Legacy?

Bob forwarded this link to a comment on a Guardian article the other day: *click here*

It's a beautifully crafted observation, no wonder the paper have it as a 'pick.'

I find the line about 'done well at a desk' something that jumps out at me, and it might for many who work in a 'modern' setting.

Everything I do is ethereal - if there's a powercut or a router breaks, there's no proof of my industry; once a note has been played, or the line delivered on stage, it's a memory. Even if a performance is recorded, it still relies on the medium surviving along with a means of rediffusion.

Being a builder, carpenter, sculpter, etc. leaves something behind. Doctors, nurses, social workers, farmers, and others, heal, care, feed people and animals; their attentions are evident in the those whom they have, err.. attended. Even engineers and designers leave drawings.

Me? My greatest programming achievement was an automated reporting system for a utilities job management system I had written in 2003/4. I managed to get it working again in a virtual machine in 2010, but doing that now would be problematic as the VM tech has moved on. The physical work on which it reported is, at the time of writing this, 14+ years old. The holes dug for water repairs may have been re-tarmacked a couple of times since, so there's not even evidence to show for it - and being digital there isn't a chit or receipt that the work was done stored in some archive. Being magnetic, one can't even claim everything comes from dust and returns to dust - this never had a corporeal manifestation!

One might see this as the start of a midlife crisis, and "what's it all for?", but I've been comfortable with this since I started mucking about with computers and being a musician/tech 30+ years ago..

Hey ho.