Depending on the epoch... can be divided like this:
- childhood, mostly from memory, either direct or from what others told me, plus what photographs were preserved.
- between spring 1968 and august 1974, diary. A bit thin in the first years, it thickened significanly after elementary school. More photographs.
- university days, very thin. Some photographs, official documents, whatever triggers my memory.
- before vojska, photographs, luckily there are many.
- vojska, photographs and memory. Perhaps one day I'll open the letters and see what we wrote to each other then.
- after vojska, very thin, mostly memory. Whatever I wrote down at the time got lost every academic year. There's one notebook somewhere, I saw it, but can't find it again. But that's all from work.
- programming in the eighties, almost nothing, no floppies, no preserved tapes. Very thin with photos too, either negatives not preserved, or we didn't make many. Some material from printers, though.
- nineties, even worse until 1994 with the photographs, but then, starting with 1991, there's sezam. Even if I didn't write much the first year, it got thicker as it went. Likewise, I have lots of code written from 1989 on, and there's a lot of reminders in the comments. Again, some of these pieces of code are events to themselves.
- emails for 1997 to 1998 were lost (except those from Burt, which he sent again, for this); still have almost everything else from september 1998 to current date
- digital photography, starting shyly in 1999, takes off in 2000 and doesn't stop. I still have a full archive.
- various chat logs - from IRC, ICQ, AOL chat app... all the way to skype, with good timestamps, persons etc, also should cover that from 1998 or 1999 and on
- still an untapped resource are the SMS, for 2011 and on. Didn't have much of a cell phone before, so the theoreticall loss from that period is about a dozen messages. [Finally did that in january 2024 and then started thinking of those in the Pinephone]
- likewise, recordings I made with nokla, once I start sifting through them. I mostly used it as a dictaphone, but sometimes it was a true recorder.
- since about 2013 I actually started writing while it's fresh, so always attacking some point in the past and writing, in parallel, about the current month.
- aboit dates, I manage. Sometimes I find in my head just a hunch that the event happened (well, what else can an event do) in this or that part of a certain month, then I check for saturdays in that month (thanks to linux's command line), because I have an equally strong hunch on the day of week when it happened. Sometimes I hit it right, confirmed post festum from other sources, sometimes I miss it by a year or, more often, a couple of weeks. Except in cases where I stubbornly stick to my own sequence of events, who fucks the facts (Rushdie taught me that). Or I sometimes move the text to where it should chronologically be, when the so-called facts appear.
- wordly events, when I get hold of them, I insert inasmuch as they influenced my life, or were at least talked about. For late sixties and early seventies I even went through wikipedia and while adding stuff, it turned out I already mentioned lots of it, because it did influence, though some of it was on a long fuse - I mentioned it when it impacted me, not when it happened.
I'm writing this for 16 years now, at random, whenever I remember something I add it. I've found that I've added some things twice. Some of them I found and removed duplicates, but some tales you may find in more than one place. Nobody's pertfec.
11-V-2022 - 30-VIII-2025