8 Clicks From Nowhere

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Future Histories: Blogging and the Art of the Personal Archive

Monday, October 22, 02012

The history of humanity is a gradient of information.

All that remains of what happened to us as people a few thousand years ago is a sparse collection informational noise, a tiny collection of scattered elements, a dot here and there on an otherwise stark canvas. These few scattered dots allude to stories deeper and more grand than any one of us could dare imagine. But the gaps between those far back, distant bits are wide, leaving much to the deep speculative analysis of science and historians.

…the gradient smearing into an ever-more dense cluster of information points…

As we move closer to the present day, those gaps narrow, the gradient still there and slowly smearing into an ever-more dense cluster of information points. But that gradient remains, always composed of much more clear-space than fill.

And then a curious thing happens as we move even closer to the present day, crossing into the twentieth century, through the end of print-age and start along a path of what we now consider the Internet Age or the Information Age of today. That gradient — that smattering of information — reaches out towards a kind of tipping point where the density of the information it represents might move from being dots of information on a blank canvas to being dots of blank canvas on a smear of information. For the first time in the broad span of human achievement we seem to be getting ready to cross into a realm of more data than gaps.

We’re not there yet. But we can sense its possibilities approaching.

I imagine there has always been something of this sense. People have long been recording information under the presumption that it will somehow be preserved through the ages. Our capacity to actually preserve that information — or at the very least publish and broadcast it — has been limited however, and it is has not been until recently with the arrival of this vast informational collective we’ve started to build in the Internet that true preservation in perpetuity has suddenly become something of a reality.

This is where that information gradient comes back into the story.

I think I\’ve crossed into a kind of philosophical age of my life…

For a variety of reasons — none-pressing, I should state — I think I’ve crossed into a kind of philosophical age of my life where I spend (way too much) time contemplating things like mortality and personal choices and the impact of being a wad of entropy-fighting flesh propelled into the future at that familiar and constant rate of sixty-seconds per minute.

Along the same lines I’ve been blogging for a while now. It started out as a kind of utilitarian act of communication way back when I began peppering my thoughts into the ether, but has evolved many times finally landing in its current iteration as a kind of ongoing letter to the future. This blog has become, for all intents and purposes, my historical perspective and my contribution to the growing collection of societal data points that have been scattered as a message to the future.

Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think that society cannot care enough — either because of the inevitable collapse or the slow, shifting changes that are sure to leave a distinct and clear mark upon what will exist in the space I now occupy at some future point — and that scattering these points of information, adding to the blur of mundane detail that will paint a vast informational tapestry for the future to understand us better, is a waste of time. But then that is pessimistic, isn’t it?

Blogging is a kind of personal archive.

Blogging is a kind of personal archive. On the one hand we write for the “now” and the “moment” publishing on a day-to-day schedule of curiosity and voyeuristic peeks into one person’s life. On the other hand, those moments slip off the bottom of the front pages and into the deep, dark archives, and only occasionally emerge later on; By then they are personal history, moments recollected for entertainment and more idle curiosity.

Barring disaster — barring the collapse of society, the Internet, or even just the notion of informational freedom with the inevitable destruction of intellectual flotsam that would surely follow such a collapse — these words have a good chance of surviving a very long time. They may never be read again after they fall off the bottom of my front page, that’s true — but then again, they may inform some distant, unknowable observer in the far future: They may inform my descendents of some ancient ancestor with too much time to write on his hands. They may inform a scholar of our long-distant society preserved in digital containment. They may inform an artificial intelligence scanning through the whole of human thought and writing in an attempt to better understand its creators. They may do little or they may do much. But there is a better than not chance that they will survive. There is that hope.

Again, I set myself to wondering… what will be known of us in the future? Ten years ago — even five years ago — I don’t think many people were contemplating the value of everyday people putting their thoughts to the wide world as blogs or smatterings of social media quips as a valuable thread in an historical tapestry that would fill the informational gaps of societies of the future. But now? Now it seems like it might be a worthwhile exercise after all.

