OK, so here’s the high-level report: We Saved Geocities!

Obviously, this needs a truckload of qualifications, so let’s go over them immediately.

First of all “We” is not just Archive Team, badass archivist motherfuckers that we are. While probably 30-40 people from around the world stopped in on the Archive Team tent at the Geocitiesdownloadapalooza, not all the action was going on with us, and not everyone who stopped in was necessarily working with me as project lead, and so on. There were, it turns out, parallel projects going on, five that we know of, and even more people who we might not know of, dedicated to downloading as much of Geocities as “Archive Team”. We’ve had people show up in the days since Geocities closed and offer us 20-30 gigabytes of data, some of which we didn’t have in any of our other stores. They just did it – they didn’t need direction or to be part of anything, and they’re happy just to drop off this packet and move on. I’d estimate that we’re probably talking 60-80 people that we know of so far who took a pretty fair shot at downloading a lot of sites that they had nothing to do with previous to Geocities being announced as closing. Altruistically trying to rescue the artifacts from the burning house, not because these were their artifacts, or the artifacts had intrinsic value to them, but because they knew the best thing to do with the burning house was rescue artifacts. That’s fantastic.

Next, there’s no way all these different groups saved every last single bit of Geocities. But at current estimates, with all of us sharing data, we saved over one million accounts. We’re still crunching numbers, of course, and things could change, but we’re looking at somewhere in the range of 3-5 terabytes of data, and very likely having grabbed every major outward-facing geocities account, outward-facing meaning “showing up in links and search engines”. It is entirely possible that someone created an account, didn’t do much with it, never got word out of it, and it’s gone, but for that matter we seem to have many hundreds, possibly thousands, of various default “wow, thanks for making a Geocities account” pages, untouched since creation. So let’s just say, a million goddamned accounts is nothing to sneeze at.

Finally, we saved Geocities in the most important way – we got the word out about this thing, I did a lot of interviews, and while the sneer-and-move-on crowd who would as soon see history burned for not having a good CSS file might ridicule, a lot of other people saw Geocities in a new light.  No longer strictly thought of as a useless financial property a dying company might be jettisoning to save some coin, it’s now recognized, in some quarters, as one of the largest-scale folk-art installations to exist in the history of the world.  People are unhappy that all this stuff is gone, and more importantly, people felt they could speak out about how they felt unhappy. There was no large-scale effort to petition and protest Yahoo for this; but I did see quite a bit of pity. The kind of pity you feel for a person who doesn’t understand what they have or what they’re doing, immolating themselves for the short-term and walking away from opportunity after opportunity, on the way to inevitable irrelevance and also-ran status.

I’m spending time with a few people who have large archives, and we’re synchronizing our working out what’s where, and how to get the data around. I then have a short-list of people who, involved with history or culture or sociology, are lining up outside to be sent hard drives of Geocities and looking forward to close and meaningful study. Who thought this would be the case in April?

Ultimately, the archive team demonstration/curated collection of Geocities will be at Geociti.es. I’m focusing us on just the pre-Yahoo sites as a first step. Other locations are going whole hog. Everything is going well. We’re all doing awesome. Already, tearful folks have found one of the groups of people and recovered data they thought was lost forever. I don’t expect these expressions of gratefulness to die down anytime soon. It was worth it before, for history, but it’s worth it even more knowing we’ve made lives and memories better for this.

We lost. And we won. I’m delighted.

I am sure we all laughed at the end, there, when one of the members of Archive Team, slaving like the rest of us to yank data out, suggested a link to a Geocities page with a MIDI of “The Final Countdown” by Europe.  The perfect tinny music to blast out of the speakers as we watched a massive site come grinding to a halt.

As it turned out, the machines of Geocities did not die on October 26th, but instead started to come down around 12:30pm PST on October 27th; we assume nobody felt a need to stay up late at Yahoo to do the work and instead began taking machines down and redirecting at the start of the next day. Fine with us – that was 24 hours of bandwidth-absorbing madness we visited upon the servers before their shutdown.

I was already rsyncing tons of grabbed files from all the harvester machines people were running. And man, did we have data – millions of files. I’m STILL rsyncing data from some people, and will likely be doing so into the next week. All told, as much as 2 terabytes of total data was saved.

