I’m about to wade hip-deep into frothy pond of self-indulgence. It’s something I’m good at, as you’ve no doubt discovered if you’ve read this blog at all, so I’m just giving you fair warning.

You may want to avert your eyes.

I’m not the most careful person in the world when it comes to backing up files. My backups are infrequent and tend to consist of sending myself an email with an important document attached to it. I love GMail for many reasons, this being but one of them.

(Side Note #1: Using GMail in this manner is quite inefficient. I need to graduate to using Google Docs more. The cloud awaits.)

Needless to say, I counted my lucky stars the other day when I suddenly had the urge to find an old file from a few years back. It was actually still there, on a backup DVD set that I burned back in 2004. I don’t know when I deleted it from my system, but it was there on the backup, and I rejoiced. Well, I smiled, anyway.

(Side Note #2: The file in question is a description of a fantasy/gaming world I was developing back then. I’m going to ressurrect it as a world-building project and invite others to join in. But that’s a blog entry for another time.)

"Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2004."

Examining the backup index, I noticed a few other files that I thought I’d restore while I was at it. Being the sentimental type, I always enjoy a good trip down memory lane (see my earlier entry on a similar topic), so this afforded me a tremendous opportunity to suspend my current activity and lapse into a comatose-like state of reverie about the wonderfulness of things and times past.

Ahem. Well. Yes. I mean, no. The time period in question was not really all that stellar, but I did have a pretty nifty web site at the time. And I found said website in its entirety on said backup. So I got to thinkin’…

Okay, I’ll get back to that in a minute. But first, a bit of history. Back in 2003 and 2004, I had an account with a handy little service called NetIdentity. They basically had a whole whack of surnames registered as domain names, and for a quite reasonable price, you could have your little parcel of one of those domain names. For example, they owned “rountree.com”, and I was able to secure “eric.rountree.com”. I also had a corresponding email address, which was the same as my domain name, except with an “@” sign instead of the first dot.

(Side Note #3: Since those days, NetIdentity has been acquired by Tucows, which also now owns ItsYourDomain, DomainDirect, and Hover. The webmail interface has changed numerous times, and service interruptions due to hardware/software migration have been massive and headache-inducing. In my opinion, the service is now utter crap, and I’m glad I no longer have an account.)

At that time, I was using the Macromedia suite of tools for web design—Fireworks, Flash, and Dreamweaver. Again with the acquisitions: Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 and now publishes all three products, which have been updated numerous times in the intervening years. Since I’m in reminiscence mode, however, I will comment upon how nice those products were to use at the time. They integrated seamlessly, allowing me to create a fairly intricate roll-over side menu without a lot of HTML tweaking, JavaScript coding and Photoshop slicing. It was downright enjoyable.

I’m sure it’s even better now, but Adobe stuff is really pricey.

Anyway, it was nice to revisit the old site, and despite the passing of the years, I still think it looks reasonably cool. But, of course, simply having the files on my computer was not enough for me. No, of course not. I had to go the extra distance, grab the electrodes from the other side of the room, and bring the creature back to life again.

Yes, I’ve uploaded the whole shebang to a subdirectory on this here website. If you’re even remotely curious, you can check it out. It’s basically the same as it was back in the day, but with some obsolete links removed and the media files embedded differently. There’s flash, there’s video, there’s MIDI, there’s rollover menus. Something for everyone. Fun for the whole family.

Like I said, a big ole pool of self-indulgence.

But this little exercise served to remind me that I am fully capable of using both sides of my brain. I’m creative, I’m technical, and I can make stuff.

Makes me want to pursue all manner of creative/technical projects. Hmmm… Maybe I will…

“It’s alive! It’s… alive!!”

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(Let’s keep the Wayback Machine pointed at 2004 and have a listen to “This Love” by Maroon 5, which reached Number 5 on the Billboard charts on April 24th of that year. Yeah, I know. This is real stretch. The song has absolutely no relation to this blog post except for the year. But it’s a great song. The video is admittedly really cheesy, and the lyrics are so explicit that they really didn’t need the naked bodies on the screen, but hell, the beat is infectious.)

