Author Archives: Arras
A Cloud by any Other Name…is Inconceivable!
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride Over the past few years the tech industry has been quietly conspiring to slip the word “cloud” into … Continue reading
Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part IV: No Bit Left Behind
Throughout history there have always been individuals in key positions making decisions about what bits of knowledge survive and what gets left behind. They were librarians, archivists, teachers, writers, publishers, producers, and sometimes government officials. Sometimes the censorship has been … Continue reading
Posted in Archiving, Music, Photography, Writing
Tagged Archiving, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Writing
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Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part III: Our Digital DNA
As I mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to preserve an idea is to share it as widely as possible. This sort of broadcasting used to cost a lot of money, back when that meant printing materials to distribute … Continue reading
Posted in Archiving, Genealogy, Music, Photography, Writing
Tagged Archiving, Genealogy, Music, Photography, Writing
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Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part II: Ideas Worth Spreading
It’s a simple but vital distinction: knowledge and its container are two different things. Preserving knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean keeping an old book on life support in a climate-controlled vault like a museum piece–that’s no good at all, in fact, … Continue reading
Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part I: Ashes to Ashes, Zeroes to Zeroes
On my bookshelf there sits a book called Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die, by Bryan Bergeron. It was published in 2001, and it’s now out of print, so finding a copy of this treatise on the dangers … Continue reading
Connecting the Dots of History
Over the past week I’ve been scanning genealogy records for one side of my family and entering the details into a GEDCOM database. I’ve now documented 873 persons from 265 families going back as far as 1475 in an unbroken … Continue reading
Legacies in a Digital World
I spend a lot of time these days thinking about my legacy. It’s not particularly because my days seem more countably numbered, or that I’m feeling gloomy or morbid. I think it’s because without children to pick up where I … Continue reading
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Hello (Cruel) World!
It’s been more than a decade since I’ve bothered to maintain a personal website, and despite having configured blogs like this for other people I’ve never actually had a blog of my own. Bear with me, then, as I make all the rookie mistakes 
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