A nice surprise was the fact that we had not two but four entities that we know of currently who were trying to rescue data wholesale off Geocities.  The four are Archive Team, Archive.Org, Internet Archaeology, and Reocities (Update: And a fifth, geocities.ws). Each of these have approached things in different ways, and will likely present the resulting data differently.  But the fact that something like Reocities would slave in darkness (they didn’t know about us, we didn’t know about them) for over a week in insane download orgies says something about what was going on here.

I’ll let people know when the Geocities stuff we’ve downloaded is available again, and Archive Team Apologizes for the Downtime. We’ll have that fixed shortly.

I’ve mentioned it a few times in this weblog, and obviously other people have made the connection over time, but I’m the guy who does stuff with Sockington, the most popular cat on Twitter. His little daily concerns with tuna, windows, toys, and more tuna have been a part of my life for a couple years now.

It might be confusing to people to think of me having both Sockington and Computer History in my life, but it’s really not that big a deal.  Unfortunately, narrative structure tends to favor one-note or specific-sided individuals, negating other sides because it would confuse the story. So when you know a guy is into bulletin board systems and documentaries and data heritage and all that, it confuses things to think he also in somehow wrapped up with an online cat.

But wrapped up with this cat I am, both his online persona, and the actual cat. Both have variant days of pride and sorrow, of joy and delight and scratching.

The thing which some people may or may not totally grasp is that through a combination of dependable appearances on Twitter and something called the Featured Users list, Sockington has over 1,300,000 accounts on Twitter following him. This makes him one of the top 100 accounts out of a space of many millions. In some ways, that’s been big fun. In other ways, it’s given me way too much insight into the realm of celebrity and media and whackjobs and drive-by opinion tourism. I wouldn’t say anything has made me so unhappy that I wish this had never happened, so far. There have been a lot of things that make me happy it happened, and it will be a tough effort for the negative aspects to ever overtake the positive ones.

But as Sockington reached greater and greater “success”, defined here as “number of followers”, a steady refrain has come from all quarters: How do you intend to make money from this?

Not do I or if I intend, or even when I might want to – it’s more that the next logical step is to turn this fun little endeavor into a job. Or, more ideally, a fountain of coins raining into my cup.

Also, to a smaller amount, are people touched by the updates of Sockington and his little adventures, and the fun he brings into their twitter feeds daily, not unlike a comic strip without those bothersome drawings and arriving a few times a day, like the post used to. These people are actually pleading with me to not ruin “it”, where “it” is whatever situation Sockington is in. And the easiest way to do this is to “sell out”.

Now, “selling out” is a hot button topic with anything, but most often it’s used to label unexpected change. If someone does something a certain way, and suddenly they change, the first forces to look out for are outside ones. Did the person get approached by a food or drink company? Did the person acquire an expensive new home? Did the person find themselves kicked out of a group and need income from somewhere else?

And really, “Selling Out” is one of those things that you could stretch to mean anything you want it to. A band that has always had two members but now has four is “selling out” to being a plain old band.  A writer who writes incomprehensible books makes one that’s a straight noir mystery, and he’s “selling out” to be “more commercial”. And so on.

For me, “Selling Out” for something like Socks comes when the cat or myself are doing things we would never do on our own, and people give us money to convince us to do this. Oh, they may couch it as “paying for your time and effort” or “to help with your maintenance costs”, but it’s taking cash to do something otherwise never happening.

In May of 2009, there was a conference called the Social Media Marketplace, sponsored by the IAB, and at which I surely would have begun drinking terrible things so I could throw up on as many suits as possible.  And somehow, during one of the talks, Sockington came up.  On the panel were John Battelle of Federated Media and Ian Schafer of a marketing company called Deep Focus.  During this discussion, it was suggested that a cat food company, any of them, should immediately license or hire Sockington. (I know this because of twittering during the panel.) And this was the exchange that went by:

Battelle: Anyone know who’s behind Sockington?

Schafer: Just a guy.

Battelle: “Just a guy” has a price.

