I was watching my favorite TV show, The West Wing, tonight. The press secretary, CJ Craig, is meeting with a reporter from the NY Times and wants some information from him, but it’s against his policy to provide it in advance of publication. The reporter obviously accidentally drops the information on the floor. They both know he did it deliberately. He asks for an interview with the president, which CJ agrees to. OK, enough set up…

What caught my attention was that he dropped a floppy disk. It might have been a Zip disk, but I think it was a floppy, a plain old 3.5 MS-DOS preformatted floppy disk. Man, those were the days.

I know, floppies aren’t cool anymore. I’ve got a burner for CD-R and CD-RW, and I use that most of the time. But my desktop and laptop (“Old Sparky”) aren’t networked. There’s no wi-fi in my condo. So if I get home with the laptop and I haven’t e-mailed my writing to myself, or put it on FTP, I use a floppy. I darn sure don’t want to disconnect the cable and hook it to Sparky if I don’t have to.

So I like floppy disks. They’re small and funky and they make you prioritize – you have to think about what’s worth copying and what’s not. ‘Cause you only have 1.4mb to work with. That’s it. Choose, or sit there moving stuff over and over. Yep, back in my day we had these little plastic things with little plastic tabs to keep you from hosing something good. Floppies and moon pies, RC Cola and Grandpa’s cassette tapes of the Dead. [Sigh.]

* * *

About Sparky: One time at work, a buddy of mine came by the cube with a voltmeter. I don’t know why, but he was running it past the computers to see how much they were leaking. My laptop lit that thing up like a Christmas tree. It’s discharging enough ambient juice to cook soup. Hence, Sparky.