Permanency

My old blog is gone. After months of inactivity, the hosting company has decided to remove it. I had wanted to copy out my entries and store them on my wordpress-on-a-thumbdrive but had not gotten around to finishing the job. 20% to 30% of the entries are now irretrievable lost. And it will not be long before I have forgotten those experiences myself.

Why do I blog? See Ah Lim's reasons for blogging.
I don’t know, but I guess I blog because I want to announce my existence. Because I feel that we human are so fragile, so fragile that we never know when we are going to die. Because I want my life to not go unnoticed and if I die tomorrow I know I had shared the good things, the bad things, and even the mundane things with someone, somewhere, out there. They might not remember, but at least they get to witness my life’.

On hindsight, maybe I should have paid for a single month of subscription, around SGD$5 and exported everything one-time when I decided to call it quits over there.

I blog for a sense of permanency. Kinda like I'm suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Maybe not that serious, but how long can a person retain all of his memories? What was I doing on this date? When was it when I last met up with a particular friend? What the heck did we do for anniversary donkey years ago? What was going on through my mind at that time? There is lots of information that will be lost forever if not recorded down. Sometimes there are things worthy of remembering, but it takes too much effort to write them down…

One way to overcome this is to become a cult leader and be worshipped by faithfuls who will record down everything I do and say. Or a celebrity who gets hounded by paparazzi, who will record every single foul-up for posterity. Or get indecently rich so that I can hire my own scribe to write it from a nicer angle. A more feasible (and much less evil) way is to wait for technology to advance enough so that I can run my own blog on a PDA with a integrated keyboard. Then I can bring it everywhere and record everything. The blog server must be web-based with a database that can be easily exported and saved offline. Current technology is still too slow and I hate to wait for computers and PDAs to respond. The price will probably drop to an affordable level within the next 2 years or so, but the speed must pick up.

For now, what I can do is to get a camera phone, take lots of photos of lots of things that happen, upload them to a blog server running on my pc when I get home, so I can put minimal comments or keywords so the stuff is searchable. Minimal use of brainpower on those days (pretty common) when I go on autopilot after work. If only there is a simple way to record down everything that is happening, for searching later on, maybe years later. I have read about a project by this guy who was building a portable device to take photos every minute or so and record onto a 40GB hard disk.

That still doesn't solve the most important thing that I wish to record: my thoughts and insights, what I have learnt. Before I lose them to time.But sometimes what is the point of remembering everything? Inability to let go is a liability. I still don't attain to the heights that I wish to reach. I wanted to start a new life, but unable to let go of the past, I remain who I used to be.