Month: April 2013

The Internet circa 1938

“The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. “This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.

“In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas… in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain… in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs… We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”

—H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain.

Minimal Bookshelf

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” 
― Stephen King

For the longest time I collected and hoarded books. I loaded up bookshelves, totes and closet space to store them. But after moving around the country a few times those books began to become a burden and no longer a joy.

Eventually it became necessary to sell or donate these once-treasured items. I resisted the urge to go to an e-reader. That is almost blasphemy.

In most recent years I’ve discovered the value of digital reading. I can store thousands of books on my virtual bookshelf that I can hold in one hand. Now I get upset if I can’t find a digital copy of a book. 

I’ve purged almost all of my physical copies and have replaced only a few of them when migrating to digital.

Why didn’t I do this sooner?

Digital Moderation

You know what I learned from my one week digital cleanse?

Moderation.

After a self-mandated abstinence from digital media I had almost 1000 blog feed posts waiting for me. 5,000 tweets and numerous G+ posts.

I redeemed my time by reading physical books, right-sizing the material stuff I own and dabbling into PhP, MySQL and Apache server systems.

So great was the temptation to consume media that I had to bury the pervasive Google apps in a folder deep down to the kernel.

I used Firefox for a week because Chrome has those tempting apps built in.

From here on out, I will moderate and limit my intake.

Check the feeds once a day. Check email twice a day.

Now it is time to declare digital bankruptcy and clear the notifications and alerts and the feeds. Starting from zero…now.

Digital House Cleaning

Since my digital sabbatical started yesterday morning, I’ve decided to clean up and purge a few things.

I removed the Linux and Windows 7 partitions and did a clean install of Ubuntu 13 Beta Raring Ringtail as the primary operating system. Also added Virtualbox.

Inside the virtual hard disks I am running Windows 7, Fedora 18 and pretty soon Linux Mint.

These will be for various programs, testing and needs.