Hoarding Archives - thegoodwills.com

The great digital photo conundrum

digital-photo-dilemma — View from the Window in Le Gras“, the world’s first photograph. This is a colourised version of the 1826 original by Jonnychiwa – Wikimedia, CC.

It was a long overdue computer overhaul that brought to my attention we had a combined database of images (jpeg files) totaling more than 100,000. Gee willikers as they used to say in the 1950s sit-coms, to express amazement (today expressed as WTF or Holy F*** Batman, etc).

Gee willikers is described in the Urban Dictionary and elsewhere as a ‘minced oath’ – like the perfect gentleman turning a forming curse into Jeepers, Jings or Cripes.

All which has little to do with the discussion we are about to have – except, what the whillikers are we to do with a database of 100,000 digital photos?

The quantity is not so surprising when researchers* estimate that people in the US take on average 20 photos per day (Asia-Pacific 15 per day).

She Who Took Most of Ours (SWTMOO) swears there is a lot of doubling up in there, while sorting photos into years, topics and other identifiers.

We have both had computers, digital phones and cameras for the past 20 years. On that basis, it’s only 5000 photos a year, or 2500 each, on average. As you can see by the research, we came out just below average (14 photos per day).

As we all know, though, only two or three of a set of photographs taken on any one day will be keepers. So why not just delete the other 24 there and then? Those 40 or 50 mobile phone shots of the eclipse, nearly all of which were duds.

I came to this audit of our digital baggage while setting up SWTMOO’s new computer. While reinstalling backups from the old, failed computer, I decided to store only photos from 2018 onwards in the default Pictures folder. Then began the process of locating and moving pre-2018 digital photos from various portable hard drives (including my own collection on another PC).

This is when you run into the folders within folders trap and the occasional folder unhelpfully named ‘Photos’ or ’Folder’.( I plead ‘not guilty’ to that one. Ed) Many of these photos are from our travels around Australia and also overseas, although the latter seems like a long time ago now.

Did I mention we also have a cupboard stacked with photo albums from the pre-digital era? We are children of the WWII era where photos were scarce mementos of hard times, romance and childhood. Just as people today can lose their photo collections to floods, bushfires and other catastrophes, so too our war-era parents lost family photos in the Blitz.

War-time refugees driven out of their homes left everything except what they could carry. Photography was an expensive hobby in those days. If you are going through great-grandma’s things and can only find a handful of creased box brownie snaps, that is fairly typical. Formal portraits from the world wars that survived offer few clues to the people who inherited them. No-one thought to write on the back (in pencil, even) just who is in the photo.

Not that photo hoarding is a new thing – check out the street photographer Vivian Maier, a reclusive character who died unrecognized in 2009. A Wikipedia entry described how Maier took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, most in the 1940s and 1950s. These unbidden images of people and architecture in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles were unpublished until after her death. A collector acquired some of Maier’s photos in 2007, while others found Maier’s prints and undeveloped negatives in boxes and suitcases. Her photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, Let that be a lesson to you, SWTMOO.

Most of the equipment Maeir used is the stuff of museums now, as camera sales dwindle and smart phone trade soars.

As Matic Broz writes in Photutorial.com, * the proliferation of smart phone cameras and the rapid improvement in technology dominates the digital photo scene. In 2020, 82% of digital photos were taken by smart phones and that is expected to rise to 92.5% in 2023.

If you still have a digital camera (as we both do), you are in a dwindling minority of people who prefer, like professional photographers, to shoot images with digital or analog cameras and interchangeable lenses.

The convenience of the smart phone/camera is that most people have it with them all the time, like a wallet or watch.

Whatever brand of smart phone you can afford will do the trick and then some. The latest Apple Iphone, for example, has a 12 megapixel main camera and a 12mp wide angle camera. All the same, you can buy a digital camera for under $300 which will have a 20mp lense and probably a 30mm zoom as well.

