My life, in bytes

I churned out four blog-posts on my other blog this afternoon. Set aside my work to do it, because, for the same reason I carry a pen and a notepad around with me everywhere I go, if you have a thought and don't write it down, and then later forget it, then you effectively never had it. (I think I picked up this little piece of advice from a Tom Clancy book, as a matter of fact. Jack Ryan's wife, a surgeon, says it, in the book "Executive Orders", if I remember correctly.) (Hmm... this contains echoes of my earliest posts on the why and wherefore of blogging...) It made me suddenly realize that, starting from the time I left home to come to the US to study, and began corresponding regularly via e-mail with my family back home, and indeed, began to use e-mail with ever-increasing frequency to communicate with other people... that since then, virtually every facet of my life can be re-constructed from the vast, digitized archives of my various writings. From e-mails to papers that I've written for classes to, yes, my blogs. Oh, and digital photographs and video clips, too, in far greater quantities than previously imaginable with their chemical-film-technology predecessors. It's so easy now to go back to any given moment in my life and see what it, and I, were like at the time. My personality. My thoughts. My circumstances. Everything.

Mind-blowing stuff, when you think of the sheer scale of it all, compared to the pre-digital era. Historians of the future are going to have a field day. Assuming, of course, that our storage media survive till then, and the various encoding standards are still recognized. (Betamax, Laser-disk, DVD-ROM/-RAM/-D/Plus/-R/-RW/-R DL/+R/+RW/+R DL/Blu-ray/HD, anyone?) Ironic, that paper (and pencil!) remains the longest-lasting, and easiest to read, form of recording information around today.