"These are small. Those are far away..."

I went swimming last night. (Yawn. Boring.) Swimming was much more of a fun thing when I was a kid. No-one glares at you if you spend aged doing somersaults or whole lengths underwater when you're little. When you're grown up you have to swim up and down then up then down again. Then up and down and up again. Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed going swimming but it wasn't fun.

Anyway, that's not really what I wanted to write about today. Today I wanted to tell the plumbers who fitted the new showers at the pool that some people are actually over five feet tall and when you install shower heads you really ought to take that into consideration. Trying to rinse all of the chlorine out of your hair under a shower you can't fit under unless you stand in the drainage gutter and lean against the wall is not an easy thing to do, especially when you have to press the water button every ten seconds. Who showers in ten seconds anyway? Is that even possible?

Plumbers are evil.

Oh, and I found a picture of those wellies. kinkykixxy: No. Bad girl. Badbadbad.

On technology and the death of civilisation as we knew it...

I've just found some interesting information. "The average life of a tape is estimated at 15 years, a CD twenty, computer systems and software far less." Oh dear. When phiil and I studied preventive conservation back in 1999, the average lifespan of a CD was thought to be around 75 years which (in archival terms) was thought to be a reasonable length of time and good enough to store large amounts of important information. The first CDs went on sale in 1983 and although they should have lasted until 2058, they've already started to degrade.

Apparently, the government have already lost the individual level population data from the 1951 Census, as well as large chunks of the 1961 and 1971 census. As katchuri will no doubt appreciate, that's some pretty important stuff for anyone interested in family history, especially when you consider that the earliest census records (written on paper and dating back to 1801) are still more or less intact. That's 30 years of your parent's lives erased from history. It makes me wonder what else has been lost and is going to get lost. Is our reliance on technology going to result in 21st Century civilisation getting wiped from the historical record as we continue the transformation into a paperless society?

Think about it. Nothing you write and none of the photographs you take will actually physically exist. Whole sections of your life compressed onto one disc with the same life expectancy as the average penguin.

That's why I like paper. It's not indestructable, but it's pretty much a guarantee that (in archival conditions) the nice glossy booklet that came with the album you just bought will be around longer than the album itself.