I can’t quite enunciate how angry I was, and how clearly it brought into clarity how I feel about this, this way of looking at things. The Battelles of the would would as soon grind Socks into hamburger and sell him on street corners as give him a toy to play with. A way of looking at the world where everything has a tag on it. An outlook where bright people work together to make the world worse while packaging it so they think they’re making it better. I don’t ever want to be a part of that.

So here we go.

I am not going to sell Socks out.  Period.  Drag your “proposal” or ‘touching base” or “big idea” or “possibility” to your trash icon, or I’ll kindly take the time to do it for you.  The store is closed. It was never open.

That’s it.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled cat.

Can I just say how blown away I am? Within two days, I’m already at 19% of the goal for this fundraiser I discussed. Two days!

People have been sending me kind words about this plan, and really coming out of the woodwork for me. I am pleased and humbled.

Energized isn’t the word for the great feelings I get when I see the dashboard that shows the pledges that have come in.  It’s like being struck by lightning that powers you to the core. To know of all the folks who would be willing to throw money into a fund to keep me going while I work on this subject I love, well, that’s honestly the best it can be.

There’s a whole science to fundraising and pledging and the rest, with all sorts of hints and homilies for what you’re supposed to say and when and how to get people to consider donating towards your cause.  For myself, I think it’s a matter of trust and taking the step. People have been contributing towards this fund, a thousand dollars from one person alone (!) and to that end, I will start on what I discussed in the fundraiser pitch. So starting next Friday, I will be providing backers with a worklog and access to stuff I’ve been working on, be it clips, scans, photos, links, and the rest, a couple days before I announce it elsewhere.

The pressure is on me to do enough stuff that people go “wow, this is what a full-time Jason Scott can do”. Maybe that’ll inspire people to put in more towards the goal. Maybe it’ll just mean I get more stuff done. Either way, I’ll be doing that from this point forward, at the very least to the funding period’s end, and hopefully beyond if the fundraiser is successful.

Anyway, so if you were wondering if this was real, it’s real.  Check my pitch and consider throwing a few bucks my way.

And thanks.

You’re stupid and I hate you. I haven’t even met you, don’t even know where you are or what else you do, and I hate you.

It’s 7 in the morning. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping lately. I’ve been doing a lot of not sleeping for months. I’ve been working on backing up hundreds of gigabytes of data that you decided to delete. I hate you.

Somehow you thought this was a brilliant idea, to go ahead and shut down that GeoCities property because hey, it’s not a money-maker and it’s primarily a free service and someone, maybe Carol Bartz, maybe someone trying to impress Carol Bartz, told someone who wasn’t you that money needed to be saved and businesses needed to be gotten out of, and who the hell cares about Geocities anyway?

Maybe whatever retarded version of an RSS feeder told you that this was a brilliant move, this easy-before-breakfast shotgun death of GeoCities, since everyone made fun of it even being up. “Ha ha,” went the kind of people who are tasked with writing a half-dozen stories a day to keep the ad clicks coming. “Ha ha, Geocities was still up, isn’t that stupid. Good riddance to it.” You probably read some form of that and considered yourself one brilliant little middle manager indeed.

Well, you’re not. I’m at the vortex of a lot of people trying to save the data you flicked away, people who didn’t have to be indoctrinated or convinced or scammed or otherwise thrust into the role of data duplication of GeoCities because the obviousness of it is on its face. This is fifteen years and decades of man-hours of work that you’re destroying, blowing away because it looks better on the bottom line. You could have sold it, but that’s too much work. You could have donated it to archive.org, but I know that makes your reptilian brain hurt and so I understand that one. But you are, by this action, destroying so much.

I’m sure you think this is all going to go down with a silent little bump, like a robin landing on a nest in winter. Oh, you haven’t heard it yet, idiot. Go ahead and do a search on a real-time news engine, like, oh, Google’s. Go ahead and search for “geocities.com” in news and watch all the places that are, even in the last 24 hours, linking to Geocities sites in press releases and notices and what have you. People who are depending on it being there past Monday and apparently you have utterly failed to notify. These people are going to be hella fucking pissed when they find out that you took their stuff down, deleted it, and then hit the hotel bar by 4. They’re going to want their stuff back.