In a world where there are 12 trillion photographs in existence and a myriad of ways to distribute them, who would actually pay staff photographers to take them? Newsrooms across the nation and electronic media in general have pared down their in-house photographic units accordingly. Staffers have been replaced by freelancers, photo sharing sites like flickr.com, and online agencies which either sell or give away digital images. Not to mention the keen amateurs who send their sunrise/sunset/storm phone snaps to the TV weather people.

According to Photutorial.com,* which seems to be the portal that keeps statistics on this topic, 1.81 trillion photos are taken worldwide every year. By 2030, this will have grown to 2.3 trillion photos every year.

The average user has around 2,100 photos on a smartphone in 2023. Apple smartphone users have 2,400, while Android users have 1,900. (My Samsung cheap ‘smart’ phone seemingly refuses to delete photos until it’s damn well good and ready, despite my varous attempts. Ed)

Even though the global pandemic reduced the number of images taken by 25% in 2020 and 20% in 2021, the growth of digital images has continued unabated. And why not? It’s cheap, available and social media makes it easy to share images with friends and family.

The major issue with digital imagery is its ephemeral nature. One of my long-term readers has been keeping a hard copy family photo album for a long while now. All of those Facebook photos of baby’s first steps, toddler’s first tantrum, first day at Kindie etc, all carefully copied to a flash drive. There are places which have DIY photo kiosks where you can select, crop and request images and come back an hour later and collect the still warm prints. The cost is nothing in the scheme of things. The big question is, do the young parents of today’s generation want hard copy photo albums of those precious moments?

“Mum, I shared it on Insta – didn’t you get it?”

The trap for those who accumulate vast numbers of digital photos and videos is the storage space they take up. At a rough guess our 100,000 photos consume close to 500GB of data, video considerably more. If you store data in the ‘cloud,’ be it a cluster of cumulus owned by Apple, Google, Microsoft or competitors like Dropbox, you may be enjoying a ‘free’ account now. Be aware that fees apply once you pass whatever limit has been set by your cloud provider.

The wonder of digital imagery is the ability to scan old photos and keep them on a hard drive (above the 2022 flood level). Here’s a scan of a ‘selfie’ from 1984, just to prove the point. No idea at all where the original colour print is. The sign says (left) swimming allowed (right) swimming prohibited. Kiwis, eh!

Four in 10 Australians Move Every Five Years

You were warned that FOMM would be ruminating about the not-uncommon human need to periodically pack up and move on. We are not alone. Over 40% of Australians moved house at least once between one Census and the other and the ratio is higher still for younger people.

According to the 2016 Census conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 43.4% of the overall population moved house between 2011 and 2016. Young people (20-29) were the most nomadic, with a third moving every year and two thirds moving within five years. These statistics are always rising, one Census after the other. Our imminent move (two weeks) will be recorded in the data collected for the 2021 Census (How did that come around so quickly?)

In a large country with six States and two Territories, it’s a fair bet the move is associated with work. I recall jamming around an outback campfire with a banjo-playing electrician who had left Rockhampton, where a contract had come to an end, hoping to get work in Darwin, where at the time there were many large construction projects.

No doubt that young fellow would belong to the cohort who rent houses. About a third of Australians rent houses or apartments, moving on average every three years. Some move because of a change of circumstance (work, a new baby, an opportunity to move to a better place), but many are forced to move because (a) the landlord is selling (b) they have been evicted for various reasons or (c) the rent went up and they need something cheaper.

Australia’s 1,100 self-storage sites do very well out of this constant moving and so do the movers who transport goods back and forth. Those forced to move at short notice have no option but to store their goods and chattels until they can find a place big enough to reclaim their stuff. A common story (from those moving from big family homes to two or three bedroom apartments), is that there will never be enough room for the piano and Mum’s antique bedroom suite. Those on a fixed income may also struggle to find an affordable home large enough to keep the possessions they have accumulated.

The rental market is controlled by people who are accumulating wealth by investing in real estate. Even without buying investment houses, many Australians have become well-off by renovating and selling their principal place of residence, on average every seven years (the period during which houses supposedly double in value).

