A lot of my life is represented in computers. Over the years I have accumulated a lot of digital data in the form of pictures, blog posts, music, emails, videos, and even computer files from college, work and church. When I think about it, there's a lot of stuff there that's just sitting out there in computers in ones and zeros. I don't worry about storage because computer storage will only get cheaper and bigger. In fact, I'm glad that all this stuff can be preserved forever in a hard drive, rather than in physical boxes filled with papers, photos and cassette tapes. But organizing all of this is a pain in the rear. The real question is: can I specifically find anything that I'm looking for that's more than a few months old???

At first glance, I have over 25,000 digital pictures on my computer, over 1000 blog posts on this site alone, over 10,000 emails in my Gmail account, and probably 500GB of data from being in school. And this is all within the last 10 years. All of this data will exponentially increase as the years go by. But these numbers might be considerably low compared to current college students who grew up on the internet. How do people organize all of this stuff? Well lately I've been trying to take advantage of metadata, especially when it comes to photos. Since there's no easy way to index your pictures, tagging your own photos with keywords will help you find it later on. It's easy on Facebook when friends will tag your photos for you, but when you've got 25,000 photos from different circles of life and only you know all the different people and places that are in these photos... you're on your own.

So now I'm doing what I should have done from the very beginning: trying to index everything that I digitally produce. It's difficult and time-consuming right now, but another 10 years down the line I'll probably be thanking myself.