Remember the great Yahoo Geocities Boycott of 1999? Of course you don’t, you’re an idiot. But in that fight, Yahoo dropped new property-grabs on Geocities when they bought it, and declared that all data on it was theirs, and they could do anything they wanted to do with it. People flipped the fuck out and started going after Yahoo then, called for a boycott, and Yahoo backed down. Yahoo had people back then, people with a brain. People who heard other people being angry and thought “wow, people are angry at this action” instead of what you think, which is a sound not dissimilar to a cuckoo clock in a fishtank. The people of Geocities knew they had something very meaningful there, and wanted to protect it, and attempts to do otherwise drove them batshit. And now you’re going to delete it all. I hate you.

So here we are, with me spending way too much of my time working with good people to back up Geocities. We asked Yahoo for a number, some idea, some rough concept of exactly how much data is in the array. We don’t know if we have 10% or 80% or 99% of the data in Geocities. Nobody will tell us because there’s a germ of a concept of some sort of privacy violation in telling us. Which is fine. Except it’s retarded and stupid. We’re asking for a rough idea of all the people you are fucking so we can make them less fucked, but that’s not what you think we’re asking so we’ve just been skullhumping your servers day and night for six months, redundantly grabbing everything we can just to make sure we’re not missing anything. I hate you.

So now in two days you’re going to shut this place down, this collection of genealogy and pages by people who’ve died and collections of writing and art and music and you’re going to turn it into dust because Carol Bartz said Yahoo needed to save a few bucks and the same idiocy that shut down Yahoo Briefcase, Yahoo Briefcase which probably fit on a USB stick by the time it closed down for fuck’s sake, is going to shut down Geocities.  I would say something like “I hope you know what you are doing”, but I’m sure to you it would sound like me going ‘blah blah blah blah non-functioning-capital gains blah blah” and then your eyes would narrow and you’d ask me to stop shouting.

This has to have been one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, and it’s your fault. Thanks to your level of galactic short-sighted stupid, I just basically got into the hosting business because I’m going to arrange for people to get mirrors of all the stuff we’ve downloaded and we’re going to keep putting it up and you’re going to keep seeing it up there and we’re going to tell people how stupid you are until your suit is a pile of rags in a garage and your car is holding soup in a hundred supermarkets.

I hate you.

All my favorite are the ideas that terrify me. Sometimes the terrifying idea is understandably terrifying – other times it’s just so many different ways of thinking about stuff that I’m lost in the possibilities. I think this is the second one. Basically, I’m reaching out to my fanbase and saying “Please help me work full time on my computer history and related projects for a few months.”

If you’ve been following this weblog for the past few years (it’s getting to be quite a few years, actually) you know I’ve been wrapped up in dozens of projects, ranging from the mid-afternoon inspiration to the decades-on grinding epic. Some people wonder when I sleep. And some people have been surprised to know I had a full-time job at the same time, one that didn’t overlap with any of my projects and history endeavors and travel in the slightest. I’ve always paid my own way to conferences and I’ve put my own time into all the work you’ve seen described on these webpages.

So, having been laid off in September, I’ve begun the process of looking around for a career where I’d be able to use my skills in computer history and my love of all things digital in something really positive. And, hopefully, have time to finish as many of these front- and back-burner projects I’ve got in the air.

Now, I’d heard of this thing called Kickstarter a while ago, and had been occasionally browsing the thing for projects to invest in or to just marvel at how the idea worked. (I am aware there’s other similar sites – I just thought Kickstarter was pretty slick.) You see a project, you have a pitch up. and then you add a reward set where donating more than just a minimum entitles you to extras and other cool things. I liked this approach. I didn’t think I’d need it anytime soon.

But recently, I thought, what if I made a go at it? What if I seriously tried to raise enough funds to live off for a few months, get to work on stuff full time? What if I could get enough donations where I’d be able to have all this stuff I do be the only thing I do? What if I finally finish my documentary on text adventures, clean up textfiles.com’s directories, bulk up archive team’s writings and pamphlets? Conduct research into a bunch of subjects and be able to make my presentations that much better? What if?

