I had a crazy last week, I barely had time to do my homework and I didn’t even have WiFi for a couple days, I also lacked time to sit down in my computer and work on my blog.
During those days, while working and thinking, a lot of ideas crossed my mind, and I am a little sad, because I already forgot most of them, some of which could have been nice blogs, but I was unable to write them down, at least on paper or a quick note.
Yesterday, and today, I spent some of my free time to do some cleanup of my Hotmail account’s Inbox. There were hundreds, if not thousands of emails coming from old accounts, old forums, Facebook notifications, YouTube uploads, Blogger newsletters, email chains and spam, and a lot of other trash that was there stored in some random Microsoft server. And among those emails, there were a few conversations I had back in the day, some old friends threads of chatting and sharing stuff we missed out on, it brought some nostalgia for older times.
Also, reading some article or post shared on Mastodon, I ended up reading a PDF, dating from the 1800’s (or maybe it was a website?) and I realized how important and amazing writing stuff down is. Somebody somewhere, took the time to record these thoughts, store them and share them to the world.
I have no idea of what will happen to those old conversations I had on email in 2013, what about the chats and threads I have in Forums, Matrix servers or Fosstodon? Don’t even get me started on MSN Messenger and the stuff I used back then, before advocating for FOSS.
I recently started to use PGP encryption for my emails, and to think that I am probably the only person who has the key to read the contents of them, is amusing.
I write these posts in plain markdown text, which is then converted to HTML thanks to Jekyll, but, how will it be in the future? Yeah, plain text files might still be readable in 50 years, but, just like that PDF file, or those old books, will someone be reprinting these words in new formats? new languages? will somebody even read this a week from now?
I have some tracking enabled on this site, using GoatCounter, but I only visit it like once a month, and I don’t really get more than 20 or so visits. I don’t really mind, in the end, I am writing it for me.
I doubt that a way to recover those lost thoughts will ever exist, all I can do is write what I currently think, and maybe hope for a trigger word to bring back those memories, preferably in front of a keyboard.
This is day 39 or #100DaystoOffload