ic_temp

#2 of 2 short story concept notes inspired by recent reading.

Propensity for language [from 2004-01-26]

'Wired-in' language cannot adapt sufficiently rapidly in a changing culture; in fact it would cause the culture to stagnate. More accurately, 'culture' really can't get off the ground if language is wired in. So human children must learn language from the people around them. What can be wired in is the equipment required to learn and the propensity to use it.

p257, Figments of Reality

Which makes me think about what Cory was saying [and he was referencing someone else] about genetic modification of humans. It can happen only on a generational timeframe, if you muck about with the genome, but you can't do it to yourself so you have to do it to your kids. But the thing is, progress goes at such a rate that if you gm your kids, the state of the art will be a generation further on by the time they're grown up: gm an embryo now, and you're comdemning the unfolding adult to a life of being a 1970s 0.5kb mainframe in a 21st century computing world.

No, said Cory, the trick is to edit the symbiotes: if you could genetically modify your gut bacteria to let you eat plastic. Or, now I think of it, carry bacteria in your eye that floresce at light frequencies we can't see to make us sensitive to new ranges. Then you, and your gm kid, can be thoroughly up to date: to do an upgrade, you flush and restock.

But reading [Figments] this I'm now thinking of a different mechanism: you engineer in the propensity to accept and adapt to whatever the gm currency is. You alter the genome to make it accept hotswapped plugins.

So maybe here's language. Imagine a pre-language culture that communicated entirely by externalising thought processes in abstract ways (doing a diff between the obviously optimal way of designing a forest and the way you actually do it, for example, where the diff encodes information that excites combinations of pathways in the brain -- which themselves exhibit an interference pattern and constructively interfere at the engram you want to transmit).

This culture generates a form of genetic engineering which can encode data back into the genome. What they invent, firstly, is a way of transmitting information between people person-to-person (instead of this public mechanism I've just defined). The problem is that the state of the art changes continuously, and new individuals are always behind the curve.

The culture then decides to make a hot-pluggable system, such as the one I've described. The problem is it overwrites the pathways we normally use for environment diffing (sometimes there's a throwback and we get a person who's not sensitive to p2p language, but utterly sensitive to environmental patterns: autism) -- in the same way our culture have discussed ecosystem collapse because of gmo, it happens here (for us, transhumans that pass the singularity are too different from those humans left behind: there's no common currency). Society collapses, etc, etc.

Years pass. Language builds up into a system capable of supporting group culture as rich as it used to be (although less human and more artificial, supported as it is by language and not human-environment-human-meshword). And here we are, unable to read anything from civilisation gone by, unaware it even existed.

#1 of 2 short story concept notes inspired by recent reading:

Squirrel unfolding [from 2004-01-24]

There is evidence that squirrels, who bury their food, know where to find it later because they have created some kind of mental map. They seem not to rely upon a sense of smell -- which makes sense, because if the owner of the nuts and acorns could find them by smell alone, then so could any other passing squirrel.

p177, Figments of Reality

Which is to say that the placement of the nuts by a given squirrel is some kind of function computed by the squirrel, and it can't be random otherwise the nuts wouldn't be found again. The mapping function must be unique to a squirrel, which means it must be derived from an aspect of the squirrel that is persistent over time (and reproducable), but is different from other individuals. Why bother to separate it out when instead it could compute a hash of the structure of the brain itself - which of course includes the qualia induced by the environment and kinaesthetic senses - and keep what appears to be stable? While the sense of the environment for two squirrels will be the same, the qualia induced will be different and depend on upbringing.

So then: by examining the map of nuts buried by a number of squirrels in the same area, we can factor out the environment and produce a function to transform the map into a description of the structure of the brain of an individual*. Then by using this description, we can deduct it from a true squirrel and reveal the proto-squirrel.

Now by using the proto squirrel as a base, we can reproduce the brain of any given squirrel simply by adding the transformed nut map.

Or alternatively: Given the squirrel's brain will have changed over the months and it'll be using the finding and not-finding of nuts to recalibrate, by selectively removing nuts we can adjust the squirrel to a fictional (and designed) nut map, and thus change its personality.

Over a number of seasons we could alter the personality (and thus the physical structure itself, by Hebb) to reinforce certain potentials, and produce a highly-organised - or at least: improbable - standard-wave-meshwork across the brain. This meshwork could have any property we desire: For example we could design it to collapse (consider the meshwork of Europe of 1915 which moved very quickly to the World War I attractor), or maybe we could design it to unfold and cascade, like a glider producing factory in Conway's Life, a squirrel which psychically expands along a certain line of flight towards something utterly alien, unknown**.

