Friday, March 30, 2007
Where does the music go, when you burn the tape? |5:00 PM| Flash flood warnings were quite fashionable today. I was watching the local radar animation, while wondering if the cardboard armor I'd fashioned for my Celica was going to be sufficient to hold back the 2-3 inch hailstones that had been falling in nearby counties. I had built the best protection cardboard boxes and packing tape technology could bring forth.
On the animation, I watched the clouds move up towards my area, and as always I thought "I can almost predict the shape it's going to take and where it's going to move..." and then I realize I can't because it's the fucking clouds. God doesn't even know what shape it'll take. In any case, as the clouds moved northward, a couple of the smaller counties went red, showing flash flood warning, but once the storm reached Austin and Travis county went red, all the other nearby counties had to join in, this sudden red tidal wave. It was like the new fashion was shown in Paris and now everyone had to change their outfits.
Or maybe, the meterologist who decides what's a flash flood warning and what's not lives in Austin, and he heard reports of bad shit happening south of here, and blew them off. Then the storm actually reached Austin and the hail dented his car, and flipped out "Oh shit! Hit all the big switches marked 'FLASH FLOOOOD'"!
Anyhow, stupid thoughts about the weather aside, I bring this up because of Geocaching*. How often are the caches lost or damaged by floods? Then the guy that planted this cache doesn't have the cache anymore, he just has a location. A set of coordinates to a set of rocks that used to be meaningless, was for a while the site of his part of a larger game. Now, outside of his/her memory and a website these numbers have returned to a meaningless set of coordinates.
Not to be morbid, but how many times have people out there died, but their geocaches continued on? Now I know there will always be bits and pieces of someone's digital life online, messages in archives, website postings, etc. There's at least one website that keeps track of myspace pages of people who have died, their profile pages frozen in whatever state of lame-ass that they were at the moment the person ceased to be. But a geocache, that's an impact on the physical world. How many people will go, find the cache, sign the log, never knowing that it was now a ZOMBIE CAAAACHE?
The logbook would fill up, the crappy souveniers no one wants would pile up. If it's a nice container, it could stay there for decades.
That is, unless a flash flood sweeps it away, and it just becomes junk, the numbers again meaningless. Hopefully someone else would figure out what was going on, and put that set of numbers and a box to good use.
Where does the music go, when you burn the tape? |5:00 PM| Flash flood warnings were quite fashionable today. I was watching the local radar animation, while wondering if the cardboard armor I'd fashioned for my Celica was going to be sufficient to hold back the 2-3 inch hailstones that had been falling in nearby counties. I had built the best protection cardboard boxes and packing tape technology could bring forth.
On the animation, I watched the clouds move up towards my area, and as always I thought "I can almost predict the shape it's going to take and where it's going to move..." and then I realize I can't because it's the fucking clouds. God doesn't even know what shape it'll take. In any case, as the clouds moved northward, a couple of the smaller counties went red, showing flash flood warning, but once the storm reached Austin and Travis county went red, all the other nearby counties had to join in, this sudden red tidal wave. It was like the new fashion was shown in Paris and now everyone had to change their outfits.
Or maybe, the meterologist who decides what's a flash flood warning and what's not lives in Austin, and he heard reports of bad shit happening south of here, and blew them off. Then the storm actually reached Austin and the hail dented his car, and flipped out "Oh shit! Hit all the big switches marked 'FLASH FLOOOOD'"!
Anyhow, stupid thoughts about the weather aside, I bring this up because of Geocaching*. How often are the caches lost or damaged by floods? Then the guy that planted this cache doesn't have the cache anymore, he just has a location. A set of coordinates to a set of rocks that used to be meaningless, was for a while the site of his part of a larger game. Now, outside of his/her memory and a website these numbers have returned to a meaningless set of coordinates.
Not to be morbid, but how many times have people out there died, but their geocaches continued on? Now I know there will always be bits and pieces of someone's digital life online, messages in archives, website postings, etc. There's at least one website that keeps track of myspace pages of people who have died, their profile pages frozen in whatever state of lame-ass that they were at the moment the person ceased to be. But a geocache, that's an impact on the physical world. How many people will go, find the cache, sign the log, never knowing that it was now a ZOMBIE CAAAACHE?
The logbook would fill up, the crappy souveniers no one wants would pile up. If it's a nice container, it could stay there for decades.
That is, unless a flash flood sweeps it away, and it just becomes junk, the numbers again meaningless. Hopefully someone else would figure out what was going on, and put that set of numbers and a box to good use.
1 Comments:
this is interesting - go write something.
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