Memories are made of this...

The second career I started in 1988 sputtered and nearly died until I joined forces with an Idaho insurance company in 1992. Insurance sales are driven by direct mail. That is expensive. I found a key ingredient to bring down the price, a laughably cheap source quality names. The names had to be mined out of a data base and sorted by age and zip code, and then divided into lists of one to three thousand and then printed on mail pieces. Enter the ZIP drive on the right. It had lots of memory and could easily be moved from computer to computer. Each disk held 100 mb of memory. I had at least ten such disks which adds up to one gigabyte of storage space. Insurance products are still driven by direct mail, but the financial crisis of the early 2000s took most of the profit out of the kind of product I was selling.

I still have the ZIP drive and it still works. I thought I might try Linux a couple of weeks ago and chose to buy the USB flash drive on the left in the picture. It has two gigabytes of memory, twice that of all my ZIP disks! So the ZIP drive will soon be going out the door.

In the meantime, our pastor began last Sunday's sermon by reporting that his 23 year old loves to download religious episodes of Mitchell and Webb from Youtube to the hard drive of his laptop to kid his preacher father.

What to do with the flash drive? I once downloaded 23 verisons of Brazil. Youtube hasn't come that far yet, but there are some nice Pink Martini clips available. Lots of old Johnny Carson stuff, too. Thanks, N, for the tip as to how proceed.