Instead of writing or watching a DVD I opted to spend some time today browsing through the radio hotlist. In a list that is overwhelmingly techie in its content I was delighted to find the Write the Web site who have this story: Our useless digital archives. A prestigious digital history project conducted by the BBC in the 1980s is now just so much junk, because no-one can figure out a way to read the disks the data was stored on. What does this tell us about all the data we are committing to electronic storage now? [WriteTheWeb]

I know this story so well - where are your emails of four years ago - are they like mine, residing in a landfill somewhere on some dead hard disk? In the good old days when I enjoyed the luxury of working on my OS of choice (Mac of course) and email client of choice (Eudora), archiving mail was not a problem. That was before I had to shift to MS OS and Outlook Express. When I bought a new laptop earlier this year I followed the Outlook Express help file instructions to make a backup copy of my mail folders. But when I tried to import/copy same into OE on the new laptop it wouldn't work. The only info I could find on the MS site was that .dbx files are corrupted files. Finally, after hours searching google et al I found an answer on a mailing list which involved downloading a little freeware app and unfuddling the befuddled files. One could be forgiven for thinking that MS doesn't want us to archive our email.

2:04:11 PM    

Wouldn't you know, first day of the school holidays and the weather's turned - cloudy with light rain forecast until Thursday. 9.40am and they're already propped in front of the box watching a DVD. Spent yesterday afternoon at a Motocross event down the road - our sleepy little village transformed by hundreds of caravans and tents and lots of vrooming and whizzing motorbikes. Saw one guy dressed in a women's swim suit worn backwards drinking a bottle of johnnie walker black label by the neck - seems bikers are the same the world over.

Now it's the Monday blues. Wherever I've lived Monday's a strange day - one you face with a certain dread cos it's the start of a long week after a couple of days of freedom but also a day of promise and hope. I read a statistic once that said that more than 50 per cent of business decisions are made between 10am and 11am on Monday morning. But not in France, much of which stays shut on Monday. Even the greediest and most rapacious of business people (estate agents and insurance brokers for example) don't open their doors until Monday afternoon here. Making it very difficult to start the jobhunting week in a positive way - because no ads are posted yet. Gives me some time to write or maybe I'll just join the gang infront of the box.

9:42:07 AM