The roads were fun this morning. It seemed that everything was moving slowly. The M5 almost stopped just after the tolls, so I exited there to use Henry Lawson Drive. Which was slow until I crossed the Hume Highway. But the worst was General Holmes Drive, since lots of people wanted to turn right into the race course for a caravan show.

This meant that traffic was stalled because people were blocking the other lanes. And then when I needed to turn right across it there was just a continuous stream of people waiting to get in too. Thankfully I managed to make a turn through this stream of people.

The meeting went well. Looks promising.

Archives

New Scientist has an article on how some patent databases are really incomplete, but how paper archives are being destroyed. Something like 322,000 documents are missing from the Brittish patents database. And now there is a move around the world to turn old documents into pulp to save storage costs.

Storing old documents costs a lot of money. When I was with Pacific Power we has a 200 square meter drawing archive which was not cheap to operate. There were certain people who wished a fire would burn the place down, but with the asbestos roof there was no way that would happen (and thankfully I never needed to actually visit it). But I have first hand experience with trying to ensure that there are good copies of every drawing, Things happen. Even with great systems in place. When I was working for them I found numerous drawings that were not usable in the digital archive. I worked out how to find them and got most of them fixed. Those that I didn’t usually did not matter.

Pacific Power used to own the site of the Star City Casino since they had a power station there. Some of the digitized drawings for that site were lost – but this was not a real problem since the power station had been knocked down years before. Therefore the drawing was for historical purposes only.