Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

Well, where does one start? First off the Internet really is endless. By the time I finish writing this diatribe there'll be another 1000 pages of content out there. There'll be a billion more forum posts, and trillions of instant messages sent. At which point does it become too much? At which point is the value added go down so greatly it becomes useless?

We've got Google, we've got Desktop Search, but what we don't all seem to have is an endless supply of brain capacity for all this information. At one time I remember this conversation with my gramps. He really didn't understand what I meant when I said I wanted to store everything and anything and never delete anything off the computer. I explained that because of the way I can do stuff on the computer I can access anything I want at any given time, it'd be a bit like Data in ST:TNG but just without the immediate access after thinking about it.

The problem I've encountered though is that through the desire to have all this information (for what reason I don't know), to have all this music and multimedia content (I don't even get through all of it); I've totally lost any real meaning in all of it. I've got emails since my days of dial up, chat logs since before chat logs even existed or MSN IM even existed for that matter, pictures from just about every point of my life, and more music and movies than anyone could possibly care to watch. But in all this "stuff", the one problem I see is that I lately I spend more time organizing, categorizing, and filtering the content than I do consuming it.

Desktop Search and Google has helped find what I'm looking for, but my personal content still needs to be tagged, this is especially true with music.

Maintaining this archive of information isn't cheap either. I've got over 1.3TB of data just sitting, collecting random magnetic waves in a server in a closet. This server is probably consuming at least $12/mo in electricity, if not more since during the summer months it can get to 99° in the office so it needs to be cooled. To keep this blog and all my information on the web I spend another $100/mo on a second Internet connection to have a static unfiltered IP.

It's also a huge headache and burden, someone like me tends to over complicate it as well. I need to make sure the data is secure so I do RAID-5 and have it all centrally stored. To save on multiple servers I have one to do everything, so this server acts as my file server, media hub, domain controller, active directory master, Exchange front and back end, SQL server, you name it this server does it.

I'm not sure if it's a total anal retentiveness or what, but this stuff just ends up taking up too much time and getting it all working is a big pain in the ass.

So I spend even less time enjoying everything, less time getting out doing stuff outside the apartment, and find my days are never long enough.

The one catch-22 in all this though. I've found that today nearly all my friends, almost every one of them except for the few I work with, I've met through the Internet. So it's probably like 98% of everyone I communicate with about life on a regular basis at this point I've either neither met in person or only met them in person after communicating for some time over the web. A part of me finds this interesting since well that's the way things are now. Another part finds it disturbing, though I guess it wouldn't be so bad if more of the people I considered close friends online lived in the same neck of the woods physically. Sadly it even seems like people I know who are local, well, I end up communicating with them more online than I do face to face.

I guess I've lost my point in all this. I suppose my main thought was, what has this all gotten me? How much of all this technology do I really use, how much do I really need? How would I really feel if I just gave it all up?