As Far As I Can Tell

I had to work this weekend. Not much, but enough to stymie my other ambitions. I have a handful of personal projects that I never seem to find enough time to make progress on.

—

The new issue of Wired Magazine has an interesting article discussing whether we might be recording too much of our lives. The author likens it to the idea of a perfect map, one that is drawn at a 1:1 scale. Although the map records the landscape without flaw, its size makes it worthless.

Photo books give way to gigabytes of images capturing every moment we have. Music collections that mirror our personalities morph into giant archives of “stuff we downloaded”. The affordability of storage only increases this situation. Do we save more than we’ll ever use? Do things mean more if they’re in scarce supply? In a way, I think they do.

The other issue is that our digital memories can be perfectly replicated. How much value do we attach to something when we have an exact backup? I know that every one of my vinyl records means more to me because I could easily scratch and ruin them. Why does the fragility of the object make me like it more?

—

For those that read Evil Bill’s weblog, be sure to check out the photos of him on someone else’s Live Journal. We finally have photographic proof that he’s not just living in Detroit. Hi Bill.

—

I have a dilemma with a cat that hangs around my house. Just now was the second time today that I had to let it out of our basement. I was alerted to it being there by its awful crying noise and clawing at the door. I have no idea how it slinks its way into our area of the basement, or even down into the main basement. Both times I’ve let it back outside and given it some food to eat, but its freezing cold. I can’t let her into the house because Birdie would freak out. The basement isn’t much warmer than outside. She’s not really my responsibility, but I’d feel terrible she didn’t make it through the winter.