Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Thursday, October 06, 2011

1984 prediction

Someday when all your "stuff" is on "the Cloud," and the only "stuff" you care about is not tangible but only intellectual property and data, don't come crying to me when "they" pull the plug and you are more destitute than someone who's just had a house-fire.

Do they sell Cloud Insurance?

All your books, bills, writing, music, photo-memories, etc. — gone. Likely you will have paid to have it there. And it's likely that the System won't have the resources to care or to act. It might be the System that de-Guttenbergs us all for reasons that should be, in 2011, quite obvious.

I want the cloud to be my surrogate hoarder so I can live like a Buddhist, but there's no way I'm trusting something that is made of vaporous water, server-farms (powered by coal/nuclear/etc.), and profits. I loathe to carry them, and I can't get far with 100 boxes of paper, but I like books.

My Depression-era ancestors, if they had perhaps been the gold-in-the-well / currency-in-the-mattress types, have me as progeny.

"And that's the way it is, blzzzzzz." — L.T.

Sunday, October 02, 2011

Vacuous


We measure things in months, which vary in the number of sunrises, on a cycle of 12. By that standard, it's been more than one. By another standard, it's been about three.

I think it's a consequence of A) my not being at liberty to be on the Internet any time I feel inspired; B) the fact that I am not often inspired in general, even as unrelated to my so-called indentured v. free time.

Tasks include: photocopy and sort; shop for supplies; endure leers and odd comments from process server known to be inexpensive, effective, and creepy; re-sort 1,000-page items into categories sub-arranged by date, ascending … given that said pages are as randomized as a jar of sand; answer door on lower level 3-7 times a day; answer a cheery, "Yes?!" whenever one of three beckon-ers decides to call (and it's not like we're all that close — shouting, it's some kind of wave of the future … I am subordinate and so send "you get to it when you can" emails — some of which are answered with a shout) … it's a bit like living with the bad parts of certain stepparents and others from my past.

For 10 dollars an hour. No benefits. No paid vacation, not even Labor Day.

Wrecking my chances? To sell you my time and rent you my brain? Maybe being hungry is just as well. I need to lose 20 pounds anyway, and I'm always "lamenting" the surplus of odd items and things (all old; nothing here is new by any means, except certain foods) collecting up in this glorified treehouse we have a mortgage on.

So, I haven't blogged (can't get used to this verb) in more than a month. Not since it was 100 degrees, 50 more than it will be tonight. Tomorrow is Monday, and Monday in the proper capitalized sense. Some people have to work on them, so I can see it's no great leap to have me have the day off but without pay. It's only convention, after all.

I think I have a mind to go cemetery-walking. I haven't seen collective personal monuments in years. I let a silverfish live today, and I'm not sure whether it was out of laziness or fear of having it fall into the bed, or a false sense of "live and let live." To the gross critter that has come to symbolize my failure, it doesn't matter; it's doing fine.