Posted in: blogger history & archives informology Tagged: archive blogging collapse historians history information internet letter to the future perpetual personal archive society the future writing for the future

Photo Archiving Adventures

Sunday, April 8, 02012

I’ve been archiving photos. I have a lot.

I haven’t always been good at tracking all the pictures I’ve taken. But a while back, around the same time I bought my last desktop computer and actually had hard drive capacity to put them all in one place, I decided I wanted to give Picassa a try for managing my collection. Before that point I had little micro collections, and collections with a lot of overlap between them, on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, external hard drives, internal drives, memory sticks, memory cards, and scattered across a collection of systems. Picassa didn’t force me to organize them, but I did at that time put in the effort of amalgamating the collections onto one drive on the new computer, a mega collection I’ve since diligently kept updated as my central collection.

That was step one.

A few weeks ago I started thinking about how I could backup, archive, and protect that collection. The thing is that when I do a quick ‘get info’ on the folder, there are currently one hundred and sixty gigabytes of data. One. Six. Zero. Followed by nine zeros. Or, about twenty DVDs worth of photos.

Online or cloud backup is not impossible, but there are limitations: simply transferring that much data to anywhere is time and resource intensive, not to mention that all that space would cost me significantly for remote hosting — or at least it isn’t going to be free. Couple that with the fact that 160GB of photos is roughly a hundred thousand files, and… well… data management issue.

I decided to simplify my problem using a three-fold approach.

Fold one… compress and zip. Most modern zip programs allow you to, through some clever and somewhat hidden options, create large zip files that break into parts. So on, say, my 2006 photos (which I was just working on and know the numbers offhand) a folder with 26GB of photos, I compress and break it into one zip file with 260 x 100MB parts. In the end of this effort I have one archive made up of two-hundred and sixty files — not compressed much because a lot of the files are JPGs and already compressed — rather than the eight-thousand or so files and folders I had before.

Fold two… parity file creation. A little trick I learned back in the days when I would occasionally download stuff from newsgroups was the parity file. A clever little program takes a collection of files — a set of zip-parts, for example — and analyzes them. The result is a collection of parity files — PAR files. The point parity files is that, if anything is damaged in storage or transfer of the original files, the information to restore everything back up to working order — with up to (default settings) 10% degradation of the originals — can be quickly done if you have parity files in their place. Don’t ask me about the math or science… it just works. But I’ve been taking my large collections of zip-parts, sub-dividing them into (max) 100-part groups, then creating 10% parity files based on those originals.

Fold three… multiple and scattered backups. When I’m done running all the little compressions and parity software, a process that will take hours and hours of CPU time before it’s done, I’ll have somewhere between 2000 files representing 180GB of data. The plan — as I’ve slowly started implementing already — is to create at least two copies of each of those files somewhere; maybe DVDs, maybe external drives, maybe scattered on a couple of cloud-services. If disaster every strikes and I lose my original Picassa folder, I find the parts to rebuild that collection. If some of those files are damaged, I look to the second backup. And if both copies of the backup are damaged, I rebuild it with the parity files.

It is an epic effort, but ten years of photography — and an ongoing plan for keeping future photos safe — is probably worth it.

Posted in: informology photography technology Tagged: archive backup data gigabytes managing files parity photographs software the cloud zip

How to Write a Blog

Monday, March 5, 02012

It’s a funny thing to go looking for… for me at, least. I was trolling through Amazon’s site looking for a book on journal writing. Y’know… a book about this exact thing that I’m doing right here on this web page. A book about how to keep a collection of personal writing for, say, a third of your life and make it readable with a deliberate purpose.

Of course, most of what I found looked like complete rubbish.

The low down: The “how to write a journal” books are all about self-help therapy or finding a spiritual journey of some sort or another. And on the other side, “how to write a blog” books all take the approach that the only reason anyone would write a blog is to string together a bunch of honey-pot style articles to generate ad-revenue via traffic. All my looking and I never really found a good book on just how to write to tell your story. So, needless to say, I didn’t buy anything.

