bt’s Weblog

It is 28 degrees F outside and instead of rain we had a few inches of snow. It is pretty and peaceful in West Haven, CT.

It was just another day in Iraq with more people dying from bombings and shootings. The headlines report a “near record” year for American soldiers killed. Is it a hopeful sign that we missed last year’s ‘record’ by four bodies? The idiot and his crew in the White House, despite earlier protestations, will remove U.S. troops from that hell hole in the coming year. They believe we will forget the conditions they set for withdrawal and go ahead anyway. It’s okay with me. Get us the hell out of that misbegotten situation and impeach the fools who sent them there in the first place.

Our ’strong’ economy ended the year with the stock market below last year’s mark. So much for another of this administration’s fantasies.

Happy New Year. It can’t be any worse, can it? Well it can and may well be as long as shrub and company have their way.

On a recent stroll through an old cemetary I noticed that a number of graves were marked “Perpetual Care” and I couldn’t help but snicker at such optimism. Perpetual is a very long time to care for a grave or anything else.

This blog is on a server that has a 3 to 5 year life expectancy. I ran one for seven years and there may be some that continue to operate for ten but computers wear out quickly compared to the buildings they are housed in. Data can be migrated to new servers to extend its life but eventually I will not be alive to see that it continues to be available. The building that houses the server may last a hundred years or more and the institution, Holy Cross High School, may last even longer but there is no guarantee that the blog’s database will do so.

The blog can be stored on a disc in an archive but in a fairly short time the data will no longer be readable because the software is gone. I have email archives from Netscape which are only 8 years old and although I can still get at them it won’t be long before no program will know what to do with that format. My text databases will fare much better in that regard. As long as the medium doesn’t decay or the data is moved to ‘fresh’ media the text will last as long as the English it’s written in is understandable.

In all of this it is clear (to moi) that you must have an institution devoted to saving your ‘message’ if it is to have any chance of survival beyond your lifespan. The Catholic Church has maintained the writings of many theologians and even secular scholars for well over a thousand years. The Bible contains material that was first written 2500 years ago and there are even older texts from Greek and Egyptian times. The institutions keep the messages alive not only by preservation but by re-translating them for each successive age.

One characteristic of each New Year is the ritual of wrapping up the old year with lists of the best and worst of just about everything. These wrap-ups could serve as a starting point for building a thousand year summary of events.

Memorable events are data points that represent a filtered view of each passing year. This filtering process is a natural attribute of memory in that only certain events qualify as memorable in the life of an individual as well as a society. Another way of looking at it is that the majority of events are forgettable e.g. what you ate for breakfast (if indeed you eat breakfast) or what you wore to work on the first Monday of February last year.

What wrap-ups effectively do is posit those things that are worthy of remembering and the rest are wrapped up and thrown away. My list and your list and the NY Times’ list on any given topic will differ but it seems that only the latter will count in the memory of the nation. In the thousand year view only institutional memories are preserved.

Just came back from a walk in near-freezing temperatures and have come up with the proverbial boatload of connections between information overload, data management and interstellar distances (it’s a clear night).

I started computer programming in 1980 in the pre-PC, pre-Apple II era. Nine years earlier I merrily punched 80 column cards with data on 250 students and submitted them with various statistical job control language cards to the mainframe operators at UMd in College Park, MD. In a nutshell, I have been at this ‘game’ a long time and throughout most of those years I’ve collected, organized and analized data.

From the inception of X-Tree to the present I insist on a hierarchical view of my hard drives. I require details and eschew icons in folders. In essence, I want the densest and most ordered view of the data that I can get. Even the suggestion that “My Documents” is sufficient for anyone using a computer makes me rant - “MY documents are spread throughout various logical drives on MY computer. They’re ALL my documents, you twit!” (endrant).

And your point is? Information is what you get after you organize and analize data. The desktop metaphor of structuring data is too weak to hold up under the avalanche of data that even a single computer has on its hard drive. I use treeprint, a tiny utility from PC Magazine, to make a list of directories and files on every CD or DVD that I burn. I now have 547 text files that I can search for a keyword to see if I have a given song or album or video before I consider downloading it. When I get Google desktop it will be even easier since the XP Search leaves much to be desired and I don’t want to install another utility until Google is ready to roll.

Google is, IMHO, a godsend and I don’t know what I’d do without it. Yes, it leads me on merry jaunts to places I never heard of (my choice, by the bye) but when I need information from printer drivers to information overload that’s where I start.

When I began my job as information technology manager a year and a half ago I experienced overload because of all the new and disperate things I had to learn to do the job. The list: routers, firewalls, switches, cable drops, workstations, laptops, wireless access points, Exchange, SQL, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, IIS, ISA, Great Plains, Administrator Plus, Apache, FTP, TFTP, CLI, Anti-virus, content filtering, Ghost, asset management, tape backup and system patching.

After a year and a half I know about each one of the items in the above list and can usually trouble shoot and maintain them but that’s because most of the time they work as they’re supposed to.

A month ago I spent over five hours on the phone with a much more knowledgeable technician fixing one problem with ISA and the content filter proxy. This problem effectively shut down Internet use for the day in our high school. It is not unusual to spend an hour or two doing a “simple” update and the list of things I want to do but haven’t gotten around to continues to grow. Even when I try I can’t truly document issues and procedures for future reference. I know what I know but there is always something that comes along that has to be learned.

The Web contains a glut of material on every conceivable topic and although it is entertaining to follow links to see what’s there the surfiet of ‘information’ prevents finding a quick answer to a question. For me it is still easier to talk to someone in India than it is to ferret through a company Web site looking for a “How To” article. I have had some sucess with email to support personel and Cisco has a procedure for problem solving that has worked fairly well for me. Still, I don’t want to be a certified Cisco engineer or anything close to it. Ditto for Symantec and Veritas and Microsoft. I need information to fix things not to set up a consulting business.

Spent the last hour or so looking at Web links on “Information Overload” and I learned some things.

First, the term was coined (way back) in 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock.” That is one of the books that ‘everyone’ knows but hardly anyone has read, yours truly included. And it was written 35 years ago!

Second, the problem isn’t that there is too much information but that there’s too much to sort through to find what one is looking for. This blog entry is a good example since it adds yet another source of information on information overload.

Third, my thousand year question/problem must consider the possibility that a message will still exist a thousand years from now but it will be hopelessly buried. It will be no more noticable than a grain of sand on a beach.