Faheed of Jamica. Memories of .MOBI

This photo, in which a property owner requests one “Faheed” of Jamica (sic) stops dumping his garbage here, was posted to Sorabji.MOBI in 2010. I’ve been rummaging through the years of .MOBI after discovering that I have not been backing it up to my RAID. Its loss in the event of disk failure (or hack attack as happened years ago) would be less than negligible to the fabric of our culture. I, however, would feel like a certain foundation had been ripped from under me, even if that foundation could be described as hoarded.

I still feel the sting of losing the first several years of .MOBI, when I used the amazingly primitive CoMoBlog, a free product which was discontinued and bears no relation to a product by that name being developed today. I actually think I could recover the database and figure a way to import it into WordPress but it’s a long way to go for content that no one (least of all me) wants to read.

The CoMoBlog stuff was my first efforts toward using a Treo to post content from anywhere I stood, and I still find a certain joy in doing it even after such activity has become virtually mainstream. How could it not become mainstream? I mean who would not want to post content from a tree stump:

Back in the day Sorabji.MOBI had mobile-formatted version of a DICT server, my Perl-powered Bible, and a weather station — all this in addition to my always prescient ramblings (hah). For a couple of years I used a setup which automatically post sound recordings straight from payphones. It worked and is still in place should I ever think to use it again, but it got depressing to listen to. And, needless to say, any pursuit which relies on public telephones is imperiled from its outset.

Today’s buzzword for “mobile formatted” is “responsive”, a term which I think anthropomorphizes the software running modern web sites.

I first dug in to .MOBI in 2005, soon after my father died. One of the first posts was a photo taken from the front porch of his building in Daytona Beach. I remember a lot of sodden ramblings about the reality of things, the essence of suicide, and the logistics of cleaning up his estate.

One feature of CoMoBlog I liked was how it said a posting was “Received at” a specific time. This as opposed to what time the item actually posted. Stuff that appears on .MOBI is e-mailed in. It sits in a queue for as much as an hour until a cron kicks off and processes the e-mails, formatting them for WordPress. Introducing posts by their “Received at” time versus their “Posted at” time gave a sense of anticipation, that something was going on behind the scenes.

As the .MOBI stuff continues to pour in to the RAID I rummage further into that 12 terabyte array of disks and find something unrelated, but in a similar spirit as .MOBI. I briefly used a stealth keychain camera to record grainy video and take low-resolution pictures. Once in a while a winner shot came out of that thing. In this case I am not sure what the hell this is but it appears to be a shot of a television screen in a storefront somewhere around here.