My Secret.

Everyone has a different way of dealing with the Internet. Some subscribe to feeds and use a reader to get the latest news. Some get daily emails. Some just read the Internet as it comes across the screen.

But I can't stand reading the Internet online. That's my secret.

I don't know what it is about being online, but it just feels gross. It's like I'm being groped by an infinity of monkeys. Dirty, dirty monkeys. Or hobos. Or old people.

Even logging in to read email has me rushing to the bathroom to wash my hands. And other stuff.

So I get the Internet in print.

It's not something many people do, and maybe you've never heard of it, but I follow the print edition of the Internet.

For people like me, there's a service called, www.webtoprint.com, and each month, they take all the posts from my subscription sites and print them out, and then they mail the bundle of pages to me. I can't stand reading the Internet online, so I pay to have everything I want to read printed out.

It's a great service. And they have a companion, www.printtoweb.com that takes my handwritten or typed notes that I snail mail back to them and converts them to Internet posts, either here on this blog or as comments on other sites.

So I hope this explains why it might take me some time to respond to your comments or emails or why I don't comment on the latest news. It's a lot to read, and it's a lot of work to keep up, and right now, I'm reading everything from December 2007, so I'm sure I'll get caught up eventually.


[fyi, printtoweb.com and webtoprint.com are probably owned by someone, but they don't seem to go anywhere as of the time of this posting: don't blame me if you enter the links and get porn.]

Why the.effing.librarian loves paper.

Some day I'm going to compile some of this blog into a book.

I don't believe the Internet has the same value as printed matter. One click, and all of the Internets can just dissassemble into random packets, or worse, some supervillain might devise a way to reassemble all of our data, baby pictures, history reports, bibliographies, Netflix queues, bookmarks, mp3s, into a gigantic image of Steve Jobs's ass and project it onto the moon.

So I trust paper. I don't agree with its misuse, all that crap I need to shred that people mail to me with all of my personal information on it, but that's not the paper's fault. That's the ink, that bastard. Ink is always giving up my secrets. Paper is just the innocent pawn to that manipulator.

Anyway, here is some old crap republished. When I write stuff like this, I can almost believe that it might be good enough to put into a book. Almost.

Yes, paper takes space and needs to be stored properly, but so do all the computers that need to be saved to access all this old data in all the variety of formats that each new idiot decides is the optimal preservation medium.

And because of all this indecision, I have no faith that we will ever save anything.

When a future Ken Burns does his PBS special on life in the early 21st Century, he won't have any source material other than some text message retrieved from a 12-year-old's battered cell phone:
()/\/\‡6 ¿00 Þ\/\//\/I) /\/()()3 I()I

And we will be glad we have that (the message is: "omfg u pwnd n00b lol," for the less l33t of us, or "you nerd"for my mom).

During the Civil War, their 12-year-old boys wrote with pen and ink:

It is with an infinite sadness that the news of your recent illness has reached my ears. Yet President Lincoln's latest speech has strengthened our resolve to weather this latest unpleasantness of battle with confidence and stout brotherhood. The cherry blossoms are in bloom and I have been inspired to knit a colorful eye patch for my recent wound.

We have these letters (even fake ones that I just made up) because people wrote stuff down on paper. If something is meant to be preserved, then preserve it. On something stable, tangible, readable.

Publishers print books; librarians buy books; libraries store books. If people use the books, the librarians won't throw them away.

This is how we decide what data are important. As obsolete as you want to try to convince me it is, paper, and the books made from it, is still more useful than a yottabyte of formless digital crap. And until these bright minds can agree on how to preserve this crap, libraries will continue to do what they always do, collect and preserve.

Maybe you should ask a librarian.

What if everyone saw your doodle?

Google announces the Doodle 4 Google competition (really? a competition?) for U.S. students in grades K-12 to design a doodle for the Google homepage.

Now, get this:

So gather those art supplies. All it takes to enter is a drawing on paper using your favorite medium (crayons, markers, colored pencils, whatever!) -- and encourage your kids to enrich us all with their imaginative vision. We look forward to seeing the creative doodles that are submitted!

All you need to do to get started is to have a teacher or principal register your school. Registration closes on 3/28/08, and entries must be postmarked by 4/12/08.

And so soon after this story, Pushing Paper Out the Door, where "an engineering director at Google, and his family live a practically paper-free life." So I guess his kids won't be competing.

Here's a link to a form where you can "spread the word" about the "competition" (not "opportunity" - the world is such a harsh place) to other teachers.

I won't be participating. Due to a tequila mishap and Paris losing her phone, there are several pictures of my "doodle" that can already be found through Google images...

Paper.

I think everyone should see The Paper Chase. It's not really related to my point, but sorta. It's a movie about law students and it came out in 1973 and there ain't one freaking computer in it. It's interesting to see how much of our world was established without computers or any electronic devices. People met in person 1 or 2 times a week and things got done. Nobody needed to text anyone 37 times to finalize a plan.
Almost every law, every test case for every decision was established prior to 1940. The whole world was settled prior to 1940. On paper.

