Payday 12 April 2002

Pic of the day: Remember your first car? Quite possibly it was something like this. (Screenshot from The Sims.)

Progress, mostly

Well, we didn't get along to build those colonies on Mars or the moon, or even the glittering cities in Earth orbit. (The latter was probably a wise decision, as there is now a cloud of rapidly moving debris, and a single wingnut at those speeds could be a weapon of mass destruction.) On the bright side we've got the Internet, as everyone is fond of pointing out.

And, as nobody else is pointing out than me, we've got some pretty fancy dental equipment. I went to the dentist today again and got a couple of teeth repaired. I remember in the bad old days, there used to be a pretty girl around mixing the heavy metal that they put in our teeth. Then you had to wait for hours before you could eat, while the stuff settled. Now, the dentist I go to works all alone. He still uses a set of small drills instead of laser to cut away the corroded surface of the tooth, but then he just grabs a small pistol of some white paste and applies it. He sculpts the stuff and irradiates it with another pistol which seems to radiate blue light or something, and it hardens to white pseudo-enamel in a matter of minutes. It's also years and years since I have used local anaesthetic. (In fact, I don't even know how to spell it without a dictionary.)

***

There is a gradual process of upgrade all around us. You may say it is evolution rather than revolution, but it happens so fast that it changes our lives while we live them.

The cars are safer now (except that people drive faster, so they are still mashed when they eventually collide). New cars are also quieter, use less fuel and pollute much less. This is one reason why I think our inflation indicators are just plain wrong and we are actually in a slow deflation. When you pay 5% more for your new car, it is registered as inflation. Nobody bothers with the fact that you get 10% better car for the money.

Don't get me started on computers. Now you may say: "I used Word Perfect on my 10 MHz PC with 20 MB hard disk, and I use Word Perfect today on my 2 GHz PC with 60 GB hard disk. It may be slightly cheaper, but does it really make a difference?" Possibly not. But your IBM AT probably did not play CD-quality music in the background while you wrote. And you definitely did not connect to the Internet to read an article translated from a foreign language about the topic you were writing about. It is small things like this that creep up on people. And then one day they look back and ask: "What did people do before ..."

The telephone beside me has buttons instead of the wheel that I remember from my younger days, but it isn't all that different. The difference is that I can call to the USA for a negligible amount of money, and get less noise on the line that I got from calling the neigboring village back home. Not that I have anyone to call to; I prefer e-mail anyway, as I am no longer in the habit of speaking. It does not come easily to me anymore. But I think that has other reasons. Certainly people on the bus are chatting freely in their mobile phones.

We have grown used to this quiet evolution. We expect progress. Sometimes there is something exceptional, but usually it is just more of the same ... or rather, better of the same.

***

As a rare exception to the rule, my archive webspace provider crosswinds.net has once again (I have lost count) accidentally wiped a goodly part of their hard drives, included as usual all of my archive. Backup is only available to premium users, who need to be accepted by the random pickyness of PayPal. (Incidentally, FTP file upload is also only available to premium users.)

I have not yet decided whether or not to spend the equivalent of a work week uploading three and a half years of daily entries one by one by pointing and clicking (and then taking a few weeks of sick leave while my wrist heals) so that you can again enjoy my archives as well as strings of barely decent pop-up ads targeted squarely at the moderately retarded sinner wannabe. (Actually, I hope you people are not stupid enough to surf the web with javascript on, but crosswinds.net does not know that.)

Anyway, I haven't changed my page format ... but chances are that I will suspend my archive until such time as evolution delivers a dependable and utterly cheap web storage. It probably won't be all eternity to wait. I'm looking into Dreamwater even as we speak.

In the meantime, you can probably spend your time better reading Al Schroeder's new free online sci-fi / superhero comic MindMistress. If you can get over the font, it is actually quite well done. Whatever did we do before we had the Internet?