Saturday, July 16, 2005
How things change .....
Well, today I decided to get back to my good old desktop PC for a while. I usually use my hep laptop (courtesy,my employer). Today my kids wanted to install Harry Potter's latest movie trailer and that needed really sophisticated Quick Time installs and they demanded, persuaded, cajoled and pestered me using 'Saama Daana Beda Dhanda' principle fully and I lent my laptop to them just 'this time'. I returned to my dear old PC, seven years old, 256KB memory, slow CD writer and a flickering monitor.
I was about to do my daily routine of visiting the same web sites, tech blogs, reviews and same articles. I changed my mind then and went to Windows Explorer. I was amazed! I opened temp first - man, it had so many files which were lying in stateless session for half a decade. Friends' resumes,bank statements, school leave letters. letters written to odd credit card companies admonishing them for charging me the annual fee for a supposedly free card etc. I deleted some of the files and moved on to My Documents and My Music! There was a treasure waiting there. I found old .wav files recorded out of songs sung by family members and by my kids. I didn't have an MP3 codec then and they remained .wav files hogging disk space. I played some of them and felt extremely nostalgic. Songs and stories narrated by kids with really sweet tones, completely innocent and full of bliss that you would not get from a meditation music from a famous spiritual organization.
Then I went to the real junk yard which is My Bookmarks. Most bookmarks were irrelevant. I had changed bank accounts, so those links to bank sites did not matter!. There were lots of links to project and product related information related to my work. I smiled to myself about two things. One about how technology, information sourcing and information rendering had changed. All those bookmarks were invalid. All the data and information needed to decide something was being pulled now in a 'one stop' portal which had regions, rich UI, dancing bar charts (dynamic data :-) , alerts ...blah blah! The second was when I realised that today the kind of information I needed was way different from what I needed six years back.
How life changes! We rarely see how unconsciously we throw away old baggage and keep adapting to new ones. Well, we can change our operations, our life style, our profession, our interests. But there was one folder I just grabbed and transferred to my memory stick AND copied on to a CD using CD writer AND emailed to my gmail account as a backup. This was my 'friends' folder. It had a friends.txt file which contained addresses, email and phone numbers of friends and relatives. It also had my personal folder which contained scanned copies of my late mom's letters to me.
Technology changes but soul to soul equations don't change......
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