Yes, I know that the world is growing and continually changing blah blah blah, but so many good ideas came to us without a single electron sparking a single phosphorescent molecule on a computer screen.

How many devices do I need now to express an idea to another individual?

And here's another thought about digitalization:

Hundreds of thousands of documents can be accessed -- saving tremendous time and energy in making copies or thousands of dollars in gathering people to a central location.

Now, I don't know about you, but before the Internet, I would search 4-5 books for an answer and do a quick scan of the Reader's Guide, and I was done with my searching. Whatever I found by the end of that search was what the patron got. Seriously, who the hell has time to review hundreds of thousands of documents? Now, when I search for something, someone always comes along behind me and searches the net again and says, "but did you find this?"

To participate in today's world, I need an account here, but I also need an account there. I need a login name, a screen name, and a password. I need to keep my accounts active. I need to update my account if my information changes. I can finish a phone call in 80 seconds, whereby one or more queries are received and one or more responses fulfilling the queries are given. A similar series of questions and responses might take 11 minutes using an electronic "chat" format.

For all the time the modern world claims to save us, I have less time to enjoy the pleasures of it.

Paper is my friend. I could lose a 500 page electronic file with a mouse click, but I'd never lose it's print counterpart.

The only time I ever lose a sheet of paper is when I take an office memo and accidentally on purpose wipe my ass with it. Which is every day. Sorry, can I get another copy of that?

Burn, Baby, Burn

Here's a stupid story by Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman who are two people who can't seem to see the trees for the trees; or never got the math right; or whatever strained metaphor you want to apply that concludes that they are dumb.

[Note: Jim and Francine seem to be bright people, and I only mock them for funny; don't take personal offense, kids.]

They complain that the digital equivalent of the informational contents of the Library of Alexandria gets lost every day/month/year. (Yet, they seem to be unsure of how to feel about
the loss, since some stuff is better lost).

The importance of developing sensible plans to preserve our digital heritage cannot be minimized. We can't save it all, nor do we want to, so it's critical that we agree on what data to save and how to save it. In the next 100 years, we will go through dozens of generations of computers and storage media, and our digital data will need to be transferred from one generation to the next, and by someone we trust to do it.

They seem to want important digital information saved, but they can't seem to decide what
the important stuff is or how to save it or even if they can trust anyone to press the Save button.
But they agree that it's important.

If something is really important, you do it. You don't wish for someone to form a committee.

For a while, I saved some of this stuff. I have an old Atari St computer and boxes of floppies for it. I have a bag of DOS OS disks. I have a Windows 95 computer in the garage with Win95 & 98 OS floppies and CDs stored away. But I really don't care about preserving this stuff. It's more trouble than it's worth. Yes, I wish I had an old 5 1/4 drive to read all the stuff I wrote back in 1992 on those crappy IBMs at FSU, but if it was really important to me, I would have printed those files out on paper. Did you read that? I said paper!

Dummies Jim and Francine continue:

By contrast, the Library of Congress has in its care millions of printed works, some on stone or animal skin that have survived for centuries.

Didn't they read what they wrote??? "Printed works." Why are we wasting all this money and time on preserving data in a medium that is designed to degrade and fragment and disappear? Microfilm lasts for what? hundreds of years? And paper can last for hundreds. So why don't we continue to use those?

Even with this blog; if I think I write something really cool, I will print it out. Which I haven't done, yet. But if I ever write something worth saving, I will...But dear reader, feel free to print it all to your heart's content.

Yes, paper takes space and needs to be stored properly, but so do all the computers that need to be saved to access all this old data in all the variety of formats that each new idiot decides is the optimal preservation medium.

And because of all this indecision, I have no faith that we will ever save anything.

When a future Ken Burns does his PBS special on life in the early 21st Century, he won't have any source material other than some text message retrieved from a twelve-year old's battered cell phone:
()/\/\‡6 ¿00 Þ\/\//\/I) /\/()()3 I()I

And we will be glad we have that (the message is: "omfg u pwnd n00b lol," for the less l33t of us, or "you nerd"for my mom).

During the Civil War, their twelve-year old boys wrote with pen and ink:

It is with an infinite sadness that the news of your recent illness has reached my ears. Yet President Lincoln's latest speech has strengthened our resolve to weather this latest unpleasantness of battle with confidence and stout brotherhood. The cherry blossoms are in bloom and I have been inspired to knit a colorful eye patch for my recent wound.

We have these letters (even fake ones that I just made up) because people wrote stuff down on paper. If something is meant to be preserved, then preserve it. On something stable, tangible, readable.

Publishers print books; librarians buy books; libraries store books. If people use the books, the librarians won't throw them away.

This is how we decide what data are important. As obsolete as you want to try to convince me it is, paper, and the books made from it, is still more useful than a yottabyte of formless digital crap. And until these bright minds can agree on how to preserve this crap, libraries will continue to do what they always do, collect and preserve.

Maybe you should ask a librarian.