the netbook experiment has proven useful, and even productive. at the moment i don’t feel like hauling it around, though, so it’s back to the old word-swallowing wireless keyboard.

just thought of a funny word, if gynecological humor is allowed: papetite. pappetizer. the gyno needs to whet your pappetite for the smear. yeah. hilarious. no, not really.

i hate to say it but the heat this summer really got me. it’s been mellow the last couple of days, but the preceding weeks were chokifying. it does not seem like the heat used to hit me like that.

i wrote a poem, or most of it at least, remembering a schoolyard incident, with fantastical ruminations on the significance and lifelong repercussions of the incident. it’s not done yet but i wrote it mostly on the new netbook, which i like, but which nearly caused a goddam heart attack the other night. the freeware editor crapped out on me in mid-stroke-of-genius, swallowing some words which i had salvaged from the throwaway recesses of undersleep,hurling them into the digital abyss with freest impunity, only to have them just as rapidly destroyed, irrecoverably, with nothing more than a message to “help us improve this product by telling us what happened” or some freeware nonsense like that.

speaking of the unsalvagability of digital erasure, i noticed a piece in the Times last week about how receipts are going digital. i am yet to encounter this option, but evidently some retailers are asking customers if they need paper receipts or if an e-mailed statement of affairs will suffice. some folks seem to welcome the development while others, like myself, find this to be a precarious perch on which to place your records.

i remember a conversation with an eye doctor, a younger man who mentioned that he was among the first generation of retinal specialists. evidently this is a fairly new specialty, but that’s just an aside.

he was saying that as an innovator he embraced new technologies and techniques, and as such he chose to digitize everything, eliminating pesky printouts of patient’s pictures and records in favor of digital-only records.

others in his field, he said, followed suit, saving the planet by saving some sheets of paper and saving some printer ink by digitizing all their patients’ records.

alas, one poor bloke colleague of his showed up to work one day to find all his records gone, evaporated into the mysteries of a disk failure, or maybe it was malware, or maybe it was human error, but whatever it was all the records were deleted, the backups were deleted, and the RAID backup failed too. all the redundancy in the world cold not save a single pateient’s pictures.

(the “pictures”, by the way, are the result of an extremely uncomfortable and even painful process of injecting dyes into the bloodstream, poking metal spoons into the eyeballs, in some cases punching needles into the eye socket… the “pictures” are not easily or willingly repeated on account of a doctor’s disk failure. most patients whose doctors lose their picture do what i did: they find a new doctor.)

i don’t know if that individual retinal specialist lost his whole practice on account of the technical failure, but the lesson learned by the doctor i saw was that going all-digital is dangerous.

i could have told him that, but he was talking real fast and not letting me say anything.

the point being, while receipts are mostly considered detritus i think it is a hazardous development if one’s financial transactions and records are entrusted to the abyss of the cloud, or the RAID, or the stack of backup CDs and DVDs. paper tends to survive more heartily than digital overstuffing, and i fmy experience is any indication, a scrap of paper is less of a blight on the planet than the hundreds of dollars in energy consumption it costs to attempt to save these records for all time, when the process of saving these things entails perpetual expense.

i was surprised, though, to find that paper receipts are the next low-hanging fruit to be targeted by digitization evangelists. why not work your way up the food chain of mortal records, to mortality itself? i think it is only a matter of time before human consciousness is digitized and uploaded to the p2p network, offering freeware immortality for all.