Personal Narrative

Taking Stock: Nostalgia

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Widen the screen just a little, in fact, and a particularly prominent and disturbing lost self can be seen as merely one guest in a room full of permutations, good and bad. And each of those selves must have an idealized doppelgänger of its own. (Benedict Cary’s Times article)

Today we take stock. And here’s a (not always reliable but interesting) social studies take:

A 2003 study at Concordia University in Montreal and the University of California, Irvine, for instance, suggested that young adults who scored high on measures of psychological well-being tended to think of regretted decisions as all their own — perhaps because they still had time to change course. By contrast, older people who scored highly tended to share blame for their regretted decisions. “I tried to reach out to him, but the effort wasn’t returned.”

In New Year’s Cocktail, Benedict Cary discusses the role of regret – at times useful but at others corrosive.

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Christmas 5:

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Each kid got a tamagotchi. This is a toy which would have been inconceivable ten years ago, let alone when I was a kid. These were far and away the favorites.

My sister in law called and astutely asked, “how is the dog? Is anyone paying attention to the real pet, instead of just the virtual pets?”

Weird stuff like this assures me more and more that we are heading into very different times as technology advances. I do not believe in the Singularity, which has been called “the Rapture for geeks”. But it is clear that there is a whole bunch of major change coming faster and faster. Hold on to your hats.

But, Christmas will still be Christmas.

God bless all our bloggers, commenters, readers, friends and enemies.

How Time is Valued…or Not

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I value time more than most. I will always exchange money for time if the amount of time I save by hiring something out looks to be a good deal for me. An example of this just took place a couple of days ago. We have had a lot of snow here in Madison and I basically have two options. After work I can get the shovel out and clear it myself off of my driveway and sidewalk or hire someone to plow it. This time I chose the latter since the snow was pretty heavy and wet to boot. On top of that I have been extremely busy at work and am pulling more hours than usual. Sometimes I just want to come home, see my daughters, have a nice scotch, and kick back.

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PC Backup Problems Bleg

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For the past few years I’ve successfully used xxcopy to backup data to portable hard drives. However, a few days ago, while I was copying the contents of one portable HD to another, with both HDs connected to the same computer via USB 2.0 connections, something happened in the middle of a backup and the source HD became corrupted. (The first symptom of a problem was that the backup stopped and a Windows message balloon appeared indicating that a particular source file could not be read and that I should run CHKDSK on the source HD.)

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The American Gift of Forgetfulness

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Presuming the residual antipathies Lex quoted in I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot to be characteristic of UK media figures, we have one more reason to regard tasteless American ahistoricity as a feature rather than a bug, because endocrine-system reactions to “Roman Catholic” are, I believe, just about inconceivable here, and certainly not because we’ve all translated into a higher plane of flawlessly nontheistic rationality.

I was going to make this a comment on Lex’s post but then realized that I wanted to pile on the links, which would choke the comment-spam filter faster than a Greenpeace activist on a tour of a nuclear power plant. So away I go with a barrage of autobiographical details, which is the price of a post written by me that’s anything other than hopelessly abstract. Gosh, you’re thinking, I can’t wait to see this!

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