Ones and Zeros

How did my life end up as a series of ones and zeros? Most of you probably know that computers and how they do what they do are programed, in it's most simplistic form, into a sequence of ones and zeros. I will use 1100 for the purposes of saving my hands from typing the words over and over for the rest of this piece. That's right, this blog is being typed on an open source word processing program, programmed by computer nerds and geeks all over the world using sophisticated programming languages that basically look like 1100, or 1010, or 0001 or some other combination to the computer, albeit trillions of times just to produce a bit of instruction to make the machines we live with every day do what we want them to do.

Recently we switched all of our data from one computer to another. Not being too technically savvy, and being too cheap to buy a program that would let me transfer the data directly from the one PC to the other, I used an external hard drive I had bought a few years ago with the intention of backing up my computer every day. OK, you can stop laughing now. Occasionally I would back up the data, especially around the times when I would be playing around with the thousands of family photos we have stored in our digital world.

Since December of 2003, all of the pictures we have taken have been on the same Sony digital camera. In that time we have lived in 2 countries, 4 houses, taken numerous vacations, started our own business and most important added a third child to our family. That, over the course of almost 7 years, adds up to ALLOT of pictures. Combine that with years of creating documents, saving our CD collection, and even the video our video cameras we have owned since we got married 10 years ago have taken, and that is an unfathomable number of 1100 (ones and zeros for those of you with ADHD, stay with me now).

To give you an idea, I moved more than 250 gigabytes of data. Now how big is a gigabyte? Well we need to start at the smallest piece of digital information, one bit. One bit would be one 1 or one 0. There are 8 bits in one byte. There are 1,000 bytes in one kilobyte. Remember when we thought that was big? There are 1,000 kilobytes in one megabyte. So for those of you keeping track, we are now up to 8,000,000 bits, 8 million ones and/or zeros for each meg. One Gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes, or 8,000,000,000 1100. So I moved 2,000,000,000,000 bits of information, not once, but twice, just to keep our digital lives in order. How come so much? My camera saves the hi res pictures somewhere around 2.5 megabytes. This means that each image of my kids, each unforgettable vacation moment, that romantic shot of my wife and I consists of 20 million bits of information. Astounding!

My parents came to visit us a few years back and they were still using, gasp, a film camera. When they were taking pictures, my sons would run up to them saying “Grandma, can we see the picture?” Yes, they had no concept that when you take a picture, you wouldn't be able to then see the image on a screen. “What, you have no screen? What is film? You have to wait how long to see the pictures?” The questions to me seemed strange, but to my little ones, there is no other reality. No world without digital cameras, computers and instant images. Looking at pictures in an album is fun, because it's different.

The first time we sent our digital shots to get printed, we probably sent out close to 200. We realized that was quite allot so we promised we would send them out quicker next time. Well, the next time was more than 300. That time we swore we would not wait that long again and now I am pretty sure if we looked at all of the pictures we would want to print, we would have more than 500. It has been that long. With film, if you left the used roll around longer than a month, you felt guilty, Now the pictures are instantaneously shown to us on our big. beautiful, crisp, clear monitors and printing them can wait. Good or bad, there are probably lots of opinions, but it is different none the less.

But I still can't get over the fact that my most precious memories are all just a bunch of 1100. It seems that they are more important than that. What basement dweller choose 1100? I would like to speak to him or her, but I would probably need to contact them through e-mail. Why not P's and Q's. We were already busy minding them anyway. And don't tell me because it was easier to type. On some keyboards the 1 is not that close to the 0. What about Z's and X's. See how seldom we use those letters anyway. We could have gotten allot more out of those lazy letters if we used them instead. I guess no matter which 2 characters were chosen, there would always be that crazy N fan out there stalking the developers until the N was the letter of choice. The R freaks would then be mad, and we would have a whole R revolution on our hands.

I guess for now, I will just sit back and watch the slide show on my computer showing me all of the priceless images of the last 7 years of our lives. Ah, here comes one of my departed dog. She was with me almost 16 years. What a nice shot of her sitting so still for the camera. Look how nicely all of the 1100 have made her look so regal, so serene. I guess the 1100 know what they are doing after all. Hey wait...what the hell is that 2 doing in there?