* We have Bessel functions in physics; why not functions that capture the ringing/dynamics of potential topologies in the brain meshwork?

** Or perhaps construct a secondary environment which itself allows evolvable features, which outputs to the effector layer of the brain, in the same way we humans output to the fabric of the physical universe [that is to say, everything we do is reflected in the isness, somehow, we can't *not* output to it], which may itself (on its other side) be the effector, the moving interface-skin, of our universe, but in another place. Or to put it another way, we humans are constructured out of arrangements and folds of a skin. And whilst we are embedded in it much as the gliders are embedded in Conway's Life's rules, there may be a representation of the whole universe which acts (effects) something Else, in a way utterly orthogonal to not just the physical dimensions, but to reality -- in the same way that seeing Life played out, the impact that has on us as part of the environment, the viewable game as an effector, that *light* the screen emits and the *knowledge that it exists*, the distortion that game makes on human reality throughout all spacetime: The way that distortion-effector is orthogonal to the glider/rules assemblage. That's what I mean.

nb. I realise that the squirrel could simply place the nuts in random places and then remember those locations. I'm sure that could be post-rationalised away. Perhaps memory is a hashing function on the physical brain structure.

Conspiracy theory: Spam isn't sent by people wanting to sell anything. I mean, there can't be that many people buying Viagra from unsolicited email. And if indiscriminately bombarding people with invitations to buy really worked then we'd see a much wider distribution of products, right? Rather, spam is sent by the U.S. government, and as it comes from the single source that explains why there's not a good product range, and they want it to have a destabilising effect to increase calls for internet policing to the point that independent organisations like ICANN are forced out, and national governments pleaded to come back in, take control, enforce email sender validation and monitoring, etc.

Wow. A photo taken by the Spirit rover of the Mars Exploration lander on Mars. Talk about moblogging.

This image mosaic taken by the panoramic camera onboard the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the rover's landing site, the Columbia Memorial Station, at Gusev Crater, Mars. This spectacular view may encapsulate Spirit's entire journey, from lander to its possible final destination toward the east hills. On its way, the rover will travel 250 meters (820 feet) northeast to a large crater approximately 200 meters (660 feet) across, the ridge of which can be seen to the left of this image. To the right are the east hills, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) away from the lander. The picture was taken on the 16th martian day, or sol, of the mission (Jan. 18/19, 2004). A portion of Spirit's solar panels appear in the foreground. Data from the panoramic camera's green, blue and infrared filters were combined to create this approximate true color image.

High res version kindly available. (Why can't my phone take panoramic photos and automatically stitch them together? Aside from my phone not having a camera, but besides that? [Remind me to describe my perfect photo at some point, btw.])

Jeez, what did I dream last night? Something about that scientist currently in the news who may or may not have implanted a cloned human embryo in a woman, only in my dream he'd implanted two embryos (twins, see) in a cake. And that was why it had to be a secret, because although the cake was extremely tasty - it was very much like the sugar-rich chocolate apple betty Es made the other day - people got kind of freaked out at the idea of eating not-yet-developed babies in dessert.

Two ways to get things done. Making the jump, A. Jump isn't quite the right word: it's making a decision to take an action which in itself is small, but the consequences of which reduce your freedom to such an extent that you just have to continue. eg starting a job you're not sure you can do; winning a contract or commitment. Way B: the marathon. It's not hard, in itself, it's just long, and a continuous effort. It's going on a journey to somewhere over the horizon.

Everything I do is a combination of both. One way to make B easier is to make the activation energy A harder -- then the rest is downhill. It's mental stamina and it's strength to know I can tackle anything.

But it's exhausting too. I think there's a general methodology for doing hard things, for performing great tasks, and that methodology is learned, in the same way I learned to read hard books. I've got to work to maintain dissatisfaction. Refusal to accept is what gives me stamina; anger and hubris is what makes me powerful.

Or at least, that's what appears to be getting me through my list. Massive A progress on H today, and a little more B on M. More needed on P however.

