Living and dying online

Have been reading the cover story from the Times magazine a couple of weeks back about what happens to your online legacy when you die.  Some people go pretty overboard and want to keep everything.  I don't know about that, but I have put a fair amount of time and energy into this blog so I guess I should make some plan for protecting it.

In general, I'm of a mind that enough traces of me will be left behind. In fact, though I can be a pretty assiduous archivist, I find the act of throwing stuff away pretty liberating. Before moving south a couple year and change ago I went through boxes and trimmed down the legacy of my academic career to two bound copies of my dissertation (I also have a pdf that I bought from the University of Michigan, which I will happily send to anyone who requests it), some copies of my senior essay (offprints from the publication, sadly I lost my copies of the original with its specially commissioned drawing by Jean Paul Beck), and a handful of other papers, including the only thing I paper got an A+ on, a close reading of a poem by John Donne.  Other than that, I chucked it all.  I also tossed out tapes that I had carried around for 3 decades.  I felt lighter.

I feel sort of the same about my digital legacy.  It's important to do some editing.

Oh and, by the way, I got promoted a couple of weeks back.Now I have to manage all of one person but also hire more and grow the top line of my area. Just what I needed. More work.

As for now, I need to go take down the Xmas tree.  We are moving in 4 weeks to a rental while we renovate the homestead, and we ain't done squat.  We need to get this tree outta here and also take a carload of crap to the rental this afternoon.