Well, looks like this summer break is pretty much over. I’ve never been particularly “good” at taking vacations, but the last few years have been challenging in that the following school year were so filled with unknowns. Thus, this summer I really minimized my “time off” because transitioning to full time face-to-face, middle-school robotics and media courses was going to require much more time pull my classroom together than the half-week given to us between when we are required to show up and and when students are required to show up. But, even so, I always manage to fall into some activity that I never seem to have time for during the school year. 

I remember one summer, when I was living and teaching in Long Beach, I had no money, my last paycheck from the beginning of July had to last to the next paycheck at the beginning of October. So I spent that summer reading Sci-Fi novels. I spent that whole summer walking on the beach and reading novels. I don’t even remember what I read, just that I couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere (couldn’t afford to, really) and didn’t really want to. Yeah, those were fun times.

Last summer I spent it working on my photography blog… I don’t even know if I want to post the link, because, even though I made a lot of “progress” I’m really rethinking the whole business of posting everything online. Yeah, the guy who has been writing a blog since the early 2000s is having doubts about this business of posting everything online. The platform I posted to was far better at hosting the thousands of images and videos I’ve shot, but I later came to find out that it was way more expensive to use this service than I had anticipated. And more recently I’ve been rethinking why I’m so driven to post everything. 

Thus this summer’s project has been a bit less personal. I’ve been digitizing my whole movie collection. Actually it began at the end of the school-year when I was trying to catch up on the images/videos I’d taken over the school year, trying to back-up and organize the work (which, due to the pandemic, was actually a far smaller collection than in previous years). Saving images somehow led to digitizing my DVD and Blu-ray collections. Due to time constraints, I decided against doing much with my TV series collection and burn my movie DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, first onto an external hard disk and then move it to my NAS (network-attached storage), where I can call up the collection using PLEX on my TVs, iPad and iPhone. I’m up to “H” in the alphabet and I had to upgrade my external hard disk to 8-Terabytes. Given all of the streaming services that I am subscribed to, there is a bit of madness at all of the time, effort and money I’ve thrown at this project. It’s feeling a bit like last summer’s photography blog effort. There’s some drive to do this that doesn’t entirely make sense. 

It’s really cool to see all of those titles in the PLEX app and know that I can just click onto any title that I want to watch of any these movies (and TV shows) to instantly watch them. But then if I’m honest, it’s not really that hard to find the disc in my library and drop it into the player. But here I am, with only a couple weeks before the school year starts and I’m trying to get the collection onto my server. Imagine what I could accomplish if my efforts were directed to doing “good”! Ha! I guess I have this odd drive to make technology do what it promised to do when I purchased it. Silly me.