Homeowners, too, have reasons aplenty for moving; a new job (in a new State), moving in with elderly parents to become care-givers and of course the moves brought on when one in two marriages end in divorce. Few formerly married couples manage to co-habit under the same roof ‘for the sake of the kids’, so someone has to move. Moving adds to the stress, anxiety and sense of dislocation that comes with a marital split. It sucks, and what nobody tells you beforehand is how hard it is for a single person (the majority of divorcees are people in their 40s), to find new digs. You’re too old for a share house, a boarding house seems like the dark side of the street and there is no way you are ready to shack up with someone new, are you?

Whether your last move was five 10 or even 17 years ago, the stress and chaos of packing stays with you.

Our downstairs room is a bit like the refrain in Kelly Cork’s song: “It’s all in boxes now, ready to go.” Even when you’re not a hoarder (we both like to keep things that might come in handy), moving after 17 years is a bit of a brain scrambler.

A reader who lives in north Queensland described moving after 30 years from the cane farm where she and her husband had raised a family. They moved to a new but smaller property in a nearby town.

“I know the time, effort and energy that go into packing after such a long time being in one place. Vinnies was very happy with me when we moved!”

We also found this to be so, separating things into that which could be sold, given away or taken to the transfer station (2019 term for a rubbish dump). A young woman took our old canvas tent off our hands, saying her plan was to take the kids camping (to get their heads out of their devices). It was a bargain, but we figure there’s a lot of karma there.

Absolutely no-one wanted our very large entertainment unit with its small fixed space for a TV. We took it apart and drove to the aforementioned transfer station. Only later I thought “Gee, the Men’s Shed might have wanted the solid timber top.”

I had an asthma attack while sifting through old, dusty tax records. In case you did not know, you have to keep personal tax files for five years; business files should be kept for seven years and 10 years for self-managed superannuation fund records.

So, a lot of shredding and burning later (shredded paper makes great packing material for fragile items), I pulled a huge plastic bin from under the desk labelled ‘Bob’s journalism files’. Damn, did I not go through this exercise once already? I previously scanned, printed and filed in folders the 150 or so columns I wrote for the Toowoomba Chronicle in the 1980s. The late Bert Pottinger, who wrote a weekly column into his mid-eighties, encouraged me to try my hand. Thanks for starting me on a path, Bert. It surprised me to learn that even then I referred to the other half as variations on ‘She Who Makes Her Own Yoghurt’. It’s not meant to be disrespectful, just an expansion of a catch phrase invented by John Mortimer, whose crusty old barrister Horace Rumpole was wont to refer to his wife Hilda as: ‘She who must be obeyed’.

We have complicated our tight packing deadline by performing at this week’s Maleny Music Festival (tomorrow at 11.45am), throwing a private house concert/party, driving to Brisbane for a ballet and then to the Neurum Creek Festival on September 13-15.

The majority of our cohort (people aged 70 and over), wish to ‘age in place’, particularly the 75% of older people who own their houses outright. This gives them options when it comes to downsizing to more manageable properties. In some circumstances, older people will need to sell their house to fund a move into retirement villages or aged care facilities. Sometimes the elderly and not-so elderly struck down by dementia are moved into the aforesaid ‘facilities’ without much say in the matter.

As so many people have said to us on hearing our moving-on story, it is better to do it now (at 70, fit and healthy), than have it forced upon you.

Some locals just don’t understand why we’d want to move away from the hinterland, where after 17 years we are still relative newcomers.

But as the famous Eccles said, when Neddie Seagoon asked why he was in the coal cellar: “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere”.

FOMM backpages: https://bobwords.com.au/one-persons-rubbish-anothers-treasure/

Is vinyl just a fad?

The first reference that came up when I searched ‘vinyl fad’ was an advertisement for high waist stretch vinyl leggings (only $15.60 from boo-hoo Aus.). That’s not a plug, you understand, just an observation on the randomness of internet searches.

