Clearing out my office, I came on an old Apple external hard drive from the 1980s. Capacity: 20 Megabytes — which is 0.02 Gigabytes. Next to it is a 60 GB iPod. Next to that is a 2GB flash drive. Sobering, isn’t it? The strange thing is that the Apple drive seemed enormous at the time. I remember thinking that if I wrote continuously for 10 years I still wouldn’t have generated enough text to fill it.

But then Bill Gates once said that 640 Kilobytes of RAM ought to be enough for anyone. Or maybe that’s just an urban legend. He’s too smart to have said something that dumb. In the old days, people used to say that you could never be too thin or too rich. Nowadays we say that you can never have too much RAM. Or disk space.

What is true is that Natham Myhrvold (who was for a time Gates’s technical guru) observed that “software is like a gas — it expands to fill the space available”.

To get to the studio, of course.*

The kids and I were in London and we went to Abbey Road (which is a lovely residential area btw). Naturally, we had to photograph the famous crossing which is on the cover of the Abbey Road album. The EMI recording studio where the Beatles recorded it in 1969 is the building behind the low white wall with the van parked in the drive.

It’s clearly a place of pilgrimage. The wall in front of the studio has lots of inscriptions. Like this:

And this:

On thing I hadn’t known is that Edward Elgar had an association with the Studio. There’s a plaque to prove it.

*Hmmm… Just checked the album cover on Wikipedia, and the Beatles are actually walking away from the Studio. Collapse of stout hypothesis.

From the Yahoo blog. Co-founder David Filo writes…

Jerry Yang and I just announced at our quarterly employee all-hands that Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

We’ve been focused on this area for a while now. Our commute alternatives program has been recognized annually by the EPA since 2001 for incentives like Wi-Fi enabled biodiesel shuttles, bike lockers, carpool matching, and sizeable public transit subsidies. Our recycling program keeps about 180,000 pounds of materials out of landfills each year. We use renewable power, hydroelectric energy, and passive cooling at our various facilities and data centers. And green-minded Yahoos have launched sustainability-focused products like the Yahoo! Autos Green Center and 18Seconds.org to show people how they can make a difference in their own lives.

We know carbon neutrality isn’t without controversy. And it’s honestly deserved if companies and individuals don’t first make an effort to find direct ways to reduce their impact. We’ll continue to be vigilant about cutting ours, looking for creative ways to power our facilities, encourage even more employees to seek alternative commutes, and generally inspire Yahoos around the world to think differently about their energy use. (For example, in honor of Earth Day, we’re challenging Yahoos to decrease their consumption by 20% this week to help build lasting habits.) We’ll also be deliberate about investing in offset projects that can verifiably deliver their expected environmental benefits…

There’s a nice appreciation of Vonnegut by Christopher Bigsby on openDemocracy.net

Kurt Vonnegut, who died on 11 April 2007 at the age of 84, once said that he learned “bone-deep sadness” from his parents. He was 21 when his mother committed suicide and in Breakfast of Champions a character remarks “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did.” He later confessed to himself being a monopolar depressive, even attempting suicide, insisting nonetheless that he was unashamed of the incident, which he would not repeat because he did not want to be “a two-time loser”. His father, he recalled, had said some of the funniest things he had ever heard but that he was “the saddest man I ever knew”. Perhaps Vonnegut’s humour, always with a dark underlay, was his response to a sense of spiritual vertigo. Certainly, the laughter in his work often comes through clenched teeth.

In person, he could come across as lugubrious, mixing melancholy with wit. In performance, he was a vaudevillian with a carefully honed act. He was an habitual smoker, believing it a treatment for his depression, but acknowledged the side-effects, one of which being that he set himself alight, causing serious burns. In the end, though, it was writing that proved the real therapy and as he remarked, “I don’t think you have to write that close to the truth about yourself in order to feel better. I think that writing detective stories, spy stories or whatever, is probably as therapeutic.” In his case the “whatever” would be science fiction…

Strangely, the Vonnegutweb hasn’t caught up with news of his death.

Our house is screened by a wonderful beech hedge. Every winter it withers and I’m convinced it’s died. Every spring I watch it like a hawk to see if it’s still alive. Then, one day, I forget to check and the next time I get home I discover that green leaves have appeared when I wasn’t looking. So it was today. The photograph looks odd because it’s got a detailed inset.

The latest statement from the only department store where I have a charge card. Why do they bother, I wonder? I’d prefer to know only when I owe them money. Wonderful things, computers.