my disk either. Not
sure how I got this one.
spreadsheets of business proposals.
Ever have a friend go through your cd case in your car and there’s a cd
like Cisqo, and he points it out.
“Cisqo?”
And the you explain that its really
not yours, that someone left it in the car, or it was your roommates and
he left it when you guys moved. I’m kind of getting that vibe with some
of these.
Disk 8: Translucent
purple. 1st attempt successful. Came from the same pack as D5, except
with Word documents, when I was making a back up for every document in cd,
hard drive, floppy AND zip drive. And no I’m not anal at all; this was a
one day thing.
I hated having to save everything on
disk. Back in the mid-90’s, right before the imacs and g3’s came out, and
right before zip drives came into the mix, we had to save everything on
5gb computers in the graphic design labs. Since everyone and they’re
mother used it, it was as slow as me updating my site. Furthermore we had
save all our graphic stuff on disk. It had to be compressed so badly to
fit on a floppy it was either the size of a Paris Hilton thought or
pixilated to the point of Pong status. I got excited when I got zip disks
for Christmas. Those suckers were 20-25 bucks a pop.
I just reread that. How lonely was I
in college?
 Disk
9 (indigo blue Imation with metal thing absent): old bmp pictures, one of
which was a picture of my toe my senior year in collegel of Which I was
forced to wear sandals for 6 months straight cause part of the nail
wouldn’t die. The upper right tip as you can disgustingly see.
I've written about this one before.
(I wear a 10.5 but would wear a 9.5
for soccer along with two pairs of socks, so was extremely tight. I
had to consistently oil my shoes to keep them supple enough to wear.
I didn't this one time and we were on an overnighter tournament in
Sewanee, TN 11 hours away from home. Needless to say the shoes
hardened like a post-Viagra Palmiero. And having to play three games in
them for two days the shoes mashed the nail into my toe, killing the nail.
Of course I had to take a picture of it.
1st attempt unsuccessful. Proceeded
to use Nintendo method of blowing. Success.
-I don’t know why they’re really
still included in computers at all. In most regards with all those little
portable things that can attach to key chains or portable hard drives that
are smaller that zip disks. Mac hasn’t had them built in since 98. what
do you think computers would say if they were reading a floppy disk now
days?
“Oh, wow, no I mean, OH WOW! good.
3.5 inches is really large. No. I’m serious.”
“Is grandma using the computer
again?”
Disk 10:
Grey Imation no label. There’s one
word document on it. It’s only 720kb in size.
I’m wondering why on earth that I
have a 720 kb in my collection. I’m assuming I bought it. Most people
label theirs. It might have been a last minute thing at the college book
store that sold single ones on the cashier counter next to the fruit
stripes and pencils. But how sad is it that I somehow had to buckle down
and purchase a floppy disk with half the memory to save a couple dimes?
That was honestly one of the great things about floppy disks, the
consistent cheapness of them. During my time, they were like mini Laffy
Taffy’s in the fish bowl. You could throw a couple grape or sour apple
ones at the last minute and not even have to bat an eye. It was almost a
comfort for years and years, virtually unchanged. Like
Wendy’s 99 cent meal. Granted with the exception of maybe the junior
bacon cheeseburger and biggie drink, you know wherever the hell you pretty
much go throughout the US your going to find a little solace knowing that
there’s going to be the same group of items to be found in that soothing
yellow font, just off to the right. Except those damn
Manhattan Wendy’s.
Disk 11:
Translucent green Imation. 1st
attempt successful. Now don’t assume that I know what are on my disks by
simply reading the labels on my disks. Most of them don’t have them, and
if they do have a label, they don’t have anything written on them. That
would be the normal, logical, and an organized way to go about doing
things. Now some disks do have things written on them to tell the
contents of the floppy. This one for instance says, “Resume 2001” so of
course it has all my writings from the first generation of my website with
no resume from 2001 to be found.
Disk 12
(translucent orange Imation): 1st attempt successful. This one has
“Website 2” written on it. Naturally, upon checking it I find my resume
from 2001.
By the way, these Imation disks are
kicking ass in the reliability dept.
