Terminate and Stay Resident

I fear I may have become spiritually homeless. Living in a spiritual cardboard box, as it were.

Since our economic migration away from Glasgow three and a half years ago, we've been trekking back 'home' about three or four times each year to visit friends and family, last week being the latest such trip. And it was during and since this last trip that I detected a marked shift in how my memories and recollections of my former home compare with current perceptions and realities.

Some of the first changes I noticed during early trips back home were architectural. New buildings would appear in and around the city, and some of the older ones would quietly dissapear in my absence. City centre traffic rules would change without warning and many other subtle and not so subtle modifications to the physical landscape would avail themselves of my notice.

But my lately I've noticed how much my old home's social landscape has also changed, albeit more slowly but just as profoundly.

It seems that three or so years is about enough time for people to die, to marry, move home, lose their jobs, get new jobs, have babies, fall seriously ill and slowly recover, get older, get divorced or change their interior decor. Or just fundamentally, they change. The change in this social architecture slowly deconstructs and eats away at my memory of 'home'. The Glasgow I left in the summer of 2001 is not the same Glasgow I visit today and with each year that passes, the magnitude of that change grows inexorably.

The physical stuff you notice quickly, the social change less so. So, my 'home' no longer exists as it does in my memory, rendering me quite sad and with a vague sense of spiritual homelessness.

For at the other end - Northamptonshire and our home since the summer of 2001 - the architectural changes are less noticeable - since I'm living within them every day - and the social side is slow to build leaving it immature and shallow with a micro network of friends in our immediate geography in comparison with what we left behind after 34 years. So, here isn't home either, the roots just aren't deep enough. Yet.

However, the one consistent social environment which spans this entire period of change is my web based social network. This world contains some of the contacts from my previous life and some new friendships and aecquaintances forged since. This 'always on' social network takes quite a different form from it's worldy significant other but can be just as compelling.

May 3rd, 2003
...is it because quitting your weblog is a form of virtual suicide, as you willfully bring about your own cessation of existence in our online world? Of course, you obviously invisibly existed in it prior to blogging whenever you visited a site, but it's the act of writing yourself into existence when you start blogging that results in the creation of a version of your self that is visible to others. When you pull the plug on your blog, does this equate to a form of suicide? Is that why we don't like to talk about it and choose to doggedly keep going even when we have nothing new or blogworthy to say, so you just keep on going as a means of existence rather than creativity or participation?

And so, I wonder if perhaps this web existence is my primary motivation or need to keep this weblog going.

Anyway, I think I'll stick around 'here' for some time.

Life Servers & Digital Life Insurance

I've been taking the welcome but altogether foreshortened opportunity of some free time before returning to work tomorrow, to finish the cleaning up and organisation of all our digital photos and MP3's.

Thus far I've gathered together and neatly archived and ID3 tagged over 4,000 or 20GB's worth of MP3s into iTunes, and about a further 6,000 or 10GB's worth of digital photos into iPhoto and I'm quickly coming to realise that what I need is some form of life server rather than a boring old trad file server clogged with lots of extraneous clag and cruft which builds up over time and does a fine job of getting in the path of your everyday digital lifestlyer.

For example, I picked up my first digital camera at the back end of 1999 and upgraded it to a Canon EOS 300D a year ago, this baby pumps out 6.3 megapixel shots at around 3-4MB a click. In the last year I've snapped just under 3,000 photographs (excluding hundreds of additional cameraphone shots) with the Canon, largely thanks to the capacious 4GB microdrive card I exhumed from a willing MP3 player donor last summer.

But at this rate, over the course of the next four years my photo collection will grow to about 20,000 images (equating to around 40GB) which is an insane number for a family photo collection compared with 10 or 20 years ago when most average family hard copy photo collections would have run to a few hundred at the very most. And I haven't even begun to think about what to do with about 20 or so, 60 minute Mini-DV video camcorder recordings laying around the place. Perhaps I should DivX archive them all to keep the space down.

All of which makes redundant the whole concept of printing photographs. Because even if you didn't need to remortgage your house four times to pay for the inkjet consumables, not to mention incurring the worlds worst case of R.S.I. what with all the scissor work that would be required, you wouldn't have the physical space to store 10,000 photographs let alone casually browse through them with a cup of coffee on a wet Sunday afternooon. Practically speaking, hard copy photographs only work in small quantities. Actually its worse than that; hard copy photo collections are dead.

