Back from our trip, including 2 nights in Avignon, 2 in Geneva, and the final 6 in a small apartment in St. Germain des Pres. Much more about this to come, with links and pictures. Great food, cool weather (three hailstorms – small and brief enough to be interesting instead of overwhelming), museums and art, and lots of walking walking walking. Good for the body, good for the soul.
Ellen and I are in the Air France arrivals lounge after a remarkably good flight. Business class is all it’s cracked up to be. The French keyboard on this iMac is quite different from the American layout. Odd. I hve to use the shift key to type a period, the a and q keys are switched, and other peculiarities.
Updates will be rare, as internet access is not assured for the rest of the trip. Count on many photos, however, when we get home, and exhaustive reports about food and wine (and hangovers, probably).
A bientot.
I have my hosting for this site and some others at Textdrive, which has an active, informative, and entertaining forum. I’ve learned a lot there about hosting web sites from the generous and talented people, customers and employees, that post there. It is a real community. I particularly enjoy the off-topic area known ast Textdrivel, where member Besonen started this thread with the post below.
It’s a Flash video; you may hate Flash video. Take a chance on it. I know I’m glad I watched.
Pass it on.
In the post Long-term backup at [dive into mark], Mark asks, “How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years? Or even 10 years?” The comments provide a valuable snapshot of much current thinking about how and where to save data for the long term. If that data is prized famliy pictures and video, as well as important documents in digital form, this is a concern worth spending time to think about.
I’ve been thinking about the ephemera we’re all generating here on the web. So has Dave Winer.
No one really likes to think about dying, but it comes for everyone, eventually, and if you’re living a creative life, as so many of us are these days, maybe you’d like your creations to live at least a little bit longer than you do? Look at it another way, suppose there’s a James Thurber, Mark Twain or Truman Capote or George Harrison among us, wouldn’t that person likely be creating on the web, and shouldn’t their work last longer than their own lives?
Andrew Barnett, writing in a Beards thread in the Textdrive forums, called this his “near-favourite blog post evah: We Face Follicular Armageddon. Just hurry up and go read it, but don’t drink anything while you do.