I'm looking for a new scanner. Preferred specs:

- 1200x2400 dpi or above
- USB powered
- slim
- cheap

Musts:

- Works with the Mac OS X Image Capture software (I *think* that means it must have Mac OS X TWAIN drivers, but I'm not entirely sure)
- For advanced features, the bundled software must work in OS X (not Classic) and be easy to use

Now you would've thought I'd be able to put this info into a search engine, but as it is we haven't metadatad the www yet. Rubbish. If I find a scanner that fits, I'm buying two.

It occurs to me that whereas when in my hard-line and idealist past I would have insisted on the complete removal of all umbrellas, now (only two years later) I'd be willing to concede on the use (though not necessity) of some umbrellas in some very particular circumstances (not to say we couldn't stop these circumstances occuring, eg by people buying sensible coats, hats, etc, but now I'm pragmatic enough to understand that this is what they term a Hard Thing To Achieve), and in exchange for said concession demand only the abolition of over-sized umbrellas.

It's a miserable thing, getting old.

Oh yes, I saw an article around recently that said we were in a simulation, not the real thing, and that the randomness implicit in quantum mechanics was a compression artifact from trying to run the universe on a finite machine which itself had to sit in the real universe. But I can't remember where I saw it. Any ideas?

I currently have my fingers crossed about so many things it's a wonder I have any left. In alphabetical order, and only using initials so as not to jinx by talking about them: D, H, J, M, P, S*. They're all things mostly out of my hands, which is always the best way to achieve things: the only hard bit is to put yourself in a position where the only line-of-flight is towards success. Then it's like running as fast as you can, downhill. (Which I've done once, down the side of a sand dune in a desert. The moment you manage to run as fast as you fall it feels like you're flying, then the next moment you fall right over.) So fingers crossed.

* Okay, S is the singularity which is more of a long-term prospect, and so I quote from Hans Moravec, 'The Senses Have No Future' (1998):

As intelligent robots design successive generations of successors, technical evolution will go into overdrive. Biological humans can either adopt the fabulous mechanisms of robots, thus becoming robots themselves, or they can retire into obscurity. A robot ecology will colonize space with intelligent machines optimized to live there. Yet, viewed from a distance, robot expansion into the cosmos will be a vigorous physical affair, a wavefront that converts raw inanimate matter into mechanism for further expansion. It will leave in its ever-growing wate a more subtle world, with less action and more thought.

On the frontier, robots of ever-increasing mental and physical ability will compete with one another in a boundless land rush. Behind the expansion wavefront, a surround of establshed neighbours will restrain growth, and the contest will become one of boundary pressure, infiltration and persuasion: a battle of wits. A robot with superior knowledge of matter may encroach on a neighbour's space through force, threat, or convincing promises about the benefit of merger. A robot with superior models of mind might lace attractive gifts of useful information with subtle slants that subvert others to its purpose. Almost always, the more powerful minds will have the advantage.

To stay competitive, robots will have to grow in place, repeatedly restructuring the stuff of their bounded bodies into more refined and effective forms. Inert lumps of matter, along with limbs and sense organs, will be converted into computing elements whose components will be then miniaturized to increase their number and speed. Physical activity will gradually transform itself into a web of increasingly pure thought, where every smallest action is a meaningful computation. We cannot guess the mechanisms robots will use, since physical theory has not yet found even the exact rules underlying matter and space. Having found the rules, robots may use their prodigious minds to device highly improbably organizations that are to familiar elementary particles as knitted sweaters are to tangled balls of yarn.

As they arrange space, time and energy into forms best for computation, robots will use mathematical insights to optimize and compress the computations themselves. Every consequent increase in their mental powers will accelerate future gains, and the inhabited portions of the universe will be rapidly transformed into a cyberspace, where overt physical activity is imperceptible, and the world inside the compution is astronomically rich. Beings will cease to be defined by their physical geographic boundaries, but will establish, extend, and defend identities as informational transactions in cyberspace. The old bodies of individual robots, refined into matrices in cyberspace, will interconnect, and the minds of robots, as pure software, will migrate among them at will. As the cyberspace becomes ever more potent, its advantage over physical bodies will overwhelm even on the raw expansion frontier. The robot wavefront of coarse physical transformation will be overtaken by a faster wave of cyberspace conversion, the whole becoming finally a bubble of mind expanding at near light speed.

