I am William Gibson’s new character

(Apologies to Brad Sucks who really is William Gibson’s new character and whose post coincided with my thoughts on this)

I’ve had a blog post sort of percolating around in my head for a couple of weeks, and thought I’d take a few minutes to try to get it out there. It’s a bit meta. As I’m typing this, a video chat request comes in from Toronto and I get to wave to my friend from 400kms away. It sets the tone nicely.

It’s occurred to me recently that leaving the house with a fully-prepared go-bag, I am hoisting around nearly half a terabyte of data. No really. Let’s add that up:

MacBook Pro internal hd: 120GB
IoMega portable firewire hd: 120GB
5G iPod: 80GB
Camera storage: 8GB
Other camera storage: 4GB
Phone: 2GB
Nintendo DS: 4GB (more on that later)

Total: 338GB

Let’s chew on that for a second. Even when lightened for field-operations, my available storage capacity’s generally around 100GB depending which devices I’m carrying, more if my laptop’s with me.

What can you do with 338GB of storage? Well, nearly 80GB of that is my music collection (or most of it, anyway). About 40GB is made up of various alternate operating systems needed for work and games. Another 40GB contains various source code trees that I’m working on. I have storage space for nearly 1500 photos at full resolution, camera RAW format. Nearly 10 times that if I bother to off-load my cards onto laptop or portable harddrive. The rest is a bunch of movies and tv shows ripped from DVD or the internets.

I’m not the worst offender. I know people who are probably more technologically-powered than I am in their daily affairs. I certainly don’t leave the house fully-equipped all the time. Usually only when working remotely. But still…

How much data is this? Looking at http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/, I’m somewhere between “A library floor of academic journals” and “50,000 trees made into paper and printed”. Or, 338GB / 9GB per disc = 37.5 full length movies. I’m not saying that what I carry around with me is that valuable or informative to anyone else, but it comprises an almost total copy of my “working set” of data.

These are truly the days of science fiction 15 years ago. Not quite Neuromancer strange, but definitely

Spook Country

.