The Processing Processing Processing Episode

0:00Recently, I found myself once again processing media. I mean, I process media all the time, but this new collection of CD-ROMs handed to me, allowed me the opportunity to really think through, maybe for the hundredth time, my relationship with processes and materials, and what it's all for. At this time, I even expanded it into a life philosophy. So I guess I'm processing processes. This is Jason Scott, talks his way out of it, a podcast about technology, history, and getting myself out of debt. Thanks to Jeff Atwood, Chris Higgins, and the hundreds of other supporters on Patreon and elsewhere who have been supporting me and helping me get out of debt.

1:01While it's not fundamentally important where exactly I got these CD-ROMs, it's actually worth noting because it came from an Apple II conference. A bunch of computer collectors also attended the conference, and there was an illustrator and programmer who lived near the museum we were at, and who was trying to get rid of years and years of manuals and books and software and hardware. So a group of people went over and took out a bunch of it. The result of this was that they had a pile of CD-ROMs, both in the forms of software packages, as well as pieces of paper, which, when they presented it to me, had me realizing these are the back pages of books. There were entire sets of manuals and instructional in-book stores where a floppy disk or CD-ROM

2:06was on the back page. This was a pile of them. Just the back pages. Frankly, it was a little disturbing, like looking at a pile of heads, but the idea was good. Save the thing that's hardest to save, the medium, because those ultimately will go away first. Taking all of these boxes back with me, I realized I had hundreds of CD-ROMs to read again. Now, in my life, I have read a lot of CD-ROMs and I have a pretty weird way to keep track of it. Because I use a scanner to scan out TIF files of the front of CD-ROMs, I put these cropped TIFs onto Flickr. As a result, I can say with authority that I have digitized thousands of CD-ROMs and DVD ROMs over the years, ranging from games and utilities all the way over to personal collections

3:12of photos and whatever else people thought needed to be burned for a version of posterity. It's now my turn to bring them to later generations. To be able to do something repetitively, through thousands and thousands of variations, you need a process. You need some set of steps that make it so that you can do the job and get to the end. Maybe I'm splitting semantics here, but I think there is a difference between a process and a project. A project is a self-incapsulated effort that has a beginning, a preamble negotiations, and has all of the steps taken inside, and then ultimately a conclusion and accomplishment and closing the door.

4:13I don't think life works that way, especially when you are the cleanup crew for dreams and lives lived previously. It's just going to be lumpy. Some days you have stuff that needs processing, and other days there's nothing to do, but it's all one solid continuum. Therefore what I do is really focus, really look at the steps necessary to do a consistently okay job, an all right job, to get through the pile. By refining that particular work, well I end up being able to work on it in the background. It's my belief that without that critical ingredient, without the ability to live your life at the same time that you are doing something profoundly repetitive and prone to self-doubt,

5:13it just won't get done. Do you want to walk away from the flavor and the sparkle of life to do a closed loop effort that nobody notices, no matter how much you work at it, until maybe years later, or maybe because they have something to complain about? But what if it's something as simple as breathing, as simple as looking to the left and the right, and then going back to whatever you're doing? If you can do that, if you can turn what you are working into a background process, that opens the door to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, to watch videos, to be on the phone, to conduct interviews, to live at your desk while doing this. It's really not much of a secret, but that is my secret.

6:16My ingredient, to be able to do all of these eventually large scale efforts, is because I can live a life while doing it. In the case of a CD-ROM, the steps are pretty good. I have a DVD drive with a USB connection on the back. I have a program called ImageBurn, which reads discs by figuring out what their layout is and then converting to a format that makes sense for that particular disc. And then I have a flatbed scanner set to a full page, the absolute full page. So I put a CD into the drive. Let ImageBurn detect, read it, write it out. If it has a problem, I take it out of the drive, set it aside, and put in another disc. When it gets to the end, I then take that disc and put it straight down on the flatbed