I do have a topic for today, but before I get to it, I feel an odd compulsion to share with you the rather bumpy and circuitous route by which it arrived in my brain. Synapses work in mysterious ways, and this is a fairly good example.

Bear with me here. The link density in this first bit will be rather high.

One of my Twitter friends, who goes by the handle @AliasGrace (and whom I met in person for the first time at PodCamp Halifax two weekends ago), has a blog entitled East Coast by Choice, for which I wrote a guest post three weeks ago. She’s had a number of guest posts over the time she’s been blogging, the most recent of which, entitled “The Death of Barrington Street?” and written by Paul MacKinnon (Twitter handle @downtownpaul), was a really interesting read.

Paul’s post mentioned a number of well-known buildings on Barrington Street, but the one that caught my attention was the Green Lantern building. Now, being the geek that I am (you knew that, right?), you’d think I’d have known Halifax had a Green Lantern building. For some reason, though, I didn’t remember the name at all. But, of course, I was tickled by it. So I went to my dear friend Google to see if I could find some pictures.

And find them I did. The Coast (our local artsy/cultural/gritty/emo/freebie newspaper) has an article about the building, complete with historical pics from the time when the building actually housed the Green Lantern restaurant. The building’s official name is the Keith building, and it currently houses Pogue Fado, a traditional Irish pub. Nice to know the green is still there, anyway.

Still with me? Good. ‘Cause I’ll be getting to the point any second now.

When I looked at those pictures of the Green Lantern restaurant, taken in 1941, I very nearly audibly sighed. The shiny newness of the tables, counters, seats, and fixtures made me want to step into the images and experience what it would have been like to sit there, order a meal or a coffee, and watch the people go by. It all just looked so… nice.

How weird is it to suddenly feel nostalgic for a restaurant that opened a couple of decades before I was even born? Well, it did operate into the sixties, but I don’t remember ever going there. Even if I had, I would have been extremely young, and the shiny newness seen in those pictures would have long since faded.

The whole experience of finding these photos and reacting so strongly to them reminded me of how much we romanticize the past. I know I often think fondly of times gone by and wonder what it would be like to visit times before my birth. Sometimes I want to pick a spot, stand there, and move progressively back through the years so that I can see the changes unfolding backwards.

Intellectually, I know that the past was not better. Previous years of my life all had good points and bad points, ups and downs, high and lows, just like the present time does. And some day down the road, I know I will look back upon 2010 with the same gauzy filter through which I now gaze upon my childhood.

So why do we do it? Why do we remember selectively? Why do we idealize past events and put them up on pedestals built of nostalgic longing? Why do we filter things so much? Is the present really that bad?

Well, I have my theories about that.

From what I’ve observed, people tend to get more nostaligic as they get older. This applies not only to people I’ve met, but also to myself. The older I get, the more stuff I have in my head, and the more stuff I have in my head, the less attention I have for the world around me, and the less attention I have for the world around me, the faster time seems to zip on by.

Remember when you were a kid? (Yes, let’s get nostalgic for a moment here.) Remember how long the Christmas break was? Remember how long the summers were? Remember how each school day dragged on and on? Time was different then. There seemed to be more of it. Even the pleasant days lasted longer.

That’s because there was less stuff in your head back then. Less worry. Less planning. Less responsibility. Less distraction from the moment. You were free to soak it all up, see it for what it was, without all the voices in your head tearing your attention away from it.

We talk about the carefree days of childhood. And for a lot of folks, that’s pretty much what they were. Obviously, not everyone has the same experience. Childhood was a nightmare for some people, and they look back with a different filter entirely. But for many, thinking about childhood brings back fond memories. We might not have been free of cares, but we certainly had less of them.

As we grow older, however, and accumulate knowledge, skills, and responsibilities, our attention is more frequently hauled away from the here and now. And so the present becomes something less than it could be. We miss the moment because of our inner time travel. We fret about the past and worry about the future. We go over and over things we might have done differently and try to plan things we can’t possibly control.

And suddenly, the present is not so great. But it’s not the present’s fault. We’re clouding it with hurts from the past and uncertainties from the future. The poor present moment doesn’t stand a chance.

