digital(self)preservation

two scary books and that both of them are sitting together on the table probably says something about what keeps me up these nights!

i got the survival book on a whim. Amazon just told me i'd got a fiver when i sold Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and when i checked, this was displayed. only 2 left. buy now. i think i had romantic ideas about it being a nature survival guide, but the index lists "firearms", not "how to make fire" and "nuclear apocalypse" rubs shoulders with "gardening" within its covers. romantic it isn't. scary it is. like a prequel to "The Road". i dunno if i'll read it.

the other i got for christmas. it is about the problem of losing the ability to forget - anti-amnesia brought about by information technology. the fear comes from a loss of control - someone, anyone, can use the internet or their archived INBOX to recall things about me from over ten years ago. i've changed a lot since then so is what i said still true? do i still believe it? probably not, but that may not stop someone using it, quoting it, misrepresenting me and i cannot really do anything about it.

as i write here, i'm censoring my thoughts far more than if i were writing a private journal. i try to be honest, but i know i'm thinking "i don't want to offend people" (and with so many people out there it is easy to offend someone), "what if a future employer reads this", etc. which often makes me question the value of this (or indeed any other site/blog/social network) as a true journal of me. that doesn't make it any less valuable in other ways, but if i want blipfoto to be a journal, i have to accept (and so do you, reader) that whoever is writing here, is just one aspect of the thing called pete. my alias only contains part of my name.

[on a related note, do you know how do delete your entire blipfoto life? i don't. i did look once, but didn't find out]

all of which is interesting, because i'm also reading several articles about digital preservation and in the current one, the guy is arguing that the perfect digital preservation system is one that ensures accurate reproduction of digital objects in their native (emulated) environment (rather than simply the content - say the words of a blog transferred to a pdf). without this accurate reproduction, the meaning of the object, how it was interpreted and considered by those that created it, would be lost. And yet here i am deceiving you, deceiving myself, by censoring everything i write as i write it - less so now in these last paragraphs - but often, in many of these sections.

so will you ever get to the truth of this blip as i intend it? it is a certainty that you will interpret it differently to me, because you are you, and i am a persona of the thing called pete. so is there really any way to preserve meaning anyway? is the perfect reproduction a foolish aim because it is trying to preserve that which is already lost? indeed, that which only existing once, for a moment, inside someone's head? how close to truth do we get?

i dunno any answers, but i'm curious. :-)

meanwhile, in a less philosophical place, i spent most of the evening fighting with Adobe Bridge & Photoshop. The Web Gallery kept giving up. No error message. Just said "Done" but wasn't. eventually i found the problem in system.log (you'd think if it reports there it'd report via the GUI too?) was that Bridge doesn't encode the content of the data file (XML) it creates prior to generating the gallery xhtml and so it bombed out because one of the photos i was putting in the gallery had some <>s in the metadata.

it works now. been an interesting dive into EXiF and embedded image metadata