I had a little bit of a hissy fit on Twitter this morning. The tweets were a result of me venting my frustration with my iPad; I had run out of storage on my device and it wouldn’t let me delete anything to make room for content because I had run out of storage on my device. I just love that vicious circle of techy errors where you’re scolded for running out of hard drive space or whatever but to gain more space you have to clear more space but you can’t clear more space because you’re running out of space. The kicker of the situation is that this is an Apple product; a marvelous piece of technology where everything is magical and rainbows fly around and unicorns dance and clap their hooves together. Investing (substantially) more more into Apple technology is a bid to the promise of being free of crazy error messages, worries about hard drive space and the other mundane adventures that mere mortals on Windows and the like experience. After all, when you buy an Apple product, it just works.
And now I’m getting worked up again. It’s amazing to me where my mind goes when I type a blog entry without any forethought; those streams of consciousness where I just let me fingers do the walking.
I am the “money manager” of our flying club. I maintain the banking accounts, the accounts receivables and the accounts payables for the dozen or so owners of our two airplanes. I really enjoy this role in the club because I like to think that I’m pretty good at it. I lucked out in that arena of life; growing up in a family-run retail environment gained me access to accounting practices at a very early age. The early geek in me picked up a lot and this has been a benefit throughout my life. Doing this sort of thing comes naturally to me. The thing is, we are well into the 21st century and quite frankly I’m sick of filing papers and keeping paper trails of all the transactions. Earl asked why I’m still tracking everything on paper because the reality is that I can store everything electronically and still be perfectly within the boundaries of good accounting practices and the law.
So now my tech quandary is this: I want to use my Apple devices to digitize these records but I don’t want them to live within the Apple Eco-system. Honestly, I don’t want them to live within any eco-system. I don’t want to rely on a paid storage service, I don’t want to use a paid app to maintain this data, I want this to be as accessible as possible using any computer by anyone that is granted access.
And this is where the full-blown geek kicks in. I have a plan in my head on how I’m going to store this information but I need to write it down to get my plan into action.
I’m discovering that I love writing things down instead of doing thing entirely on the computer. But this creates paper and it seems silly to create paper to plan out a scheme to get rid of paper.
It’s that vicious circle again.
The previous sentence was my planned final sentence of this entry but then this popped into my head: Is it a vicious circle or vicious cycle? Does the vicious circle have teeth? Does it go “grrrr”?
Things to ponder.