We'll be able to create whatever reality we want, as I was trying to explain to James last night. Do you want things to happen one after another in different places, or all things to happen simultaneously? It's up to you. We garden not just in first nature, making machines, but remodel zeroth nature itself. I'll miss not having the world of happy individualism, I think. I'm looking forward to supersenses and present-day-cyberspace merging with the real world. Augmented reality and computation plugging into distributed cognition would be fun. Rewriting input to the sensorium on the fly. Scripting atoms instead of bits. We'll lose all of that if we hit the cascade before it happens. But if we do attain the singularity in time, I won't have to worry about not being able to visit Mars, the raw matter of Mars will be part of my very urcortex, the new virtual lobe I'll require to perform multiple-reality physics and social computing, a new part of my brain to cope with an infinitely and immediately recursive [on thought] reality; Mars will be me. (And you! don't worry, it's fine.)

Back to the Moon by 2020, preparations for a moonbase and a trip to Mars after that. -sigh- All I can hope for is we hit the Singularity during my lifetime. Moon now! Mars tomorrow!

It's weird thinking that the internet won't be the focus of a good chunk of the world's capital forever. One of space or biotech next, and the both of them aren't very social. The democratising quality of the internet is a side-effect and not a reason for its development; this human quality may not be present in future technological trends and the current norms will now stick around for the next few decades, not getting any better: Discuss.

(The asteroids! How about we just go to the asteroids now? Pleeeeeeeease.)

More drive news! Why, it just comes thick and fast doesn't it. Perhaps not, but thicker and faster than anything else round here and that's all that counts.

The drive is proving harder to recover than anticipated. I understand they've managed to get back about 68% of the files; the rest might come. It's a slow and iterative process, continually scanning the drive image to find areas of corruption, fix inode tables, rescan with that knowledge, and cetera. At -least- another day and a half.

The tactic could be to take so long to get the files back that we no longer care.

A man stricken with grief at the sudden death of his wife travels a year and a day to see a witch in the depths of a dark forest. "Your wife will return to you," says the witch, "if, for seven years, you do not speak and do not smile." Resolved to complete this task, the man returns to his home and lives his life ignored by friends and taunted by neighbours, none of whom he can tell about his ordeal. On the appointed day the man's wife is brought back from the grave expecting to resume a happy family life. The man, on the other hand, completed the task because he started it, and although he can understand his motivations for beginning, doesn't really recognise his wife: she's either a person he doesn't know at all, or a paler imitation of the one who inhabits his memories.

Maybe I'm building this up to much. When I get the data back my scripts will be rubbish, worthless to me, I'll have learned to do without that extelligence. But there's something deeper than that: If the universe throws something at you, you do something about it. In that sense, I can't *not*.

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Am currently: Indignant about computers. Having set my mum up with an iMac yesterday (the Win 95 machine has almost worn through) I'm seeing the user experience through fresh eyes. Too many exceptions. What's that little flag in the menu bar? Why can't iTunes warn me I'm about to import a CD without any track names? -- that's the kind of thing that won't bug me now but'll come back and bite me in a month or two. What's all that stuff in the root of my Macintosh HD? When you drag a photo into iPhoto, does that mean you're allowed to delete it from the desktop? Why does it ask me what kind of modem is installed - when it's an internal modem - in the setup screens? Why isn't there a tutorial that says how to put it to Sleep instead of shutdown? How to Canon get away with making software that isn't fit for purpose (the scanner's going back to the shop. It's disgusting they'd expect anyone to install that. The uninstaller is called 'Delsg'!).

I don't want a more task-based UI. I don't want a pared-down or simplified computer. I want a *consistent* computer that isn't scattered with misleading or confusing elements that gradually train me [the user] out of exploring anything else. I want to be warned before I do anything stupid -- which means mistagging music, or saving documents on my Desktop. I can see this computer through my mother's eyes, and as much as I like, there's a lot wrong.

(What I *do* like, however, and what I didn't expect, is the Dock and the way the applications launch so fast I don't need to make a distinction between which are running or not. I also like the metal Finder because I've already explained how iTunes and iPhoto are alike (with their playlists) and the Finder is just an extension of that.)

I guess it's a fine balance. On the one side I'm saying that the more I encounter these tiny things the less likely I am to trust the computer as a whole. But on the other, the warnings I want would disrupt the metaphor of agency and introduce the computer as a social actor -- which can only lead to trouble.

(Another conversation with the drive recovery company yesterday, this one not so good. Apparently there's corrupted data. I didn't entirely understand, but one in every 16 bits (or bytes or blocks or b.*) has been written out On. Now this only matters for recently accessed files, which will be corrupted. Oh, and things adjacent on the filesystem too, and the inode table (or something). Short answer: there's data corruption for some quantity of files, maybe everything.