So I decided to go for it. I’ve created a page on Kickstarter. In it, I am asking 1,000 people to fund me to the tune of $25. There are rewards (with returned items) for larger donations. Some people, if the mood strikes them and their wallet feels too heavy, can donate enough to make me travel to them (within limits) and play my movie and discuss it with them. There’s a bunch of little rewards I put in there.

If this works, my mind will officially be blown. As mentioned in the pitch on that page, I would be issuing a report, weekly, to my patrons, showing what I’ve done that week and giving them a 2 day headstart on new materials over everyone else. I’d be, in other words, a subscription to someone devouring digital history full time. That interests some number of folks – I do not know how many. I hope it’s enough to push past this limit.

I’ve set the fundraising to 30 days. I figure I can live off unemployment a few more weeks and continue to look for work, while this set of numbers either climbs or doesn’t climb. The time limit plus the ability to see the growth will hopefully encourage people to get involved. I hope you do, I really do.

This is a big thing I’m asking. That’s all I can say. If it doesn’t happen, I will still thank everyone who stood up and said they’d be willing.

Here’s hoping.

This week’s sent-in cool stuff came from Steve Ross, who sent me a box of IBM Binders.

Sometimes (OK, fine, often) I get to indulge in acquiring material that is personally meaningful to me. In the case of IBM binders, it’s one of those connections that, honestly, I find hard to explain but it’s overpowering. I’ll take a shot.

I don’t know when IBM started making instruction manuals in this fashion, but I know it must have pre-dated the IBM PC. That said, for a pre-teen like myself, the IBM PC would have been the first time I’d come up against this presentation and packaging. If it was intended to imbue a sense of power and confidence, to give the impression that IBM was here and everything was going to be OK, it did it in spades for me. I know that Digital and other companies had also made huge strides in creating documentation that smiled and tipped its hat to you, promising the world. But IBM was my first, and my strongest.

Each major product got one of these binders, this huge thing with tabs and the logo and inside a binder whose pages could be pulled out, or added to, or whatever. You saw these boxes on the shelf near any IBM PC. Here’s one in all its glory:

How could a kid not be impressed with something like this? How could anyone not be, especially if it was the first time they encountered a business-grade manual? After all, the IBM PC was going to be business-grade, and having a reference document nearby in such a perfect layout was fine.

If you’ve not encountered one of these in person, I do want to draw your attention to a significant detail/aspect of these manuals: the texture of the outside. This wasn’t just “cardboard” or a smooth colored surface. It was a crosshatched texture, one that gave a sense of richness and strength to the box and binder that you just don’t see as much anymore, now that everything’s commodity and lowest-common-denominator. Maybe this picture will help explain:

Can you see that? That bolt, that rich texture of the manual? Again, not something drawn/printed on the cover, but an actual textured feel. You could bring this to me, tell me to close my eyes, and stick this in my hand and I could tell you exactly what it was – my fingers would call back memories of a cold dining room with the computer on a table, pawing through this binder and trying to figure out how to make various parts work, or what buttons to press, or where I was going wrong in trying to make graphics show up. It’s embedded in my character, part of what makes me me.

Oh, sure, someone who does not buy into this worldview or my description of my feelings for these things can spit off a few quick digs, like my world being small or lacking proper human perspective or something. But in fact, this was all part of my growing up, of realizing that people could do really great stuff, and then when I encountered crappy workmanship in something as basic as the manual, I knew that things had strayed badly or the company didn’t work out all the problems with their product, or showed pride in it.  There really was a pride about it, here. Of craftsmanship, of IBM throwing people at the problem and those people having a lot of meetings and deciding what kind of a manual would, before you even turned the machine on, make you feel like you’d made the right choice.

It’s an outlook that, in this realm, is truly gone. Thanks to Steve for letting me have a few additional specimens of this bygone era.

The presentation I gave at Arse Elektronika 2009, entitled “The Atomic Level of Porn”, has been edited and uploaded by the very talented Eddie Codel, who utilized slides I sent him with a well-mic’d, well-constructed set of footage to make a superior audio-visual product.

The talk is mostly an attempt to show the various ways people have expressed erotica through a lot of variant technologies, and how standards and approaches have shifted over the last (roughly) 100 years in a variety of such attempts. It’s not complete, and I really screwed up a couple facts around Atari 2600s, but otherwise it was a fun romp, especially (based on the comments) you have no idea who the hell I am and where I came from. I got a lot of surprise from folks previously unacquainted with me about the stuff I was up to, and so that was, to me, a great success on that front as well.

