Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [21]
This page-logging can be turned off so that I can visit sites without having them go in my e-memory. However, with all the storage at my disposal, there’s not much point. I literally can’t surf the Web fast enough to incur a significant storage cost.
I also started recording all my instant messaging and saving all my e-mails, minus the spam (just like my paper, I want to keep what I actually read, not what marketers force into my in-box).
We set up hardware to record telephone calls in my office. If you call me, you will first hear a voice say, “Recording.” This notifies you that the call is being recorded, as is required by California law (not to mention common courtesy). I can settle any dispute about what was said on a conference call by instantly retrieving the audio file. My alibi in court, if I ever need one, will be ironclad to the extent I can prove that I didn’t fabricate it.
We started tracking all kinds of things: the number of mouse and keyboard clicks, every time a document was opened, every window shown on my PC screen, and the history of my music playback. We logged every search. I bought a GPS and started loading my location history into MyLifeBits.
We even experimented with recording radio and television shows. Digital video recorders (or DVRs) such as TiVo were just coming out, and we wondered what it would be like to keep everything when it came to TV. We built our own DVR and set it up with nearly two terabytes of storage—more than twenty times the capacity of the early DVRs. If you think your TV program guide is big, try wading through more than a thousand shows, all of which are actually interesting to you. And radio was a totally different experience. We recorded lots of National Public Radio shows, including Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, and news. We played the audio back on a Pocket PC, so it was like a cross between TiVo and podcasting. Jim Gemmell learned that he fast-forwarded through all but fifteen minutes of a typical news hour.
But I quickly lost interest in TV and radio because such shows would soon be archived and available on demand. Having your own copy is not so special if you can just have it streamed to you through the ether anytime you please. It’s still worthwhile to have your lifelog make a record of what you watched and when, but not to copy the program itself.
By October 2003, I still wasn’t wearing the walnut-sized camera strapped to my forehead that Bush had predicted. But Lyndsay Williams, a colleague from the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, had come up with something even more interesting. She called it the SenseCam. About the size of a cigarette pack that hangs from a cord around your neck, the SenseCam is a fisheye camera that takes pictures automatically. When it detects a change in light level it presumes you’ve passed through a door or otherwise changed your setting, and snaps a picture. When its passive infrared sensor detects the appearance of a warm body, it snaps a picture of whoever just came into view. An accelerometer lets the SenseCam know when to delay taking a picture to avoid motion blur. And of course, you can point the SenseCam and take photos at will rather than waiting for it to take the initiative.
Lyndsay once confided that one reason she developed the SenseCam was to find her misplaced eyeglasses. By scanning