So far, so good...
My eldest daughter turned 13 yesterday. I had told her that I wasn't going to let that happen - that she'd have to stay 12 until she was old enough for us to kick her out of the house, but she countered that if that happened, then she wouldn't be able to drive herself anywhere until she was 18, so I decided to allow her to become a teenager. So far, there's no drama involved with teenagerdom. Sure, its only the first day, but from what I hear from friends, I need to take each victory as I get it.
In other items, along the same lines as a previous post where I wondered about the impending obsolescence of many of our digital photographs, I remembered coming across a very cool program in the past that allowed you to create a sort-of interactive journal or family history. You could put pictures into it and type lots of cool stuff with neat backgrounds and then view it later like an electronic book. It really was a neat program and I even had a friend who used it and was really into it.
Unfortunately, the information was saved in a proprietary format that required the program in order to read it. The program was designed for Windows 95, as I recall, and the last I heard, some folks were having fits getting it to work under Windows XP (they probably didn't know how to use the compatibility mode). Now, with Vista on our doorstep, it is likely this neat little program may become completely non-functioning, thereby destroying any number of fantastic little journals or histories since nobody can run the software anymore. I hope it had a hard-copy output...
Due to this problem, pretty much anything I really want to hang around when I disappear, I've made a hard-copy of. If I'm really wanting my thoughts to be maintained, I journal them on paper. I have a cool little book at home that has small questions about my life in the past that is designed for me to answer them, then pass down to my kids later about my own history. Its not quite as cool and glitzy as the admittedly wonderful program noted above, but it will be readable 100 years from now, barring fire, flood or bookworms to the pages.
A sharp-minded reader might then call me names for writing a blog at all - committing notes that will certainly someday disappear into the ether when the business model of the blog finally implodes. But hey, what I write here is either not particularly important to me to save for posterity, or if I think it is, I will later create a hard-copy, probably in my own handwriting, to put into my paper journal.
And hey, I'm a techie - I generally have faith in technology. But there are just too many examples of lost information that have already occurred in such a short time during the computer revolution that I don't have much faith in it during the ensuing years. Sure, the important stuff may be saved, but who gets to determine what is important?
In other items, along the same lines as a previous post where I wondered about the impending obsolescence of many of our digital photographs, I remembered coming across a very cool program in the past that allowed you to create a sort-of interactive journal or family history. You could put pictures into it and type lots of cool stuff with neat backgrounds and then view it later like an electronic book. It really was a neat program and I even had a friend who used it and was really into it.
Unfortunately, the information was saved in a proprietary format that required the program in order to read it. The program was designed for Windows 95, as I recall, and the last I heard, some folks were having fits getting it to work under Windows XP (they probably didn't know how to use the compatibility mode). Now, with Vista on our doorstep, it is likely this neat little program may become completely non-functioning, thereby destroying any number of fantastic little journals or histories since nobody can run the software anymore. I hope it had a hard-copy output...
Due to this problem, pretty much anything I really want to hang around when I disappear, I've made a hard-copy of. If I'm really wanting my thoughts to be maintained, I journal them on paper. I have a cool little book at home that has small questions about my life in the past that is designed for me to answer them, then pass down to my kids later about my own history. Its not quite as cool and glitzy as the admittedly wonderful program noted above, but it will be readable 100 years from now, barring fire, flood or bookworms to the pages.
A sharp-minded reader might then call me names for writing a blog at all - committing notes that will certainly someday disappear into the ether when the business model of the blog finally implodes. But hey, what I write here is either not particularly important to me to save for posterity, or if I think it is, I will later create a hard-copy, probably in my own handwriting, to put into my paper journal.
And hey, I'm a techie - I generally have faith in technology. But there are just too many examples of lost information that have already occurred in such a short time during the computer revolution that I don't have much faith in it during the ensuing years. Sure, the important stuff may be saved, but who gets to determine what is important?
posted by Erik | 7:16 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home