16 May 2008

rather than coding, I'm thinking about pictures and my own history

In egocentric attempts to recover memories of times gone by, I started posting my Semester at Sea pics again to my Flickr account.  I realized that all the photos I recovered via teh intrawebz back in Sept 2006 after the robbery didn't get organized correctly and I was missing a lot of pics and data about my Semester at Sea experience.  (I'm also missing craploads of Dartmouth day pics and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they're backed up somewhere out there on CD in my one unpacked room.)

So I started reorganizing my MacBook at home to try to get a handle on my digital library of photos.  And while doing that I'll be doing a country-by-country (re)upload of photos from Semester at Sea.  I took down the old subset of photos so that I won't have dupes and this time I'm labeling as I go.

The amazing thing about this is that even just seeing what's captured in a photo of a moment sometime between September and December of 2000 brings me back to that place.  I can remember where I was, what the food tasted like, how sunburnt or homesick I was, and all sorts of other trivial details.  I'm able to recover data from my brain I didn't know I remembered like what monuments were called, when I saw them, and who that one random person I met for one hour of my life was. 

I'm having my own egocentric "oooo wow that was fun!" set of photo flashbacks.  And yeah, it's making the travel bug rear it's ugly head.  Galapagos Islands seem of great interest to me at the moment as does traveling in Turkey - talk about diverse.

But thankfully I'm on my work laptop and no where near the digital library of memories, so it's time to go back to work so that Sunday when I'm recovering from a day of fun-in-the-sun and housewarming party I can lazily label and post more photos.