31,803 is the number of emails I recently imported from various old archives the other day. Every single email from October 16th, 2000 until present day, minus the emails from September of 2003 until November of 2004 that were lost in a hard drive crash.
So why keep around all of my email? Well, it’s like a log of my entire life. Want to know what I was doing on November 14th, 2001?
- My friend Walter sent me a picture of a girl flashing the fans at Wrigley Field
- My friend Dave sent me an email through his newly created nationwide dial-up network
- My friend Josh scored a 33% on the geek test
- My friend Jeremy decided to move back from Italy
- Aaron and I had a debate about the merits of qmail and DJB’s software
- I fixed a bug in the build form for Care2.com along with working on the spotlight rotator
- I discovered
ORDER BY RAND()in MySQL - My server, zebulon, had been up 119 days
See, that’s why I keep my email. Now, what should I do with all of this information? I’ve been pondering about putting it up in blog format one day at a time in a somewhat raw format. I’d change the names, etc., but I think it would be interesting. Thoughts?
Having an archive of your life is fantastic. I definitely recommend blogging it, in whatever format is most convenient for you. It may end up only be interesting to you (and your biographers in the future), but it’s worth saving your stuff somewhere besides your own hard drive. I know; a fire destroyed all my archives (email, chat logs, writing) last August. Only the things I had put online survived.
Of course, blogging stuff wouldn’t help people who run their own webservers…:P
stump, you’ve lived a wonderful life. aren’t the memories enough to keep you going? do you really need ALL those emails?
Reminds me of this movie I just saw from Netflix…
http://movies.go.com/movies/movie?name=americansplendor_2002