Today, I have had numerous calls and messages from many people wishing me the best for today and many of them are people that I have not heard from for a while. Some of them, I am pretty sure I have never told them of my birth date. 
So I started asking some of them how did they know the significance of today. A huge chunk of those people messaging me turned out to be people that I have on my Skype contacts. It seems that Skype reminded them that it was my birthday and that was how they knew. Susmaryosep!! I am leaving too many footprints in the cyber world!!. I have had profiles created in Friendster (profile mostly deleted), MSN Livespace, Yahoo, Google, etc. Yikes.I have instant messengers using MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Google, Skype, and POD (company proprietary). You may ask why? Just that different groups of people that I deal with had their preferences. So rather than limit to one IM, I essentially used all available.
We have mobile phones with huge amount of memories where we can store the contact numbers and other details of everyone we know (and even some we don't). My ex girlfriend finally figured out how to set reminders on her phone and called me early in the morning to wish me Happy Birthday - on time and on the right day, unlike previous years. Ha!! And she is a typical computer illiterate!
I left photos in Yahoo (abandoned since), MSN LIvespace (still active) and Friendster(also deleted). My personal photo collections (mostly taken by me - so I guess the copyright is mine) resides on my hard disk and is backed up on 2 different portable hard disks! They take up almost 13G of disk space at this time and growing! Maybe someone knew I download photos of interest (people and places). I had someone send me a supposedly Zipped file of photos. I had that virus scanned and found a Trojan horse embedded. I suspect that that had been an intentional and malicious act as the person never responded to my queries.
With the advent of digital photography, film photography is dying a slow unnatural death. With SD, compact flash and other memory standards with Gigabyte capacity, it is easy to generate vast amount of photos. I personally use a 2G SD in my Panasonic Lumix(FZ30). The max that I have ever used was 1.5G (and that was with video recordings as well). I still remember the first camera I got - a Kodak Instamatic when I was 13. The flash as a disposable - 4 shots cube of magnesium. With money in short supply, I had to think hard before taking a shot, as every shot had to count. I took photos for Friends and colleagues at weddings to earn extra pocket money and to pay for my hobby.
Today, my son knows that some sites of interest can be accessed on the Internet and he regularly bugs me to help him to get to one site or another. Luckily I password protect the Internet access at home and he has not figured out how to get online without my help at this time. Whatever happened to making your own kite, adding glass to the string with egg white mixed in to hold the glass on the string? Playing tops? I used to be able to whip a top and have it spinning on my palm all at one go.We made our own jelly guns out of a piece of plank and rubber bands. I never had the money to buy toys and resorted to making my own.
Today, my son wants transformers, Spider man, etc. And they are not cheap!! I envy him - he can get so much more than I could in my time and at my age then. The biggest consolation I have for him was to get him a digital camera (5Mega pixels Sanyo) to snap to his heart's content. I will then edit his shots and archive it on my hard disk.
With all these footprints that many of us leave in the Cyber world, I will not be surprised if in a not too distant future, we will be able to get personal information of anyone via a click or two on the mouse and keyboard. We are almost there already as many people are happily leaving their profile, their contact numbers, addresses, birth dates, friends of friends information all over.
One small step for me and you and one very GIANT step for mankind!!
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