Vinyl records, or LPs as they were known in my youth, have indeed made a comeback, after being superseded by compact discs (CDs) some 30 years ago. In the US, where such trends usually start and end, 9.7 million vinyl LPs were sold in 2018. This was a 12% increase on the 8.6 million copies sold in 2017.

In Australia, 860,000 vinyl albums were sold in 2018, up from 717,000 in 2017. The revival began in 2015 with a modest 314,000 copies sold.

Demand for new music on vinyl is such that last year Sony started manufacturing vinyl albums in Japan. Australia’s only pressing plant, Zenith Records, will be joined by a new pressing plant competitor, Program Records.

Vinyl seems destined, however, to remain a small-scale, boutique business compared with the growth of music streaming. ARIA (the Australian Recording Industry Association) said music streaming (wholesale) revenue continued its explosive growth pattern in 2018. It now accounts for 71.4% of the overall market by value amid annual growth of 41.2%.

The streaming category includes revenues from subscription services (Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play,Spotify etc) and on-demand streaming services such as YouTube and Vevo.

The compact disc format continued its gradual decline, securing 10% of music market revenue with just $53.17 million in sales.

By comparison, streaming services and digital downloads earned $445 million in combined sales.

Vinyl sales grew from $15.79 million in 2015 to $21.73 million last year, robust enough sales to keep the industry interested.

Yamaha Music USA’s Ted Goslin says the return of the vinyl LP is being drive by the under-25s hipsters. “Visit your local record store”, Goslin writes, “Chances are you’ll spot a man bun, a flannel shirt or some other identifiable accoutrement of this popular sub-culture.”

Collectors are also driving the renaissance of vinyl, constantly scanning second hand shops for a rare gem to add to their collections. The other demographic adopting vinyl as a serious hobby are people in their 30s and 40s, who can probably afford the high quality speakers, amps and turntables it takes to make vinyl sound good.

This topic came to mind after I retrieved 200+ vinyl albums from the bottom of the linen cupboard, where they have been for 17 years, and packed them into three plastic milk crates. As some of you may know, we are packing up and moving on. Expect a flurry of stories in coming weeks about packing too soon (“Honey, where’s the can opener?”), decluttering and when does sentiment outweigh practicality.

The most sought after vinyl albums are usually in mint condition (rarely or never played) and of course everyone wants 0000001 of the Beatles White Album, sold at auction recently for $790,000.

Over the years, I have had occasion to liberate an album from the linen cupboard and give it a spin. I once went through a whole week of listening to vinyl and nothing else. It’s true what they say – the sound is mellower, easier on the ears than the compressed attack of digital audio. But you have to sit down and actively listen and not have it on in the background like a café mix.

There’s a quiet hiss and an occasional crackle as we listen to the likes of the Moody Blues, Blood Sweat and Tears or Joni. Sonic heaven.

But it’s a pain getting up to flip the album over, isn’t it?

If you have looked after your records, it seems not to matter if they’ve been in a cupboard for 20 years. They will play like it was Yesterday or Tomorrow (Never Knows). There’s a certain level of frustration now, as I sift through these albums, having packed the record player away.

The other attraction of vinyl albums is the elaborate cover artwork that helps make LPs more collectable. Obvious examples include Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (a pre Photo Shop montage); Blind Faith’s bare-breasted teen holding a model aeroplane (it was banned in some countries) and Nirvana’s Nevermind, a baby in a swimming pool seemingly chasing a dollar bill.

There were also some stunning Pink Floyd covers by design company Hipgnosis; a man bursting into flames, hospital beds on a beach, a shaft of white light passing through a prism to become a rainbow.

So when I was asked was it really necessary to keep the vinyl collection, I had to say yes. It is an important connection to my youth and early songwriting influences and yes, I do listen.

The LP (long player) collection is quite eclectic and includes a lot of jazz and blues (my earliest influence until I discovered The Shadows). I have discovered that my niece and her husband are not just vinyl converts, they love jazz. So I have promised to give them my jazz albums, which include five recordings by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (note to executor).