They're going to scan their image of the drive and tag the bits that are damaged, then send me a list of files. Whether that's the files they can get back or the files they can't I'm not sure. The chap was very tentative on the phone. Hopefully I'll hear more on Monday, but that's if they get time to work on it over the weekend.)

(Drive update. I talked to the recovery company this morning - who I can feel increasing in my estimation over the last couple of days, given how informed and friendly they are, and how good they are about phoning me and saying what's going on - and they say we'll know in the next 3-4 hours whether the data can be recovered or not. Or at least the filesystem, we've not talked about whether they can see actual data or not yet.

Apparently this particular model of hard drive has been the subject of legal action against IBM. The drive head rests against the bottom platter and gradually wears through. My drive has had a fair amount of damage, but it was coping. We're hoping that the drive failure this time was very early in the process and there's not been too much actual physical destruction. Anyway, they're trying to reconstruct the filesystem and when I talked to them this morning they warned me not to put the drive back into service when it's returned. It amazes me that I'd even need to be told that -- trust my data to something I know goes wrong? Ah, like not doing backups. Okay then, good point, well made.)

If you scan a bank note, Photoshop won't let you print it out. Oh, and photocopiers in the U.S. activate an alarm if you try to copy one. Weiiiird. Oh, and cool comment:

What happens if I want to make a backup copy of a note that I have in my wallet? At least if my wallet is lost or stolen i will have a backup of the cash that was inside there!

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils.

His subject is the medico that jabbed him. (They're all wicked. Number 7 is a moment of calm and beauty.)

The use of golfing umbrellas in general street use as a key indicator of individuality in society, Webb MW (2004).

Abstract:

A methodology of assessing cost/benefit to street walkers in the rain is proposed, using benefit to self (wetness of hair after a standardised walk down the pavement using an umbrella) against cost to the Other (weighted mean of eye injuries caused by umbrella spokes in the Accident and Emergency departments of local hospitals). This is normalised for estimated pedestrian density and estimated rainfall at the point of selecting methods for keeping dry (ie leaving the house), and average real price per hair style per day. Correlating against umbrella size, it is shown that the average umbrella size held by individuals since 1990 has linearly increased. This willingness to incur cost on the Other for self-benefit is also identified in other standard measures for social capital, and positively correlates with the purchase of single habitation accomodation, Meal For One packs at major supermarkets and pornography. Countermeasures are suggested, including employing "street hecklers" to shout at oversize umbrella users such phrases as "Buy an overcoat that actually works instead of one you just think looks lovely but falls to bits in the rain", "Your umbrella doesn't need to be that big, there aren't four of you under it" and "Wear a hat". Further analysis of the data reveals that carriers of golfing umbrellas down crowded pavements, especially when it's only drizzling, are inconsiderate bastards.

Oh, I put lightcone back up because I had a few spare minutes and I thought I might-as-well (a few people were pointing at a 404 and it felt quite mean). My original plan of just dropping back the old sites [if I get them back] is no longer going to work simply either. I've been tidying up the way Apache is configured and things are organised, so it's going to take a bit of tweaking, but it'll be easier for me to maintain in the long term. Fingers crossed about the data. There should be news early next week. If the parcel doesn't get lost in the post.

Couple of interesting phrases about open source in this article:

I was originally excited by the idea of open source, collaborative development. But the direction open source is headed seems like a waste. Creating clones of commercial software isn't impressive creatively. But more importantly, what does it contribute? Why would anyone with excellent computer skills want to work long hours to create code so that millionaire executives at IBM can use it to sell expensive mainframe computers and middleware with six-figure licenses? All for no compensation and little recognition.

Frankly, all this seems to do is steal jobs from people that program for a living. I wonder if more commercial programming jobs have been lost to the open source community giving away intellectual property than to cheap programming shops in India. Admittedly, I can't back that up with numbers, but I suspect it is true. Certainly, IBM has been able to lay off thousands of technical professionals since it embraced open source.

Whoa. Those clones of commercial software are at least recombinant. Knitting together calcified idioms I've previously written is how I do *most* of my code.

