Over the weekend, as part of a cleanup effort, I dug out my old Zip drive and 5 years of backup disks (1995-2000). Eventually, I’ll burn the contents to CD’s and get rid of the Zip disks, but in the meantime, I spent a few strange hours reading about my life.

Honestly, I was surprised how much I’d forgotten about those years, especially since I usually have a pretty good memory. More than just forgetting events or things I’d written (papers, computer programs, emails), what troubled me was completely not remembering people – there were a few folks I’d just omitted completely, and not ’cause I had bad experiences, either. But I did find some gems, including a copy of my senior thesis from college, which I may put up soon.

I also spent a little time doing some experiments with my camera & flash to work out the right settings for indoor flash photography. Turns out I made two big mistakes when trying to take pictures at Thanksgiving. First, I used slow film (ASA100). Second, and more importantly, I used slide film, which is very finicky about being exposed properly. You can be off by quite a bit and still get a printable negative, but for slides, it’s gotta be right on the money. So the experiments from this weekend on ASA400 negative film did just fine, and now I have a baseline for comparison between using the flash directly, using it with a diffuser (slice of a plastic milk bottle), and bouncing it off the ceiling.

Speaking of photography, check out Dan’s new photoblog.