Odd subject this one. Some stuff lately got me thinking what would I leave behind for future generations? I’m sticking some links to blogs on the subject of digital legacy up at http://del.icio.us/cgbeattie/legacy.

So here’s the big question – if my neice and nephew at the age of 31 wanted to find out what i was thinking and doing at 31 – would they be able to find out? There’s alot out there…

• I have pictures from this month on my machine
• google calendar has lots of details of stuff i’m up too
• there’s this blog – i took up yoga for instance…
• there’s my twitter account
• there’s my facebook account which handily integrates with twitter
• there’s my feedburner feed
• there’s all my sites linked to from my claimid page

so the interesting question is – will all this be around in 29 years? will it be around in 89 years? 389 years? Will my grandkids be able to go to a search engine (google?) and say what was craig gerard beattie doing in 2007?= In fact my homepage does pop up in the list there – maybe there’s hope as long as my grandkids know i wasn’t a famous footballer ;) Intriguingly what was craig beattie doing in 2005?= is lots more successful ;o)

Intriguingly there’s alot of stuff now on facebook about things i and my friends are doing – but its a closed network. Sure later I’ll add my neice, nephew, friends and family to my profile but when I pass I won’t be able to add friends – family members wouldn’t be able to see and peruse my profile there after, it would simply pass into disuse – assuming facebook is around after that… I could pass the account to an offspring or younger family member to administer but would this mean my childrens childrens children would have 3 generations of identities to protect – a family librarian if you will?? Even then – could you find the data you wanted?

feedburner and twitter offer some hope in that the rss feeds are in my google reader and are archived all over the place – there’s some hope that google will have visibility – hope that it’s still around and thus hope that my pages are cached and findable by future generations. Hope but not certainty oddly enough.

And what of craigbeattie.com? I own it now – can I expect an offspring to maintain it in my passing. I actually want these random thoughts kept – I’d like to think in a few hundred years my descendents knew I was thinking of them, and that they could understand some of what I am thinking about, who I was – what I chose to record. so what is my legacy?

Funnily I find now that some home pages I wrote during university on geocities no longer exist, history gone – words, thoughts – stuff I’m fairly sure I now have no record of.

How then, is one supposed to ensure ones legacy?

It seems I’m not the only one wondering about this. This blog entry on is my digital legacy too secure also wonders about this, and this one on a shoebox legacy posits that one should print stuff out and store it in a box.

Perhaps both have the right answer…

still the former article did point me to the web archive and low and behold – my ancient geocities web site is still there – seems like it was deleted around 2004(?) but hey – it’s still there kids! (whether it works is a whole ‘nother matter ;) )

perhaps then, there is hope for my legacy yet…

archive link to this page

It was interesting. Certainly the body awareness learning various forms of t’ai chi certainly helped along with the balance. Felt better than your average beginner I think. Commands like “relax your shoulders” and “lift your head” all fell quite naturally in to place for me.

The movements are odd, some more different from t’ai chi than others. Definately something of interest though. I do believe that someone who know’s yoga would find it interesting to move on to t’ai chi. Hopefully heading down there again tomorrow.

should write up my thoughts on

1. yoga (relevant to tai chi, tai chi helps, actually yoga -> tai chi standing and chi gung -> tai chi would work nicely),
2. information legacy (what will i leave to future generations) and
3. twitter, del.icio.us and facebook n’ stuff.

Lacking time just now tho…

Figuring on taking a different course with my hobbies and trying to find some classes in meditation. Figuring the buddhist centre in croydon would be a good bet. It seems they separate the meditation and yoga classes though. Figuring yoga first a little - i'll go along tomorrow and ask I think.

got a little spare time and I must say I’m a bit “what do i do?”. I want to play on the puter a bit but that feels like I’d have shifted things round for no reason. Things I feel I ought to do are organise my life a bit better, work out what my personal objectives are and close up some loose ends (like to do list items hanging around from wedding 9 months ago).

I’m hungry – gonna go eat. Think first order of business is organising some objectives for myself, bit of a mission statement – what do I want to be and all that. That should allow to prioritise and work out what to do next.

Nuts, eh?

pizza first – progress next – play later

some exercise seems in order too

Over the past few years my jobs gone in cycles. Big projects come, lots of work involved and I stop doing some life stuff to accomodate it and then things settle back down again. This year seems to have been a little different – I’ve rolled from one big project into another and it’s starting to have something of an impact. What brought it home for me was this time last week. This time last week I was still at work. I’d had a call from my wife sammy saying that misty wasn’t well and she was taking her to the vets. I knew sammy was worried but left it till about seven to go join her, knowing I still had things to do and planning to head back to the office. I saw misty and she seemed fine even though the vets wanted to keep her in. I wished her good night and left sammy with friends at the pub and trotted back to work. I got home about 9pm, 9.30 or so. The call came in at 10 that this wee thing whose home I cleaned out once or twice a week for the past five years, who I’d seen to it she was fed, paid for her vet bills and such, that she had gotten worse and died. Just like that. It struck me a little while later what would it have been like if I’d not been there for sammy, shortly after I wondered what it would’ve felt like to not have taken the time to see her before she passed.

So works not looking like it’s changing and right now my priorities are messed up. I was running around trying to do stuff for work, make time for sammy, apologise to guildies in wow for not turning up on organised events, occasionally talk to my family and check the menagerie was ok. I have/had no time to take time to change things so I would have time – if that makes sense. There’s a thing in t’ai chi that seems to fit. There’s this idea of being locked up, or pinned, when you can no longer move your limbs because of the other players actions. The way to free yourself is to yield, open up some space by sacrificing a little ground. So, this is what I have done. I have taken myself off my guilds raid roster to find a little space to sort stuff out. In truth the options were my job (pays the bills), my career development (ensures more expensive bills in future will be paid), WoW time or my marriage (not an option ;o) ). So no real choice. I’ve all but sacrificed time I used to play with t’ai chi.

Stepping back I see that I’ve packed on some more weight this year – travelling all over and slowly taking away any sort of exercise from my routine has affected my health in truth. So now I just gotta use the time, work out how to change things. I’m already yielding some of my workload to colleagues whom I likely ought to have handed over to months ago.

So whilst I’ve not quit wow and sharded all my goods and stuff I am toning it down. I hope to use the time to hone some of the skills I’ve picked up in recent training. This should in time allow me to produce more, get more done in less time – perhaps I can get back to it all.

Oddly tough decision though – seems like I went through / am going through the phases of accepting change (shock, denial, anger, bargaining, etc.).

Still, already knocked some stuff off my todo list that had been there too long.

I am still planning to play this weekend – want to finish my leatherworking and make me some windhawk armor :D