Daily-Column

I’m in the middle of an experiment right now: writing real letters. It all came about because of a movie which featured letters prominently as a plot device, and the discussion that followed in my family about how letters used to be the only way to communicate across distances. Telephones reduced that, and email has virtually eliminated the need to send a letter which is not business related. I left that in my ideas drawer for a bit, noting it as something to perhaps come back to in the future. (I don’t actually have an “ideas drawer”, it’s more the abstract concept.) A few weeks ago, I picked up the book White Mughals, which is about the East India Company and its rise in the late Mughal era of India - nicely historical, engagingly written book. I noticed that the primary sources for so much of the writer’s information was letters (other sources like journals also cropped up). That got me thinking… what would the historians 200 years from now scour over? Google’s old decaying datacentre hard-drives? An Archive.org that was bigger than the ‘operating net’ itself? History rarely records the emepheral things such as conversations, and one could say quite easily that emails etc are just digitized conversations, not letters in the same sense they were 200 years ago. ...

There’s a few people you can never replace in your life, but right at the top of that list is your mum. Without whom you wouldn’t actually be around, so right off the bat there’s something you can’t argue against. Some will argue that having one “special” day set aside for mothers demeans the whole thing, that actually having that day is an acknowledgement that most of the time mothers go unappreciated. There’s some who argue that it’s crass & commercialised and that decaring this day of all days is completely arbitrary - mainly because the shops haven’t got anything else to get sales in May. To which I say that’s the weakest excuse I’ve ever heard, foo'. ...

I’ve got a list of things as long as my arm to do and only so much time to do it in; when you’re at work, it’s hard to find the time to call up the motor registry and the car insurance company and the post office and the health insurance company. Why are these things only open during business hours? everyone’s working at that time! I for one love Indian call centres. They’re open outside our business hours, and the people get my name right. If all call centres were in India, I could do the calls I need to when I had time, and I’d never get a parcel sent to Karen again. (“Yes, that parcel’s for me… No, I’m Karan, not Karen… I’m sorry, do you want a statutory declaration or something?” sheeze). ...

I’m sitting and wondering this morning what on earth I did during Internet 1.0 (i.e. before it was fashionable to call it Web, and give it a version number). I can recall fansites dedicated to Buffy, my very own Geocities account, random flash games and ad-overkill Yahoo!Mail, but that all seems a little… well, lacking. Do tell, what was the net for you before blogs, before gmail, googlepages and flickr?

Oh crap, I’m late I’m late I hate CityRail I’m late, I thought as I ran from Circular Quay to the Conservatorium of Music. The time was 4:01, the concert scheduled to start a minute ago. I’d never even seen the Conservatorium before, let alone knew where the entry was. Going on a map, a wing and a bit of a prayer, I managed to find it, and apparently… I wasn’t late. Or at the very least, everyone was late. No actual performance started until 4:15, by which time I was seated and reasonably aware of the fact that if you took hair colour as a reasonable measure of origin, 90% of the audience was Asian. Not altogether surprising, but a fact that did make me amused. ...