There are no printed notes I’m working off of – the order of the slides is my guide. Other than that, I’ll gladly answer questions if people have them but I think the presentation kind of stands by itself.

Well, well, well.

So you might have missed this piece of news, but this past week, if you owned a phone branded as a T-Mobile Sidekick, which itself was based on original work of the Danger Hiptop, then your phone’s data was all lost and if you power-cycle your phone, you will lose all your contacts, photos and other important data. Permanently.

That’s pretty awful.

So let me modify my previous sentiment:

FUCK THE CLOUD, BEFORE THE CLOUD FUCKS YOU.

Being the guy who gut-punched current presentation and marketing crap of “The Cloud” earlier this year, I’ve been a lightning rod for a spectrum of frustrations. Some are annoyed at this weird marketing term taking on such strength. Others are people who have glommed onto this marketing term and are hella pissed that some upstart fuck like myself is indicating in some way that they are charlatans or misinformed dupes. And some others are end-users who are worried about some of the concerns I have been raising and want more information. It is nominally less interesting than other mail I get, but it’s pretty important stuff, so I don’t mind being at the center of it.

Therefore, when things started really going to ass-town earlier this month for Danger/T-Mobile, I got communications from a lot of people. I’m still getting links and I am grateful to all the people who wanted me to know about this nightmare and what it was all about. I was also given vaguely privy information to what is “really” going on, and how some perfectly talented folks are not getting any sleep for quite a long time while the problem is being addressed.

The story, as I understand it from various sources who may or may not be as insider as they claim, is that this is a classic case of “no separate hot hardware backup during major upgrade”, resulting in a worst-case scenario when what was supposed to be a relatively smooth transition fell apart, cascading and knocking over all current data. Backups exist, I’ve been told, but obviously they are slightly out of date and probably don’t keep around every piece of data important to the end-users. And they will take quite a while to come back. Meanwhile, we are treated to people, regular and normal folks, who have been absolutely fucked over. This is the human side we probably tend to forget:

You should have a bunch of feelings when using computers. Excitement. Pride. Delight. Amazement. Curiousity. Yes, even frustration and anger. But you generally should not feel despair. You should not be feeling desperation. You really shouldn’t. An architecture and environment that could lead you into this situation, where you are helpless and wronged and did nothing but what you were told was right, and then punished quite severely, is very wrong. It is the opposite of what a computer and technology should do. And worst of all, by any of the information I’ve been given, it was avoidable – just more expensive to assure such avoidance. And expensive gets lost as an option, when you’re dealing with a cloud.

What we call The Cloud is about obfuscation, about blurring. It’s in the name of ease and convenience and about incredible savings on a number of columns in your galactic spreadsheet. Unfortunately, this marketing bullshit easily comes at the cost of service level agreements, error tracking, and accountability.

Oh sure, the worms have come out of the wood to make fun of people who owned T-Mobile Sidekicks, saying they shouldn’t have been with a “kid’s” phone instead of a grown-up phone or some other platform-related calling of the dozens.  These people are beneath contempt – all centrally located items, like, oh, telephones that rely on checking centralized servers, are prone to potential failures in the future. Failures that could affect everybody, even people who own some other brand of phone who are the type to point and laugh at others’ misery. Here’s hoping the hot guy/gal you gave your digits to was using a T-mobile, Mr. Jerkin’-it-on-Saturday-Night. They ain’t calling you back anytime soon.

And sure, I’ll be sure to get mails and comments from people who have hung their shingles on The Cloud to tell me that this wasn’t the fault of the Cloud and that the Cloud was actually down at the local pub sharing a pint with 39 buddies who The Cloud bought drinks for and so The Cloud is innocent. That’s what’s so great about something like The Cloud – a few tweaks of the words, a clever turn of phrase, and the bad part doesn’t apply to you and what you’re selling. That was something else, somebody else. Not your fault. No mea culpa required. Come buy our new Cloud service.