Disk 13:
Translucent fluorescent yellow. 1st attempt successful.
Disk 14:
Black Imation. With no label but the metal thing has “resume” scribed on
it with a blue sharpie. It’s blank.
I hate the sound of a disk being
read. Gives me flashbacks when my 87’ Mazda 626 when it wouldn’t turn over
when it was below 50.
Disk 15:
Same model as 13. 1st attempt successful.
Disk 16:
Black Imation, with 3m technology. 1st attempt successful. Label has
Advertising and Salesmanship written on it as well as “MS WORD!” beneath
it, apparently written when I finally gave up on word perfect. Low and
behold. It actually has my reports from the classes mentioned on the
label. Only took the 16th disk to get that.
Disk 17:
Black Imation, with 3m technology.
Label says blank. It’s full of old emails that I saved from college if I
thought they were funny from 96-99.
Excuse me, I have to go run. Talk
amongst yourselves. I’ll give you topic.
Coffee talk never really every had
coffee. Nor was it really talk.
An hour later.
Ok. So my basic workout is based on
PTI on ESPN. It’s arguably one of the most monumental events since my
mid-twenties. During my tenure in Jersey,
I would go on the elliptical everyday while watching PTI. It’s segmented
and timed so well the 30 minutes just fly and burning off Miller Lite in
the process. Yes, whenever there was a golf tournament that would
interfere with the ATH and PTI hour, I wouldn’t do cardio, I couldn’t. So
now since I have no gym membership I go and run during Around the Horn,
(longer run 30 minutes, for a wussy run15). Then I do the ab ball during
PTI. Been doing it for two weeks now, so no, there’s absolutely no
semblance of a six pack arising from my core. I’ve never used the word
“core” ever when referring to the body. I’ve watched too much FITtv with
Cheryl man. I encourage you to watch it at least once. The episodes
taped during the post implant years. It’s weird watching her. It’s not
in a Maxim viewing kind of way but in a more “How’d they do that!?” way.
It’s like they were that big because her workouts just weren’t intense
enough and didn’t feel like carrying the extra weights in her hand.
Getting back to the disk, it has some
old emails I mean previous to 1999. This needs its own
little tidbit.
Disk 18:
Black 3m. My html and web design
class (with an Archaic FrontPage 98). This is terrible. One of my
projects turning banners with graphics like these.
It’s kind of sad that a web design
of this nature was a 300 level class when my sister could have done the
same exact stuff in 8th grade in 5 minutes with while carrying on 5 IM
conversations with peoples screen names like HOttEEE4eva,
Str8mrsTIMBALAKE, and UwishUwasMEE. You can see now how un-evolved my
design habits are.
-There’s also my first web page ever
built....and it’s terrible. It’s like a hometown aol thing.
Purple background with black font.
“My name is Steve and this is my
website. I’m 20 and play sports”
It’s 872 kb, which is tiny. This
one, Steveuncentered takes up only 50mb,but in the day, 872 kb was
monstrous, it was too big for Angelfire, and I had to go to Geocities
which offered an unheard of 1.0 mb of disk space. It’s properly
equivalent in terms of excitement when my dad got color TV or when my
grandfather actually got a household TV, speaking on the thought.
*Ask an older science or math
professor teacher about their first calculator or slide rule. There eyes
will beam with excitement as they tell you that the calculator cost $250
for the equivalent of a calculator that you can get for 8 tickets at the
Showbiz prize counter.
Disk 17:
Green Imation. 1st attempt
successful.
Disk
18: Black Highland. What
the hell is a highland? a Daewoo of disks? No label with a “?” on the
metal thing with black sharpie. Upon insertion, hee hee, the official
title of the disk is “NO NAME”, giving an even more mysterious connotation
to it when coupled with the question mark. There’s just some old config
computer stuff I’ve never seen before along with a .wav file of a wind
breeze for 2 seconds. Don’t think I need to save disk.
Disk 19:
Black Imation, with 3m technology.
Label says word perfect backup. Let’s see what happens...1st attempt
successful. And actually it is my old word perfect documents.