The point about IBM a good one -- the whole problem with value disparity comes up all over the place If somebody makes money out of you downstream, shouldn't some of that flow back up? And yes, we've just created ecosystem so an *intelligent* IBM *will* push some of that cash back up, to make sure they don't lose the input. It might take a while however. I prefer the alternative: that the new model starts wherever it can (software, in this case) then ripples outwards, enlarging the franchise for *first* software, *then* IBM and big iron suppliers. Do you still need Xerox to maintain a Xerox photocopier? Do I have to return to Casio if the strap on my watch breaks? (Maybe if it was a decent one, but it was the cheapest I could find, so no.)

But the most interesting bit is the phrase "the open source community giving away intellectual property". That's a wonderful shift. Originally intellectual property was stuff that was created, like a movie, or an application. Then intellectual property became an idea too, like a "method for picking up email" and an application just an instance of that. Now this idea that somebody can go out, *claim* a piece of intellectual property (the model being territory here) that other people are camped out on and mining, and give it away from under their feet -- does that metaphor, that way of thinking, does it really stand? If I wrote a free replacement (fully open source) for Notepad and encouraged OEMs to put it on the Wintel boxes they shipped, whose intellectual property am I giving away? I'd argue that, because I'm increasing the ontological resolution of that "territory" by giving away the source, I'm actually creating territory. (Of course territorial metaphors are rubbish here because we need to talk about use restrictions and so on.)

The old drive'll go off to the data recovery folks today. For all my talk of "oh, I don't mind that much", when it came to the crunch I couldn't say no. And the quote wasn't cheap. Ouch ouch ouch. Well, I was looking for stuff to offset against tax.

I'm going to turn into an old man they wheel round schools and I'll wave my fist at the kids and say "do your backups, son, or you'll end up like me", then they'll rearrange the blanket over my legs and wheel me back out again.

Ah, Historical Facts, here are the early ones (from 1999-11-23):

Queen Elizabeth II is descended from Alsatians

If you urinate inside a woman immediately after having sex with her, the sperm are sterilised and she won't get pregnant

Spaniards clean their teeth with piss

The Swedish experience a period of national tragedy once every 630 years

The feces of swans are highly nuticious to humans and comprise an important part of the diet of the population of north-west China, from where these magnificent birds originate

The team of scientists teaching apes to use sign language is hoping that the simians will be able to show the team the way to the lost mines of Soloman

The heating effect on the brain supplied by hats measurably increases the wearer's IQ

Arnold Schwarzenegger has two hearts.

Bees don't have arses.

And this is a dream I wrote down on 2000-01-26:

a world where for two hours every day a certain group of people walk around in a daze with brainless faces and do absolutely anything (strange or wrong things included). this is accepted because those people are better. i was pretending to be one of those people, having to deliberately do random things and look brainless and not get caught.

There's another dream I wrote down on 2001-02-25:

Dial 7 to upload your soul as you die. Business cards

And there's a whole bunch of good shit about interfaces, games and money from 2000/01. I should get back onto that.

[looks more]

Oh, this is interesting, from 2001-09-14. Did I ever post this?

I think if you picked a few suitable reference points - the WTC bombing, the Turkish earthquake, the high-speed German train crash, the Tokyo red-light district fire by the main station, etc - and took from them a number of variables (each on either a quantitative or qualitative scale, it doesn't matter which) - say, the number of people dead/injured, how far away in "society space" (eg, China and Australia are further apart than Australia and the UK) the event occurred, the length of time of the event itself, and the level of consciousness [of what the consequences would be] of the thing [person; earthquake; organisation] that made the initial action - you could deduce the curves for [the Western world's] shared/joint moral code, and produce a function to give the outrage level, length of aftermath, desire for revenge, percentage media saturation and so on for any given event.

There's a story or two in that, I'm sure. And more.

(This is why I never get anything done. Where are my slippers? My pipe?)

(Idly thinking about what I've lost if the data's gone. The weblog content's safe, but I've always been paranoid about that cos it's more than a notebook that anything. I'm continually greping it for links, are there are copies of it both on Blogger and in a slightly weirder structure on my laptop. And on Yahoo Groups, mostly.

My email would be mostly gone, I think, which is a shame. Although my mean time between catastrophic email loss appears to have increased to about 2 years. First a drive failure that lost most of my old BBS mail, although there are backups of my favourite bits of that ('96). Then, in 1997/98, again because I downloaded everything to my hard drive, but it got corrupted because of shitty backups (an Iomega drive that appeared to have all the files until you actually tried to read all the way through about 30% of them) -- the same backup policy that I'd tried to start because of '96. Then again in early 2000 when Outlook Express corrupted its database on me (although I'm not sure how much I lost that time, maybe only the most recent few months). So I switched to IMAP, which saw me through a few problems and even survived a server failure, but I think if I've lost mail now then I'll have lost my archives pre mid 2003, and everything in December. Quite possibly more.

