(snagged from Warren Ellis)

This page is for anybody interested in further details on stuff adumbrated in my 45th Anniversary Report. It's probably sensible to begin with a quick glance at my reflection on my reading of the 40th Report, way back in 2005.

My life is inextricably entangled with the computer, going back to an undergraduate job feeding punchcards into machines. It's been more than 20 years now that I've been engaged with hypertext as an expressive medium, and my midlife career as a librarian (1991-2005) was really centered on working through the question (formulated about 1990, just before I wandered in the door at Simmons and started Library School) of what effects microcomputers would have upon libraries. I dove gleefully into the Web when it first appeared in the early 90s, and have continued to follow the twists and turns of its evolution ever since. I've drawn the line at Twitter and Facebook, finding it reasonable and consistent to Just Say No (ditto to cellphones, so far), but I continue to keep my anthropological fingers on the pulse of new developments in the social uses of computing power.

Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock --he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.
(Charles Stross Accelerando, pg 8)

The Home Page is now a bit flyblown, but it does provide a launch pad for anybody interested in exploring what I've been up to over the last couple of decades.

Music has been a primary interest for 60-some years, and I've used the excuse of being an anthropologist to explore all sorts of genres and traditions. My own playing is fitful and mostly closeted, but I sometimes sense that I'm still learning, still improving in areas that I care about.


[can't decide which one I'd rather be]

You might want to explore some musical examples and perhaps even read further in my efforts to verbalize the passion. I'm now wrestling with many many gigabytes of mp3 files, trying to figure out what to DO with stuff that I love but understand only imperfectly. There seems to be no public whose ears I can figure out how to assault.

For more on the yoga thing, see a rumination on Practise from 2007.

On revisiting and rethinking, see two blog entries on my reading of George W.S. Trow, right up there in terms of looking-backward relevance.

Photography has waxed and waned in importance over the last 50-odd years, and I've spent a lot of hours digitizing images from my various collections and eras. I've recently exhumed 100-odd rolls of negatives from my 1964-1965 work on the State Street Bank building and found a lot of remarkable images. I'm still contemplating the proper organization and display of other sets and projects. One such is my Nova Scotia Faces project, which draws on a few thousand pictures of other people's ancestors that I collected, mostly in the 1970s. Those and other examples from past and present populate my Flickr photostream, and thousands more await translation into ones and zeros. The greater problem is how to narrate the tales they might be made to tell. Indeed, THE great challenge is to make order out of the proceeds of a lifetime of magpie collecting ...no, wait a minute: the GREAT challenge is to collect less and organize more.

I considered making lists of books read and films enjoyed, but the mere act of naming doesn't convey much of the why and wherefore (though I have been exploring LibraryThing as a means to manage the aboutness of the home library). Perhaps a better means to summarize the ambit of my interests and enthusiasms is to point to