Moderation

Pre-blog post-script: I took notice as I was writing the last sentence of my blog that my language is quite different than what I'm accustomed to. I have been listening to the audiobook on LibriVox of Pride and Prejudice (highly recommended) and, dear heavens, I've started internalizing her prose! This will not do.

I'm too lazy to change it.

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I am very partial to the ideas that K. Mandla offers in regards to minimalism, in that rather than try and follow a path of computing simplicity, a better virtue is to make the most out of what you have. I suppose I follow that idea to an extent, but what I think separates my path from his is that I offer moderation.

The OGG Vorbis experiment was a rousing success to the point where I now have 8 GB of OGG music, lots of it free and new. I spent the last twenty minutes sampling, snap judging, and discarding much of it. I cut back to 2.5 GB. (I'm not counting any audiobooks though; I just downloaded those last weekend! Those are 6 GB and require vicious QA on my part, and, as a result, equally bloody cutting.)

I've decided that while it is nice to have the MicroSD card of 4 GB on my Sansa Clip+, it would be of more use to my focus if I let go of it and used the 4 GB of internal memory only. The opportunity to have many, many albums from Kahvi collective and audiobooks from LibriVox is tempting, but I find that I appreciate my library less if I am too overwhelmed by the management and depth of my wares. I simply don't need to carry my entire library around with me, wherever I go.

There was once a time when I was convinced that 16 GB was not enough space! Nowadays, I purposefully downgrade for my own sake. My minimalism has blossomed. I'd write a sentence here about how "I loved big minimalism" or something, but for one, this is quite the opposite of oppression, and second, Jane Austin didn't write 1984.