That may not be the most correct English grammar, but what I meant is true.

Following on the words of my prior entry, it is both incredible and wonderful that in any given day, as with today, I have used Skype to maintain a realtime video conference with a friend in London, England, while updating a website hosted in Montreal, Quebec with realtime feedback from a co-Director in South Africa while coordinating with an IBM colleague in Singapore and a former co-worker in Victoria, British Columbia. It is likely too that I will receive email or text messages from Kenya, China, and of course much closer to home, any of a dozen States in the United States.

This interaction combines international standards across three desktop operating systems (Linux, OSX, Windblows) and who knows how many servers which push the data, headers and packet checksums through countless routers, telecommunications server blades (most likely PowerPC running Linux), and eventually to their recipient.

It reminds me of an article I wrote for MacNewsWorld in 2004, A Ghost and the Machine in which I drew a correlation between distant recipients of internet transmissions and the ghosts of times past.

Maybe some day, when the science fiction of Philip Dick becomes science fact, the differentiation between what we do with our computers and what we think is greatly reduced, the ultimate, seamless transmission of our experience in this world, becoming the experience of another.

And those experiences, if digitally stored in the richness of a three dimensional, tangible memory could themselves become ghosts if they were to escape the confines of their database cell, roaming the planet’s networks seeking their long-since deceased creator.