Remember lives could be very negatively affected by this outage and loss. People whose sales contacts or organization information or any of a number of critical phone lists were on these phones is gone. That can be devastating to a businessperson who relies on this list to get work done, or who stored photos, memories, messages on this platform. Sure, you can point here from the Magic Fucking Future and act like they were committing a sin by not syncing their data up every single night, but how’s your sink looking, motherfucker? Got any dishes in it?

Like Roger Boisjoly, I don’t take much pride in being “right”. What I want is for us to stop making these mistakes, to stop several terrible trends from continuing. It’s partially an engineering issue – syncing up data quickly and easily to several locations isn’t a terrible task and it certainly isn’t something to be ashamed of and hidden way up the food chain at the central servers. It’s also a social issue – data owned by users should be sacred, considered the highest calling in computer services, with people’s lives understood to be affected by every choice. It is often, instead, thought of as a business case – if we lose everyone’s data, what will it cost us? Right now it’s costing T-mobile plenty (they’ve halted sales of the Sidekicks), but how often has anyone within the paradigm of Microsoft/Danger/T-Mobile used the terms like “trust” and “caretaking” with relation to this data? Will they ever? Will anybody else? In a world full of fucksticks like Larry Halff who should have a restraining order from ever being in charge of user data again, you don’t know what the ethics/value system of the people in charge of your data are, and in this situation, the idea of something like the approach of what we call The Cloud is a step, no, a marathon run backwards. We’re better than this. We really are.

This is not a time, over here, for pointing and laughing. It never was. It’s a time for mourning. It’s a time to realize that tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people woke up and had part of their lives ripped from them and had done nothing, nothing to deserve it. And to realize, with horror, how many people are walking around as we speak with pieces of their own lives hanging in a fragile balance with only one bad upgrade, one poor business choice, one missed phone call between them and losing it forever.

I got mail from someone who saw I took in all those other magazines and books.

“Hey, we’re getting rid of a bunch of magazines and books. Do you want them?”

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll take it. Without question. I’ll pay for postage.”

“Great.”

So a little while and hundreds of dollars in postage later, I can let you know that I have now taken in ANOTHER 1, 328 POUNDS OF MATERIAL.

Yes, that’s right, one thousand three hundred and twenty-eight pounds. That’s over half a ton.

I’d show pictures, but they’d just look a lot like this:

So yes, imagine that, but it’s almost all either IEEE magazines/proceedings, or it’s books about programming, error control or neural networks. Either the company this all came from did a lot of work with neural networks or somebody wasted a hell of a lot of money. So let’s assume the best of them, since one of their employees was kind enough to pack all of this stuff up and mail it to me.

The previous couple of shipments crossed this line, and now I am firmly in the territory of having to plan a long-term solution to this amount of paper. In just a few short months I’ve roughly doubled the size of my archive from the previous 20 years, because of this mass of magazine, journal and paper. No two ways about it. I am making a bunch of life changes right now and one of them is moving, and you can imagine what adding truckloads of paper has done to the process. I must stress, I AM ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTED TO HAVE THIS PROBLEM so if you have similar collections of paper and magazines, please mail me. But it does mean I have to stop thinking about myself as just a guy with some stuff. I have a lot of stuff now. I have, literally, tons of stuff.

There’s several possibilities.

Perhaps I broker the stuff that’s appropriate to archives or places that could really use this material. Come on, you know me by now – wherever I did that to, it would be a place that wouldn’t turn around and destroy/discard the stuff. I’d ensure that.

Another possibility is I go the Prelinger route and co-open a space, perhaps in conjunction with a grant or donations or what have you. Basically, have a weekend-hours library or archive that people could visit, and otherwise hit me up to ask for scans of material or some such. Rick Prelinger and I haven’t met yet, but that shouldn’t surprise people that much – it’s a big world and I’m not everywhere. It was only last year that I finally met Michael Hart; and to some people they must think we all hang out in an awesome castle of cool filing cabinets reaching up to the 30-foot ceilings. I wish! That’d make a great sitcom.

And still another possibility is I simply store things, bide my time, and see how my new life with different job and career works out.

Either way, the stuff is safe. Please send more.

P.S. I can’t currently reach the downstairs bathroom. Send help.