And therein, friends, lies a profound irony. As much as we look back on certain past events with pink gauze over the lens and sigh about how much better things were back then, we are simultaneously corrupting the present moment with ghosts and shadows of past events that just weren’t that shit-hot at all.

Today, I purchased a book entitled The Secret Pulse of Time. It’s a science book, and it looks like it’s going to be an interesting read. I’m looking forward to it, because, well, I’m a little obsessed about this whole time thing.

As I’m sure many of you are as well.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(And, in keeping with the nostalgia theme, not to mention the time theme, here’s a live performance of “Time” by Pink Floyd.)

Yes, I'm talking about blogging. And this particular blog, the one you're reading right now, this little chunk of the web claimed by yours truly, is anything but current. As a matter of fact, it's completely retro.

Well, no, that's not entirely true. I'm running the latest version of WordPress on a site hosted by HostPapa, who are running the lastest and greatest versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL. But as for the rest of it, well, retro all the way, baby.

The images on my pages are all retro technology. I'm running Windows XP Home edition on my very old HP Pavilion 522c. And I'm not exactly fresh and young myself (though I can be quite immature sometimes). And I really like talking and writing about stuff that happened, well, a loooong time ago.

Does that make me a geezer? Hell, no. It just makes me someone who's had a lot of experience over time and who truly appreciates quality in all things.

Which is why I'll occasionally write about something that is current. Like The Time Traveler's Wife movie. Or District 9. Or Kate Miller-Heidke.

But I have a damn good frame of reference for this stuff. If I didn't have the experience of listening to Chicago and The Alan Parsons Project and Paul McCartney when they were actively putting out new material (Well, McCartney still is, actually) I wouldn't have the same perspective on new artists that I do. If I didn't have the experience of seeing the Star Trek movies or the original Star Wars trilogy (in its original form) on the big screen when they first came out, I would not have the same perspective on things like District 9 and the new Trek movie.

There was a time there, though, when I thought all was lost. It was a dark time for music, movies, television, and fashion.

It was called The Eighties.

And it sucked.

Okay, not really.

But the eighties did have a lot of supremely bad things. Like disco, for example. And big hair. And platform shoes. And Police Academy. And REO Speedwagon. Not to mention the murder of John Lennon. I shudder at the recollection.

But it also had Star Wars. And the Star Trek movies. And Sophie's Choice. And Gandhi. And The Alan Parsons Project. And U2. And Chicago. And Paul McCartney. And Hill Street Blues. And Cheers.

So it wasn't a total loss.

I'd love to know the exact statistics, but there's only a small percentage of any works produced in any era that can stand the test of time. The original Star Trek episodes still hold up well (for the most part). So does the music of the Beatles. And those two examples are from the sixties. There's a lot of stuff from much later that is simply cringe-worthy to behold now. I hate to say it, but I can't even watch episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show now. It was one of my favorite shows at the time, but that type of humor doesn't age well, unfortunately. It's become corny.

Likewise with music. I used to enjoy listening to bands like Journey and Foreigner back in the day, but despite the fact that I still consider Steve Perry and Lou Gramm to be fantastic vocalists, the music from those bands just doesn't do anything for me anymore. Ironically, the music of groups like Duran Duran, which I wasn't really into at the time, holds up a lot better today than the power-rock stuff.

It's all subjective, though. Just as I know you can't paint an entire decade with a single brush stroke, I also understand that there are probably lots of people out there who still fully enjoy The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the power-rock bands. (And I can hear you out there… "He still likes Chicago, but he doesn't like Journey anymore…? WTF?")

Memory mixed with emotion is a powerful concoction. It can make something really lame seem like the most wonderful thing that ever happened. Sentimentality is the great equalizer. It smooths all bumps and puts little warm fuzzy kittens in the cockles of our hearts (whatever those are). So I understand any annoyance you might feel at my trashing something that was special to you.

But I don't want to hear about your slow dance at the prom to REO Speedwagon. That would make me throw up a little.

Mind the gap.

(Wow. Every time I do a YouTube search for a clip to embed at the end of a post, I discover something new and wonderful. This is a video called "In the 80's" by Rhett and Link. It's priceless. Just put down any beverages before you watch it.)