I’ve been thinking about this a little bit lately, mostly because I’ve reached this sort-of impasse on my writing here. You’d never notice if you’ve been reading my prolific vacation posts for the last week. But all that writing was part of a deliberate effort to break myself out of a bit of a funk.

The problem goes something like this: as the quality of writing increases, the quality of content should seemingly increase in parallel. In other words, I check back on my old crap, back from five or ten years ago, and it’s not much better than much of the drivel that is posted on Facebook these days: vague updates, links to other junk, or random opinions with no substance behind them. Then I look at the stuff I’ve written more recently, and the quality generally improves: articles, ideas fleshed out, or detailed expositions on concepts or opinions. The writing is improving. The content is improving. (Feel free to disagree…)

Now, I’m in a catch. Suddenly I sit down to write anything and… well… the bar is that much higher. I feel like I need to get something of substance to say here or not bother writing at all. So, I kick myself down and don’t write the trivial stuff. And more and more gets classified as trivial. So less and less gets written about. Does that make sense?

I went looking for some advice in book form: how to write a journal or a blog. But every bit of advice seems to be either from people trying to make a quick buck by writing on some topic, filling the web with semi-factual drivel or opinions, and attempting to monetize that with Google Ads, or from people looking to recover from addiction or trauma by spilling their guts to a private sheath of paper.

Neither are what I’m looking for: I want to read about how to write for the sake of telling your story. Why to write this? What to write about? What to do? What not to do? …make sense?

Or maybe, it just needs to be written. I’ll need to think about that some more. Perhaps with my years of blog-writing experience, I might have something to say. But, figuring out what that might be — what I’ve done right or what I’ve done wrong — that’s the tricky part.

Posted in: blogger meta & methods writing Tagged: archive articles blogging book journaling style updates

Forgotten: So Many Pictures

Monday, June 6, 02011

For the entire month of June I’m planning on writing a series of blog-a-day posts based on a set series of open-ended questions to myself. This is one of those posts.

June 6th // Something You Have Forgotten

I’d completely forgotten just how many awesome photos I have taken over the years.

Last night I spent over an hour scrolling through three years worth of digital photographs in a (fairly weak) attempt to locate more images for my randomfeets gallery. I’d snapped a dozen or so in the last years, but haven’t put any serious efforts into this once-epic collection. Thinking I’d reprise the effort, I needed to catch up posting… which I did… and which meant glancing at twenty thousand odd thumbnails… no really.

I’d forgotten just how many pictures I used to take. It is an observation that is particularly sad these days in light of the sparseness of my photography in recent months. In other words: weak, nada, nicht, fail.

But I’d forgotten how I used to just pull the camera out for no reason and get pictures of us just living our lives. It was good. And it was good to remember, too.

Posted in: critters photography Tagged: archive camera forgotten pictures planning questions remembering reprise three years thumbnails

Is reading aloud even optional?

Monday, February 11, 02008

The following is a recovered and reclaimed post from a blog I used to write on skepticism and rational parenting. Commenting is permanently closed.

I’ve been trying to dig up some real research on the topic of reading aloud to kids, positive or negative. Other than a few vague correlational analysis there does not seem to be much scientific literature online about this either way. (Perhaps a reader could point me in the right direction. I thought I was adept at searching, but I’m stumped on this one.) Alas…

( keep reading … )

Posted in: fatherhood scientist Tagged: archive book parenting rational thinking reading reading aloud skepdad styles

About this Blog

This is a personal website to which I've been posting for over sixteen years. It's neither news nor journalism; It is often trivial fluff, but occasionally perspective and opinion.

At its heart, this blog is little more than my odd collection of words, photos, thoughts, vents, ideas, fiction and assorted mental farts, a collection that happens to live online in the form of a blog.

I tend to fill this space with musings of little value to anyone but myself. Occasionally others find what I write to be interesting, and read it or share it. But usually it just is what it is: My ramblings.

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8 Clicks From Nowhere has been posting since 2001 and maintains public online archives for 6215 days (about 17 years ) of content, from April 20, 02001 through April 10, 02018 It was calculated in precisely 1.575 seconds by a mechanical steam-powered wordpress difference engine.

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