Monthly Archives: November 2009

the long now … maybe

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I was looking at an old posting of Anne Galloway’s @purselipsquarejaw.  The article quotes Stewart Brand1 and in particular:

“How can we invest in a future we know is structurally incapable of keeping faith with its past? The digital industries must shift from being the main source of society’s ever-shortening attention span to becoming a reliable guarantor of long-term perspective.”

The name Stewart Brand (above) is linked to http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/library.htm.  Now the 10K in “10klibrary” refers to the Long Now Foundation‘s mission to look forward at least ten thousand years, including sub projects to look at long-term file format conversions; similar to some of the aspirations of the Memories for Life UK Computing Grand Challenge.

Unfortunately when you click the link to the 10K library entry …

Looks like the URLs are not going to last till 12000 AD

  1. Whole Earth Catalogue, How Buildings Learn, The Clock of the Long Now, etc.[back]

Royal Mail comes through

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The Royal Mail has had a lot of bad press recently with strikes, postal delays and ‘modernisation’. However, it is easy to forget the revolutionary nature of the “Penny Post“: one price and one service to deliver anywhere in the country.  Living  in Tiree, one of the western Scottish islands, this is particularly pertinent.  Many carriers do not deliver here or only do so at a higher rate; those that do are often delayed waiting for the ferries, but so long as the plane comes in so does the post.

Our shower was leaking water and on Friday at around 12:42pm we ordered spare parts from Shower-Warehouse.  I had assumed that they would not arrive before I set off back to Lancaster on Tuesday morning and so it would be Christmas before I could actually do the repair.

But, at 1pm today, they were delivered

So top marks for both the Royal Mail and Shower-Warehouse and may modernisation never change the wonder of universal post.

back to Tiree

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I’m on the ferry on my way to Tiree.  I’ve not been back home for nearly 8 weeks and have a long weekend before heading back down to Lancaster until Christmas.  Since I left in mid September I’ve slept in 19 different places and had 23 moves between places; however, my main home has been the camper van, a Ford Transit Auto-Sleeper Duetto, small enough to manoeuvre easily, but with everything on board from cooker and fridge to its own toilet and shower!

I’ve also not blogged since I was last at home. I have a half-written entry from Paris, I was at a lecture by John Searle in Eindhoven and really want to write about that, and I also need to write a retrospective on my sabbatical year, but not had a moment; indeed on my office desk is an iPhone, which has sat waiting to be unpacked for the last 2 months, no time even to play :-/

Perhaps over the next few days I can catch up with the half-written blogs amongst the unanswered email, overdue papers, and pressing admin; and also take some time to appreciate the sea and wild wind.