I suppose this falls under the category of mordant humor, but I’ve been thinking about how much of my life is on disk lately, old disks at that, and this pops up in the news.

To ensure that his unfinished works won’t see the light of day without him, Terry Pratchett stipulated that his hard-drive was to be run over by a steamroller.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to find somebody to run over a hard drive with a steamroller.”

Myself, I plan to take my old laptops (and a lingering palm pilot) to a place in Richmond where apparently there’s a huge machine that chews them to pieces and spits them out. Not as classy as a steamroller perhaps, but who wouldn’t want to watch that? Then I can go forth into the future with a more organized file system and the ghosts of documents past taken care of (not to mention the tax returns).