Sometimes I amaze even myself.  OK, I know that’s a very ego-centric statement, but once I explain more I think you’ll understand I’m actually being self-derogatory as well as a little smug.

First I need to give you the background …

Many, many, years ago, someone told me the secret to knowledge was not to know everything, but to know where everything could be found.  It’s a very librarian concept, which basically means that a librarian has no way of knowing everything in every book, on every shelf in their repository, but if they have a good indexing system, they can find any piece of information within that library, quickly, and then study it for relaying to someone else.  Such concepts are the basis of all Internet search engines, and should be the basis of all organisation of a computer’s hard drive.

With me so far?  Good.  Onwards ….

Part two – I’m a magpie, not just because I support Newcastle United FC, but because I collect, hoard, store, refuse to seperate from, items and information I collect.  Just ask my Mum – she’s desperate for me to ship my library of books from her garage to here in Thailand.  It literally fills half of her garage and is becoming the bane of her life.  I’m no different when it comes to digital data.

I acquired my first DOS-based PC back in 1991.  It used floppy disk storage only, and when I bumped it up to a hard drive version (with a MASSIVE capacity of 20 MegaBytes – yes, Mega not Giga) my data archiving addiction began in earnest.  You can disbelieve me if you wish to, but on my current PC (and on the network server here) I still have many of those files from back then.  Note I said at the start of this paragraph that it was my first DOS-based PC, that’s because from that point on, I have had a continuous compatibility trail up to the present machine.  Still in boxes at Mum’s place are 3″ Amstrad PCW floppy disks from pre-DOS days (they are not 3.5″ floppy disks and are thus incompatible with modern drives), and … wait for it … data cassettes from my first ever computer – a 1984 Commodore 64 (very Orwellian).  I have no idea what’s on them, but refuse to part with them … just in case.

Where am I going with all this?

This morning, rummaging around in my hard drive for something, I gave up “browsing” for it as I’d completely forgotten where I’d put it – this happens about once a year, and is not surprising on a hard drive array with seventeen years worth of data, images, and other files on it.  I’d even started considering it may have been archived off to CD or DVD (and dreaded doing a hunt through that mountain) when I decided to do a network wide search.

Boy, did that blow some cobwebs out of the corners.  Amongst the literary archaeological treasures it unearthed was a folder full of the “lost wisdom of the ages” a.k.a. articles I’d written about Thailand during my first months here.

Voraciously I read those older insights to the new and exciting adventure of becoming an expatriate in an exotic far away land.  Then I had a coffee, made and ate some toast, read them again, and came to a conclusion.

I’m going to share those articles with you, starting next week, but I’ll be updating out-dated information such as prices etc. and in one or two I’ll be sanitising (self-censoring) some of the topics discussed as my opinion or knowledge has changed in the last nine and a half years.  Additionally, doing it that way will also allow me to publish them with current dates (bringing them to the top of the blog) rather than backdating them to 1999 and burying them in the blog archives.

Some of their content surprised me, even though I wrote them, and some of the tales from back then amazed me that I’d forgotten about them.  What amazed me more, and this goes back to the top of this article, was that I’d completely forgotten I’d written them, never mind that I also had no knowledge of where they were stored.

My computer hard drive is now officially an archaeological site that needs further excavation. Maybe nearly a decade of cooking in aluminium pots is catching up with my mental faculties?

Watch for the 1990′s revisited, starting next week on Expat Eye, in a series called, “Back to My Future”.

Garry