I am an obsessive packrat by nature. In fact, my desire to amass and accumulate is so strong, that in the past I have made a cross country move every few years in a vain attempt to encourage myself to simplify. Only then, do I seem able to extinguish the beguiling desire to keep that beat up old sweater I have had since 1994.
My computer, however, is one place where I am free to revel in my compulsion to keep everything — it is a veritable cesspool of installed (and forgotten) software, Photoshop files from 2001 and digital photos from back in the day when I actually had red hair (for like a minute). The most stunning example of my desire to horde, however, is my Firefox bookmark collection. As a designer, I am compelled to save every Photoshop tutorial, every beautiful website, every marginally interesting usability study. As a result, I have about 500 neatly categorized bookmarks. So, imagine my horror when I one day noticed that 95% of my bookmarks had been erased. I traced the catastrophic event back to an upgrade of Firefox a few weeks earlier and spent two weeks fretting over my lost bookmarks.
I tried a myriad of remedies from checking my bookmark backups (no cigar, the old one had already been over written) to running a chkdsk on my computer — nothing worked. Just when I had finally come to grips with the cold, harsh reality that my bookmarks truly were gone, I remembered that three months ago I had gotten a new hard drive. I rushed to find our IT guy, Dave, who without further ado restored my book marks (minus three months) from my old hard drive.
I have since started using del.icio.us, which despite its horrendous user interface, accomplishes the task quite nicely. My growing bookmark collection can be found on: http://del.icio.us/nixgab
