Gryhphon's Word of the Day, May 27, 2007

The word of the day for May 27, 2007 is "incommunicado" — adverb : without means of communication : in a situation or state not allowing communication <a prisoner held incommunicado> <remained incommunicado while working on her book>.

My sister's birthday is today. (She is mumble-five years old.) When I called to sing at her, she apologised to you all for not getting out the Word of the Day for me during my vacation. She had a good excuse though. The library where she works had electrical problems while I was gone. They did not know from day to day whether they would have light to work by, let alone computers for all the reasons that modern libraries need them.

Electricity has been a great boon to libraries—starting with extending the daylight, working hours and diminishing the risk of fire. However, as with any technology, the drawbacks become evident in catastrophic ways. When man went from clay tablets to paper as writing medium much of what was written was subsequently lost to fire, water and vermin. Now that we are putting our thoughts in electronic form and storing it on CD and DVD discs. Indestructible, you say: they'll last forever. But technology marches on. How many of you have used a 4 1/2 inch floppy disk lately? Could you retrieve computer information from a cassette tape deck? Have you ever used a keypunch machine to make out data cards? Yet those of us who have been using computers for more than fifteen years probably have used all of those and more. My advice is to save your data on as many different mediums as possible. That way someone will be able to decipher your stuff, much in the same way the Rosetta Stone was used to learn heiroglyphics.

The quote for today is from Barbra Streisand (1942 - ):

     A human being is only interesting if he's in contact with himself. I learned you have
     to trust yourself, be what you are, and do what you ought to do the way you should
     do it. You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it..

;^)  Jan

Tags: incommunicado