This is boring as hell. I wish I had
my own intern. If you’re still reading this, I’m assuming you’re just as
bored.
I’m now done with all the random
assorted disk that I’ve found scattered amongst boxes, backpacks and shoe
boxes that are supposed to have only pictures.
I now have to do those ones that are
in protective cases, the ones that can hold five securely, seven if you
have strong palms to smash them into place. And you have to really not
care about those other two because they’re probably ruined but at least
you were able to not be confined by the corporate mans capacity
recommendation.
Case 1: Clear.
Disk 1:
Yellow Imation, bought from same pack as disk 16. With a picture of a
photo ID of KU. Jpegs of a KU student ID with of my friend Janet. Ok. I
might have participated in some things involving identities, just like
many other people. I had a few friends at KU and was invited to
basketball games all the time, I’d always be offered the student tickets
but you need to have a student ID. Enter Photoshop 3.5. Yes I had a fake
KU ID. No one ever noticed that my name was Janet Hartson.
Disk 2:
Red imation with 3m technology. Label has “MAC” on it. The name of the
disk is “huhnside”. Logical. Unable to open files after using first 3
steps of Nintendo method.(link)
Now you’d be able to surmise that the
disks in the cases are considered much more valuable entities because
there was probably a reason why I put them in a protective case. But
honestly, more than likely, I had the cases in hand and just grabbed the
first handful I disks I could and crammed them in there.
Disk 3:
Black Imation no label or markings: Blank.
Disk 4:
Black with no manufacturer markings with a vcr label that says “free” in
my handwriting and 3/28 in someone else’s, with disk titled INAGING. This
means nothing to me. It’s blank.
Disk 5:
Black Imation with 3m technology. Label has “ *nothing”) scribed on it.
And it has nothing on it. Good for that disk with its Curtis Martin like
consistency.
Case 2:
Solid yellow, apparently these were my pre-zip disk files from graphic
design
Disk 1:
Black Imation with 3m technology. 1st attempt successful but locks up OS 9
when it loads resulting in only the apple logo and the help options in the
upper right corner. Help does nothing when clicked on. Help
does nothing when clicked on repeatedly for 15 seconds. I turn the volume
up on my speakers. It’s my computer laughing.
Disk 2:
Black Imation with 3M technology. 1st attempt successful. Its old
Photoshop projects that took up an entire disk. This one was a beginning
project of learning how to airbrush things out. It was a sunset that I
remember doing and I had to airbrush out seagulls, power lines and a boat.
These stupid things took a disk per project. “181kb left” written on the
label to show how much of a project that I could put on the
disk. Airbrushing takes forever, magnifying things to the nth level, but
it taught you how to turn the year 1979 into the year 1974.
If your still with me at this point
in time, my condolences.
Disk 3:
Black Imation with 3M technology. 1st
attempt successful. More terrible stuff that I’d never put in a
portfolio.
Disk 4:
Straight up 3M with what I'm assuming is 3m technology. (The big boy of
floppy, a 2mb): I found the two greatest pictures I ever took!!!! I’ve
been searching for the negatives for years and years. Unfortunately each
is only 500 mb, but still printable halfway on a 4 x 6. Took it in
Chicago on Navy Pier during the summer of 1995 during a Ferris Bueller
road trip.
Drum roll. It’s my last disk.
Disk 5:
Black imation with 3M technology.
Apparently it’s a back up to disk three. Sorry to disappoint. Now I’m
sure I have a couple more lying around in my parent’s basement, since they
converted my room into the guest room. Twice.
My dad retired midway through my
college career, my parents bought a house. Since I was there on an
extremely limited basis, I went from the second biggest bedroom (the
privilege that I held for 21 years and bumped off by the apparent needed
expansion of the study, bumping me to third largest bedroom stature. Upon
college graduation and me getting an apartment, my sister, who was 12 at
the time, needed to expand like the study, bumping me to 4th bedroom
level. Then eventually they turned that into a guest bedroom. So when I
shall return to the mother ship, I’m pretty sure I have a few more to
copy.
I haven’t even reviewed my 8 zip
disks yet...
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