This month has been an unexpected adventure into the past.

My personal journals: Earlier this month, I spent some time having Google Gemini perform OCR on hundreds of image files — each was a page scanned (in 2002) from my personal journals from 1974 to 2002. Of course, it turned out that many of these images were duplicate scans of the same pages, so I spent quite a few hours removing the duplicate passages, which left me with only about 400 pages of material.

I am actually considering publishing huge chunks from the journal that relate to my personal growth over several decades, dealing with the long-lasting impact of childhood sexual abuse by my brother, and my nuclear family’s response to my disclosure of that abuse, and to his subsequent offenses (link).

Articles: I also had Google Gemini perform OCR on about 100 articles I wrote for my college newspapers, plus a year of weekly columns I wrote about CB radio for the Worcester Telegram in 1978-79. (I am still surprised at my typical reporter’s memory: I have no recollection of most of these articles, and probably would not have remembered most of them even a month after they were written.)

I believe my writing for BYTE and InfoWorld magazines in 1983-1987 is included in Google Books scans, so I haven’t bothered to re-scan those.

I’m surprised that I can’t find the 3 years of “Law Office Technology Review” columns I co-wrote with Barry D. Bayer for legal newspapers; we republished many as a “collected columns” offprint and then a monthly newsletter. Perhaps he has them somewhere in digital form, but I doubt they’ve held up over time (these were reviews of technology products and software from 1987 to 1990).

Fiction: I wrote many hundreds of pages of science fiction during grades 6-12, and they’re all in a box in the garage. I scanned some, but not all, back in 2002. From a quick review of the scans and the box, they’re not quite as bad as I remembered from earlier visits to the box, but I’m not planning on working on those at all.

I also found a detailed summary of a mystery novel I’d considered writing in 2012.

Backups: This week, I’ve restored backups from dozens of CR-ROM and DVD-RW discs from 1997 through 2007, and now I’m combining backups from a half-dozen different external hard disk drives. And I’m learning how much of the 3+ terabytes of data are just duplicate copies of the same huge directories full of the same music, pictures, and correspondence. I’m now working on “de-duplicating” some of the file sets. Incredibly strong feelings arose when I had to click “confirm” to delete 400 gigabytes of duplicate files at one swoop. My complete backup bundle is now less then 100 gigabytes, which actually includes pretty substantial backups from Kary (my wife) and Riley (my stepson).

Of course, all of this follows my tragic Labor Day weekend in 1996, when my computer hard drive failed and none of my backups were recoverable.

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