I lost eighty pounds in three weeks...POSTED FEB 12, 2010

...and all I had to do was chop my legs off! Oh, wait. Different kind of weight loss...

Five years ago, with a move from New York to Florida becoming more and more likely, I sorted through everything I owned and tossed/gave away things I didn't need anymore. Such room cleaning went against my pack-rat nature, so the geek within devised a clever scheme to appease it (cue maniacal laughter), which I named "Project FireFolder" after the "Fire" folder on my hard drive.

The scheme went like this: There were stacks and stacks of papers and photos lying around, taking up space, being difficult to organize and heavy to move, such as the class notes I'd recently accumulated over four years in college, and I wasn't ready to part with some of it. I realized that I could scan the documents into my computer, save them into compressed image files (typically grayscale JPEGs), and toss away the paper. You can fit a lot on a CD if you're good with compression, and one CD doesn't weigh nearly as much as all my notes from college did. So, that's what I did in 2004/2005, and I had about sixty pounds less to haul down to Florida months later.

There are no moving plans right now, and certainly not as far as NY -> FL was, but I've been wanting to finish what I started for a long time (2005 was somewhat a rush-job), and now there are more trash bags filled, more giveaways, and another pile of things to scan into the computer, things which will also be thrown out later. I feel so much lighter. Just as long as I don't look at the bathroom scale.

Besides the ability to throw old things away without really losing them, there's another advantage I found over time. Most of my photos (family/vacation/archival, etc.) were scanned but not thrown out in 2005, but they were much easier to access since they were then right on my computer. Over the years, many of these already-scanned pictures were used for web graphics (notably the "25 Years of Ryan G" articles three years ago). Not once in five years have I been compelled to pull out the physical photos. This time around, I'm not keeping them.

So, that's what I've been up to the last few weeks. At the tail end of this project, I will be going through the video archives and re-posting my high school/ college work to this website. There are also a few things leftover from January to work on from this website. That'll probably be next month.

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