I'm actually quite perturbed that I only just worked that out. So, iPhoto and Picasa and the like aren't just snazzy ways of brightening up your photo storage problems, they are in fact the photograph albums of tomorrow, leaving hard copy print work for the sideboards and mantelpieces of our homes and offices. In fact, they'll eventually be replaced with digital frames too.

So, a wireless 500GB network RAID hard disk is what I need to secrete somewhere under our floorboards at some point in the future connected to about 20 wirelsss digital photoframes which also moonlight as MP3 players / speakers too.

But this predicament of mine is not unusual and whilst I'm tech smart enough to think about disciplines like backing up and storage so on, I'd bet that most new digital lifestylers are dangerously disorganised and therefore exposed. In many ways this is a replay of commercial IT usage patterns 20 years ago when among smaller and less tech savvy businesses, scant regard was given to data storage and security, often with painful and catastrophic results.

This is a big area which as far as I can see, is largely being ignored by the major vendors who could do much more to educate and protect their users' personal libraries instead of leaving them to bake their home own home-made solutions to this problem, if at all.

Digitally archived collections such as mine and yours should form part of our family legacies for, in theory, hundreds of years to come. As such it is vitally important that we don't just focus on the front-end creative aspects like foolproof point-and-click design and extreme portability etc., because as unglamorous and boring robust and secure back-end storage is, it is in fact just as important as the stuff that makes it onto the billboards and spec-sheets, if not moreso.

There are approximately 4m commercial entities in the UK and the total UK population is around 60 million, many of whom are enjoying ever increasing amounts of leisure time and disposable income. Which do you think will be the bigger technology services market in 10 years?

Cold War Noir And The Class of '86

As I hurtle towards middle age and the inevitable, inexorable and brutal change in outlook such a life achievement brings, I find myself retracing my existential roots and celebrating them. And, frankly, I can't imagine a better time to become a teenager and then an adult, than the glorious 1980's. But I guess I'm biased.

Aside from big hair, leg-warmers and a hundred and one other examples of eighties fashion aberrations, my teenage years recall the last era of elegantly style, before ripped jeans showed up on the scene. I'm talking about a fashion sense most accurately rendered in movies like Grosse Point Blank, Donnie Darko and Pretty In Pink; not too excessively garish 1980's fashion, just understated - Cold War 'noir' - classically sophisticated. Elegant cool.

The music of the moment is also critical in locking onto the mood of the time; Psychedelic Furs, INXS, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Tears For Fears, Depeche Mode. During the nineties, a degree of distaste for such aural pleasures understandably developed as the social contexts shifted together with attitudes and tastes. But now, 15-20 years later, a degree of distance has allowed a refreshed context to be re-applied and a resulting renewed appreciation is beginning to flourish for what was, for many, a real social renaissance period.

Today the word 'retro' seems to be increasingly used as code for the 1980's and the embryonic electronic phenomenon the decade heralded. The Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer. The CBM-64 and the Sinclair ZX-81. Back To The Future and De Loreans. Pac-man. Digital wristwatches with musical alarms, (I proudly wore one such example; a Zeon Rock Album watch that bleeped simple renditions of five Beatles hits as time alarms), the ancestral precursors to today's mobile ring tones.

I am a retired gamer. The most significant pull for me as a child, teenager and twenty-something was videogames. But I've more or less given up on them in recent years, jaded and detached by much of the recent contemporary tat that passes itself off as entertainment to a fresh generation that doesn't know any better. But lately I've found salvation in the burgeoning Retro movement, games magazines have recently switched onto this with regular and significant retro features and there's even now a complete magazine devoted to the area. These allow me to bask in my youth again and relive those heady days all over again.

A couple of weeks back I visited a small computing museum in the University of Bath in Swindon, where I met up with fellow #joiito regular and, like me, a follower of 80's technological fashion, John Rochester.

It was a total blast manhandling Atari VCS consoles, an Oric-1 and I even managed a quick play of Minestorm on the uniquely classic Vectrex.

But I wonder what the technological revolution will make of its old self as it progressively continues to review its historical origins. The 80's is where it all more or less took off, and the products and marvels of that decade are now being treated with a degree of reverence and respect. The brands, inventors, industry leaders and demigods of the time are now increasingly being viewed through saintly spectacles.

I wonder what we'll be saying, what the view of the digital historians will be on the dotcom boom, Google and blogging, twenty years down the line from now.