The collection includes a lot of folk albums that I purchased for small amounts of cash at a time when record shops were having sales to get rid of surplus stock before CDs arrived. I would not dream of getting rid of such gems as albums by Kath Tait, the McGarrigle Sisters, Silly Sisters, Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, Van Morrison, Maddy Prior, The Pogues and Christy Moore.

Meanwhile, I discovered that banana boxes from our friendly IGA were perfect for packing CDs. Just fill in the small spaces with paper or bubble wrap, put the lid on and tape it up with ‘FRAGILE” writ large on the box. So far I’ve filled five of these boxes. Not to mention the four boxes of unsold stock from our recording ventures.

Much has been written about the decline of the CD, signs of which have become obvious. Few laptops now come with a built-in CD/DVD reader/player. Likewise, many modern cars don’t have CD players. As far as I can tell, the new medium for the average music listener is a Google app, Bluetooth, a smart phone and a subscription to a streaming service.

My brother-in-law has a Google Play speaker in his lounge room – hours of endless fun. As I have previously observed, the app struggles with different voices and often chooses the wrong song:

Bob: “OK Google, play The Goodwills.”

Google: “Alright. Here’s DJ Goodwill from YouTube Channel”

Bob: “Stop, Google. Play T.H.E. Goodwills”

This time it works and, because all of Google’s music is drawn from its subsidiary, YouTube, we hear one of our songs used as a soundtrack for a six-minute video. It’s confusing.

I ask Ms Google to play ‘Silhouettes’ and once again she turns up a more recent song of the same name (by Avicii).

Bob: “No, no, Google. Play Silhouettes by The Rays”

Ms Google: “Alright alright! Playing creepy voyeur stalker song Silhouettes by The Rays.”

Bob: “What! Are you developing independent thinking now, like Hal from 2001 a Space Odyssey? Also, you need to learn how to use commas.”

Ms Google: “Look Bob, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over”.

Further reading: Some technical opinions of interest only to audiophiles.

FOMM back pages – https://bobwords.com.au/planned-obsolescence-strikes-again/

Junk Drawer Quest For Missing Key

The small stuff autumn clean-up starts with a simple search of the junk drawer for a missing filing cabinet key. I recently shifted my office downstairs and in the shifting, all the things which were in places known to recent memory have been displaced. But it gives me a good chance to clear out what we call ‘the drawer of drawers’ – a small, deep drawer in which we throw stuff which has no particular home.

The first item in the junk drawer is an electronic button in a plastic pouch. I don’t remember what it is until squeezing it. A tune immediately begins to play, ‘Love Me Tender’, the A and B parts, faintly, reedily and slightly flat. Ah yes, that would be the satin sleep shorts from Valentine’s Day 1990-something. I surmise the idea was that one’s lover slides their hand inside the waistband (into which the button is sewn). You get the picture?

“Do you want to keep this?” I ask She Who Must Always Be Consulted.

“Aw sweet – I remember that…chuck it!”

The next items in the junk drawer are various jeweller’s screwdrivers, Allen keys and plugs you put in hardboard walls when you want to hang a picture. Then there are plastic bags full of assorted screws, nails and other wall attachments.

There are many batteries of various sizes. I set them aside to later test with the battery tester which must be in some other drawer.

Did I mention Blu-Tack? There is quite a bit of that, given our habit of posting music promo flyers all over town. I’m consolidating it into one packet clearly labelled Blu-Tack. You can see how insidiously a brand name worms its way into the language.

There are small padlocks (3) and padlock keys (7), none of which fit any padlock I can find thus far. There are 17 other keys which do not appear to have a match anywhere in the house. The old Camry key goes back quite a few vehicles. There are six plastic dimmer switch caps which became redundant last time the electrician was here.

“Do we really need to keep those?” I ask SWMABC (derisive snort).

At the bottom of the (empty) junk drawer, a tiny cockroach scrambles its way to liberty. I get the vacuum out and hoover up the cockroach grit in the bottom of the drawer. The remaining contents sit on the kitchen table awaiting re-distribution or disposal.

