Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Mundanity

As it should be, the mundane and the trivial are the topics of the day. Maybe some future anthropologist will discover this and gain some insight into the day-to-day routine of this one specimen. And then again, maybe not. After all, it's not like this is the sort of thing that will be discovered at the bottom of some forgotten well. Maybe the layers of strata will be long lost archives of tapes from backups or some server sitting folornly forgotten in a corner until some grad student finds it while looking for some storage space for their work. Or some future version of a CS student doing postgrad work on ancient systems digs up these logs of ours and passes them on to his girlfriend, who's an anthropologist.
Somewhere along the way, some sysadmin will move the data along to a new machine because it's always been there and there's room and bandwidth anyway, so why not? Like long lost photographs of the mundane, there will be these snapshots of time in the lives of ordinary people who belong to this layer of strata. Similar to the early business records found on ancient Babylonian clay tablets that allowed us to get some idea of early mankinds life. Absurdly mundane, yet they provide an valuable insight to how the average business owner conducted business. Some things never change and a successful, small business owner of today could probably tell a lot from looking at these business records from long ago. And that is what they provided us.
As we perform that same service now, as we store snapshots of our lives online. Some are providing portraits of madness as they deal with life and the multiplicity of choices and agony of endless decisions. Some provide an insight into the endlessly fascinating ability for the human mind to find ways to hate their fellow man. Man's creativity for war is exceeded only by his inventiveness for hating his fellow man. As if we don't already have enough ways, looking online you find endless variations and assortments of hate. Sex, lifestyles, inventiveness, pets and the list goes on. Or just normal ramblings at the end of the day. Some prolifically so, some not.
But, there are a lot of blogs out there like mine. Hey, this is what I did today. Life isn't bad. I'm not rich and famous, but I live, love, cry and laugh. And write. Speaking of which.
Looking for a house here in Florida is an enlightening experience. The wife came in from Texas so that we could look together now that I've covered some initial ground and have at least some idea of where we may go. Just in time for her first hurricane party and hurricane. Here I am, less that a month in Florida and I've already seen three hurricanes. I have a friend that was stationed here while in the military and only saw one after several years of living here. Hmmm, c'est la vie. After living through several big earthquakes in California, experiencing my first blizzards in New England in the winter of 77-78 and seeing numerous tornadoes in Texas, what's one more set of natural events? Of course, it's easy for me to say, we only lost power, not a home with all of our lives there or an actual life. Still, while not driven to run back to Texas, I've been impressed with the raw wind power of a hurricane. It's given us pause to insist on a well built house. And, with things not looking like we'll have them resolved before the holidays, we're already looking at having the kids up to New England for Christmas. Get the whole family together in one spot. Next year, we'll have everyone at the new casa, whether we build new or buy existing. Between now and then is a year in which another hurricane season will come and go, possibly impacting us severely, probably impacting us somehow even if only through a loss of power. I'll be in a community working with the local emergency services to help provide communications support. And building a new life in our new home.
Not exciting, not important and definitely not the final, authoritative word on something. Reading numerous mass media sources, you get the impression that we're all supposed to be incredibly pompous and self-important. Full of ourselves and our importance with our little stake of virtual real estate. Can I just owe you instead? How about I provide insight into one life that is relatively stable and okay despite the minor trials and tribulations of daily living. You can always move on to the important ones after you've touched the baseline.