But unlike my weblog, email is stuff that other people send, so maybe it's not so important. I'm maybe I'm unnecessarily anal about hording it.

Upsideclown and Upsideclone archives are restorable, with a little work. Interconnected designs mostly, I think, but maybe not the most recent version.

Most painfully I think I've lost a few scripts, but it's not as bad as I thought. I've got local checked-out copies of the most important older projects on a laptop snapshot I took a few months back, before I did the most recent cleanout.

Then there are things which are harder to reconstruct -- bits that hid on Interconnected that are scattered round various old backups of mine, and I can't quite remember where they go. There's the Dirk data too, which is important for nostalgia but possibly so riddled with racist comments that it's not worth it. Maybe a few database things, but I was never too into database CMSs.

Random things mostly. I'd miss going through old belongings and reminding myself of things. The time I built a prototype for a huge 3 tier system from UMS out of AppleScript on my laptop, and a RPC server and webpage on the server, and we grew the entire thing out of swapping those components out: that would be gone. The Historical Facts. Oh, and site stats, but I don't really look at those anymore. Favcol.com pictures, those would be gone. The few public comments that there were. Possibly I'm obsessing here? I wonder. Not so idly thinking after-all.

My friends have some content too, although it's mostly weblog stuff and on Blogger. I feel really bad about that. Much worse than I do about my own stuff. They're being really good about it.)

Forgotten pleasures: Listening to really nasty trance techno while trying to work.

Forgotten no more.

Friday today. The data recovery place opens on Monday. I'll give them a call then and see what they think.

It's been an interesting couple of weeks without my data. The server holds my cvs repository and mail archive, and it *used* to be the case that there was nothing on there that was unique: I had checked out copies of my code, a mirror of all my mail in my email client, the websites were just copied up. So the idea was that if I lost my laptop or my server (but not both) I wouldn't have lost *that* much.

Whoops.

Three things. 1, I don't have connectivity from my laptop at work, so I do more code on the server than before (and that's led to me being far laxer than I used to be about source control). I code sketch always (eg I tend to write throwaway scripts to munge text rather than editing myself, so there's a lot of that) and all that was stored on the server. 2, I did a fresh install of the OS on my laptop and stopped carrying around so much stuff with me. So for some old project I *don't* have checked out code, and old email got archived into files. On the server. 3, I've got so used to the server being there (over a year of uptime) it gradually became a repository for more and more unique work. I'd edit websites there, instead.

Damn. Well, I saw this coming a month or two ago and bought a big hard drive to backup my laptop. I was going to buy two (the other to back up the server) but I couldn't quite face spending that much cash at once. I was going to wait until I felt more flush.

Anyway, here's my point.

While I've not had those little scripts, random files, code snippets, old email, it *has* felt kind of liberating. I've barely replied to email at all, it seems like I don't have to, and it's like a holiday. Mind, I've also found it harder to write code because when I've got all my old scripts around me I just pick and choose my favourite idioms and knit them together. (I'm taking the chance to move away from Perl, so unless there's something I need really quickly and I'm not sure how to do it, I'm using Python instead.)

And I'm missing way more than I thought I would. There was *loads* on that server.

There are two data recovery companies I can use. Both have been recommended by friends. One is *highly* recommended and a small company. The other is a huge company and much more expensive, but they might be able to retrieve more stuff if the drive is really badly damaged. I thought before that if the cheaper one couldn't do it, I wouldn't bother. Now I'm thinking that I'd pay a lot of money indeed to get the data back. Yup.

If you haven't got a new year's resolution already, here's one for you:

I will take regular backups.

Posted on interconnected.org/home since before xmas:

*okay*

Interconnected will be back in the new year.

If the data recovery people can get it back.

I'm replying to email, but oh so slowly.

(Yes, it is possible to reply slower than I did before.)

You could say it's liberating to lose all your data. That it frees you from the past.

People in addition say you get wise with age. And that it's lucky if a bird shits on your head.

You also die with age however. And if a bird shits on your head what's more, that means you've got - on your head - shit.

I'm not feeling terribly liberated.

More like I should've taken backups.

*contact*

matt webb is matt at interconnected dot org. No flowers please.