The Lyons Share

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

So here I stand, on the edge of the abyss. I can take the blue pill and carry on recording just in my notebooks, always struggling to find the time to enter my records into the SxBRC database and ultimately producing boxes full of notebooks when I die for some luckless cybernetically-enhanced data entry clone to painfully process when I finally kick the bucket in 2061 or I can take the red pill, and start entering the biological data that I have been collecting for the last 23 years and produce some sort of meaningful database whilst maintaining a far more sustainable system of new record keeping. Ha ha, I just re-read this, I am starting to sound like Charlie Brooker! Anyway, I chose the red pill. It's gonna be a tough journey but one that I am now committed to.

I am going to use Recorder, as that is what the SxBRC uses, so I want to be able to sync with the database easily. I'm also opting for online storage for backup. I have just requested the latest version and I will begin when this arrives by databasing the history of this blog first. Then I will concentrate on Sussex records, then I will process each taxanomic group at a time.

Here is what I think must be my oldest records.

Interestingly, the thing that made me realise that I needed to do this and do this now, was the presentation I put together on pan-species listing yesterday. I've always known this time would come but something has changed in that I now really want to do it and I'm actually quite looking forward to it. It will mean that this year, I might be a little less active in the field. I will however, be updating on the progress of my database on my blog so that other people may be encouraged to do the same thing.