TheBanyanTree: Wolf Moon 2010 - Something has been lost...

[Dale M. Parish]

Something has been lost, I've noticed, in the period between Christmas and New Years.  For years, I've received a copy of the Farmer's Almanac in my stocking.  For over twenty years, I carried in my breast pocket my bound At-A-Glance pocket calendar book.  It became an annual tradition to set aside one night between Christmas and New Year's to take my new calendar book and methodically go through each section and transfer the phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, anniversaries, contacts, cost codes, account numbers, encrypted combinations and passwords, and every thing that the little address book carried for me that I might need to remember from a written copy.

In addition, I treated my little pocket calendars as a history, and each year, after retirement, I filed away last year's book with all its predecessors, leaving a history of where I'd been, with whom I'd met, and who was important to me that year. 

During the act of transferring contacts, I would leave out those people whom I felt I'd not be doing business with in the new year, and any phone numbers or names I couldn't remember who they were would be left out, thinking that if I remembered someone later that I needed, I could always go back and get the number out of the old book.  I seldom did.

After copying all the contact information, I'd page through the calendar, day by day, and migrate any anniversaries that I wanted to carry forward-- birthdays I'd picked up on through the year, expiration dates of subscriptions, renewal dates of leases, anything that would reoccur in the new year.  Then I'd break out the Farmer's Almanac. 

I used the traditional symbology in my weekly calendar to mark the first, full, last, and new moon in ink.  That was the only thing that got marked in ink.  Everything else got penciled in.  I think the movement of the spheres isn't likely to change in my lifetime, so could be marked permanantly.  After the moon phases were completed for the year, then I'd go back through the calendar and mark sunrise and set for each Sunday from the Farmer's Almanac.  Following that, I'd look up all the meteor showers, lunar and solar eclipses expected to be visible from Texas and mark them. 

But about eleven years ago, my boss gave me a "PDA" for Christmas-- a Palm Pilot.  After my initial scoff, I started looking at the calendar features-- an event could be repeated annually or almost any other frequency or combination.  Not to mention that there was available for it a program that would give sun rise and set, moon rise and set, eclipses, day length, sun azimuth, etc. for any place on the planet.  Additionally, the contacts list let one categorize individuals, attach notes such as account numbers, combinations, and the like.  Plus, birthdays and anniversaries of individuals showed up in the calendar automagically.  This was a big improvement on the calendar book.  I was hooked.  

But, as I've upgraded the original Palm Pilot to newer models with more memory, higher resolution, and now to "smart phone" features, when each old model is retired, the data contents is copied into the new version and there is no physical history to show for it.  I know I could archive a copy of the data to some fixed media, but like my old 5.25" floppies, eventually, there will be nothing with which to read them outside of a museum somewhere.  While I keep backups, there's nothing readable without the current hardware and software. So what good is it for historical purposes? 

Printing it out would be, I think, a waste.  A waste of paper, in that the compactness of the pocket sized calendar book reduced a year's worth of history into less than 50 cubic centimeters.  The formats readily available for printing PDA calendars and memos isn't conducive to compactness.  So my last eleven years worth of history are intangible now.  Something has been lost.

Dale 
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Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632