7:20and press a button on the front. The scanning program I have has reprogrammed all of the buttons on the front of the scanner, so that whatever you press, it scans. When it's done, I put the CD into a stack and then do it again. And again, it doesn't require any thinking. If the drive is open, it needs another disc. If the scanner has a CD in it, I must have scanned it. I would never put it in and then not scan it. At the end, I have a directory of CD-ROM images, that is the ISOs and binqs of CDs red. And I have another directory of TIFF files. I look at the TIFF files and using the writing on the CD-ROM, rename the TIFF files to be

8:21whatever the actual product is. Then go to the set of disc images and pair them up. Since I can sort by modification, it pairs up pretty well. There's always cases where something goes wrong, something is strange and you have to track it down, but it can be rather minimal. Maybe once or twice out of a couple hundred that you've done. This is all simple. Perhaps much of it is intuitive or obvious, but it's my particular process. Refined over years to turn a pile of plastic discs into a pile of files sitting on a directory in a way that I think somebody can use them later. I'm in service of those people, that world. I don't know who they are.

9:21I don't know what they'll find. I haven't been reading them, studying them, going into a rabbit hole of curiosity. This is about taking a pile from one part of the desk and putting it to another part, knowing everything there is digital. One last critical step though is I don't throw out the CD-ROMs. I gather them up, I put them into a box, and I set them off for the Internet Archive to store indefinitely, effectively forever. Forever with an asterisk next to it. This works. This is fine. It gets the most things done in the least amount of time without being held up by thoughts of perfectionism, hope of getting it just right for those very rare CD-ROMs that are

10:23confusing or odd, and it allows me, ironically, to reach out to others. It's an anti-social act, resulting in a social act, the sharing of information, the sharing of what I've found, allowing others to give me feedback based on what they need. But perhaps won't be a surprise to hear that something so simple as the reading of digital information off of plastic discs is itself fraught with some layer of debate of politics, of conflict. And maybe it's because I'm so much older now, but I have no taste for it. I wish I could say that the amount of times that somebody has sent me an extremely angry letter that I failed to use my process with a particular item that had a particular format

11:26that is extremely subtle. And by not doing so, I have made things worse than if I had never done anything at all. I wish it was zero, but it's not. Luckily it's a small number, but it's a reflection of how quickly people can be fraught with theory, with ideas that they think have to be done their way, and where it all kind of falls apart for me in terms of sweating it out. In the vast, vast majority, my process gets the work done, and I believe, provides markers where it wasn't well done. Somebody can look at a CD-ROM that I imaged, believe that I should have done some sort of special bit or some repackaging, and can note it, and should I ever have the energy

12:27or the opportunity, I can go back, revisit these stored CD-ROMs, find this one, and give it that treatment. In other words, I do set myself up for a potential future, but I don't leave myself, paralyzed, worrying about it. This is a philosophy that transfers in so many directions. It's kind of unfair in life that we start to get it together as we get older, until failures of a physical nature or energy prevent us from implementing the things we learn. Maybe that's what books are for. Or somebody who has taken a journey to talk about the paths and the conflicts they had along the way, and be able to help someone at the beginning of that journey understand

13:31what's coming. There's an open question of if they listen, but again, that's life. Knowing that all these titles, all these collections of shareware, of drivers, and applications and operating systems, have at least a fleeting chance of becoming somebody's study project, art project, thesis statement, dissertation, or random browsing afternoon. I'm an old man putting a CD-ROM into a tray, knowing I won't be there when it gets ejected. The moment that I pick up a piece of plastic, admire the art, and place it in, has become over time, as exciting a journey. As any others I might plan to take, with these incredibly silly pieces of plastic that

14:34I make my home. This is Jason Scott, talks his way out of it. Next to James Baykoianu, Ernie Hershey, Michael Rubin, David Fisher, Sean Kelly, Sambiance, Benjamin Guts, Trixie the Cat, and Anonymous, along with the hundreds of other supporters on Patreon and elsewhere, who have been supporting me and helping me get out of debt.