There’s a birthday candle, (5), which causes puzzlement until I realise there was also once a 6, which probably got thrown out after my landmark birthday. There’s a GetUp Action for Australia sticker which I just now stuck on my choir folder. There’s a Maleny Music Festival 2015 volunteer’s badge, a reminder to sign up for this year’s festival starting Friday 31^st of August (and score points for being a volunteer promoter).

There’s a ball of green twine (with a strip of Blu-Tack attached), an eraser, a Niagara Falls keyring and a recipe label for Palm Street Choko Chutney. There are also quite a few small butterfly spring clips.

“Most of this shit belongs in the office,” I yell down the hall.

“There’s too much shit in the office drawers already,” comes the rejoinder. “And don’t say shit in your column.”

Motivated, I take some Bank of Queensland coin bags and separate pins, nails, screws and ‘other fasteners’ then stow them in the shed.

Will get around to that one day too, I mutter, soto voce.

So then I get stuck into the office desk drawer. There’s two paper knives (never use them), several magnifying glasses (useful), two boxes of rubber bands and lots of address labels I can’t use anymore because, as I wrote in this blog last April, I stopped paying for a private mail box.

Having drawn a blank in both drawers, I rummage through the three-drawer plastic storage container on my desk, one of which is full of USB drives, each helpfully labelled with a key tag. Oh, yes, and one of these tags is attached to the missing filing cabinet key! ‘Incroyable’ as the French would so foppishly say.

The drawer or box full of USB drives is the scourge of 21^st century hoarders. Someone gives you one – “Oh you have to watch (bootlegged series)” and of course it is never returned. I still have my first USB drive, 256MB capacity (it cost $125). But if I tell you that you’ll think I’m a hoarder.

There’s a rarely-used Telstra internet dongle in this drawer, which gives me an angry hot flush when I think about Telstra’s plummeting share price, at $3.10 the lowest point since October 2011.

On Sunday I got onto Telstra’s ‘customer’ chat room to ask why it was that Telstra’s NRL app is charging data to my phone when it is supposed to be free. Incredibly, the customer service consultant told me her remit was for billing inquiries only so she’d have to transfer me to someone else. You know the story. I ended up on the ‘Crowd forum’, which is Telstra’s way of getting customers to solve their own irritating issues. A retired Telstra avatar suggested that perhaps I had not fully completed the installation process which links the NRL.com Live Pass to my mobile phone (very common, if you have the same issue – I could have told you that. Ed).

I know from reader research that 67% of you have no interest at all in rugby league, but I just want to say this one thing.

I remember when a TV reporter asked former Broncos captain Corey Parker what the Brisbane Broncos had to do to beat the Storm.

“Score more points,” was Corey’s laconic reply. He’s now a commentator with Fox Sports.

Miraculously, it seems, I feel freer and less anxious since (a) getting those unrelated issues off my chest and (b) completing the junk drawer declutter exercise.

But as happens with hoarders, the Love Me Tender button now sits on the office window sill, along with a strip of black and white negatives of uncertain provenance, a wooden frog with a fishing pole, a rabbit with one leg, a dumb-looking frog, a groovy ceramic frog with a dobro, a small concrete rabbit, a small pottery elephant, a pink piggybank, a faded postcard from Montreal, a weather station that needs a new battery and a lovely photo of SWMABC looking sweet and harmless. (Just goes to prove photos don’t always tell the truth. Ed)

There is one more item on the window sill – a chrome-plated star picket section, ‘The Winning Post’ (pictured left). It was a souvenir from the late George Stratigos, one of the few people in the world to ever sue BHP and win. I wrote (several) news stories in the 1980s about how it took Queensland Wire Industries six years to win a Trade Practices case over BHP’s refusal to sell Y-bar to QWI, which would allow it to make star pickets, thereby competing with a BHP subsidiary. After the High Court ruling, George had a batch of ‘Winning Posts’ cast and gave them to away to remind people how sometimes the little guy can win.

Call me sentimental, but I’m hanging on to the Winning Post, tarnished as it is by age and neglect. Like life itself, even.

FOMM back pages:

and another