Yesterday evening was very pleasantly spent at a friend's apartment, where he took photos of two medieval outfits, for the flyer and for other promotional purposes. Now I have about 250 photos to sift through: I have to choose the best pictures for the flyer and related things and then wield the photo tools necessary to get them printable.

Which means today is also the time for me to find out how I can best handle raw photo data files. Which is what will fill the next bit of the day - and I hope I can find a good program for me fast.

We spent most of yesterday playing life-sized Sokoban in our apartment, sorting through old paper and rearranging books in the shelves. It really is amazing how much paper amasses in just a few years, even when we both try to discard old sheets and slips of whatever paper that are not needed anymore.

There is one exception for me when throwing away paper, though: Any artwork I made myself stays. Period. In some cases, even the preparatory sheets for the final thing.

And in addition to that, I admit I'm a bit reluctant to throw away old bills from computer parts, because I kind of like to rediscover them after some years.
Do you know this feeling of utter amazement (paired with relief that these times are past) when you read what you paid for, say, a 128 MB USB-stick back in the early 2000s or for 128 MB of RAM (simple RAM for a desktop PC) back in 2001? Blimey, those things were expensive! Yet they were needed, and we paid for them.

And now? 50 Euros for a 32 GB USB-Stick. 512 MB sticks given out as freebies on job fairs.
Amazing.

And then I think of the one Gigabyte RAM happily working away in my slightly elderly laptop (and 1 GB is all it will take) and how long some necessary procedures take... and I imagine doing this on 128 MB of RAM because what that cost 2001 is approximately what I paid for my GB in 2006 or 2007.
Impossible.

Oh, by the way, culling old paper or books is so fitting into the medieval calendar. As Got Medieval tells us, February is the month to trim back dead bits from the trees. Paper = made from wood pulp. Therefore paper = trees, dead bits of trees = paper stuff not needed anymore.
(And since there is an archaeologist in this household, and there are small bits of real wood around as well from past projects, we even managed the get-some-firewood part. Neat, huh?)

Today feels just like yesterday work-wise, except that all the things with a deadline that haven't been finished yesterday are one day more urgent today. And since I'm hunting for double files right now (or to be precise, I let a program hunt for them), I can't even do proper work on the computer since all the RAM has been taken already.

And I'm only hunting for the double files to get more space on the external disc so I can do a full back-up before installing updates for two of my programmes. Which I don't really need to do urgently, but wanted to do to have it off my list since I thought it would not take long (and another full backup is never wrong). Speak of efficiency.

No, never mind. Speak of back-ups. I know it hasn't much to do with medieval clothes on the first glance, but when writing my thesis (about archaeological garment finds, which should explain the blog post title), two hard disks died in my computer. Yes, you have read correctly. Two. And the second one was bnly about three months old when it gave up. Since I had one disk dying years before, with less-than-pleasant results, I had grown religious with making backups, so it was not the disaster it might have been - even though the second drive managed to die slowly in such a curious way that it corrupted the most recent backups, costing me about a month of time. Incidentally, I handed in my thesis one month later than I had planned.

With a complete data loss, I would not have finished my thesis by now. In fact, I'm not sure I would have found the heart to do it all over again. Should you be one of those people who are doing it all without a backup copy of your files and a deep belief that you will be the lucky one, please reconsider. Backup media doesn't cost much money nowadays, and it will save you a lot of anxiety and tears (and of course, unnecessary work!) should bad things happen to your hard disk. I'm using a small freeware programme called SyncBack, and I'm content with that, but there are oodles of programmes out there and there's surely the right one for you too, even if you don't like SyncBack.

So please, do yourself and your friends and relations the favor. Do your backups regularly - it doesn't take much time, but boy, can it make a difference!

I have made a resolution to do some academic housekeeping (a.k.a. filing of papers) every day to reduce the huge stack of copied papers that are still left from the time of thesis-writing. Since filing here means taking the paper and typing all the necessary data like author, editor, title, year, journal or book title, ... into my database before actually punching holes into the sheets and binding them together and physically filing them, this is not one of my favourite jobs - it can get pretty tedious after a while. At the moment, I am filing mostly papers written in Czech, which means "after a while" translates as "after the third or fourth article". Even with a keyboard heavily altered to include almost all special characters that are needed for writing Czech, Polish, French, and the Scandinavian languages, getting all the words typed out correctly is taking a lot of concentration.

Yet keeping such a database is a huge help when looking for that "something I once read somewhere", not to speak of citing things in papers and articles. I would not want to be without that database - I am using Endnote, but if you are looking for a literature database, you might want to look at Zotero, a free plugin for Firefox doing the same job as Endnote. I bought the commercial programme a few years ago because it included an add-in for MS Word, and there was no alternative product on the market. I was convinced before buying that adding references to texts with a flick of the finger really is something, and I never regretted buying the software. Even better if you can get the same functionality for free nowadays!

So now I'm tackling the paper stack three or four papers at a time, and I'm looking forward to the day in the future when all the sheets have been filed into one of my file folders. And I hope it will come soon!