My last entry about adding users to MySQL got me thinking. It might be more than a little silly to duplicate that sort of information here. A simple Google search will probably lead to thousands of pages with that very same information. Yet it's way easier for me to come here and search through my entries than to go to through my old code or notes or even Google -- since I know just where to find it. Hence that entry (and, in fact, the very raison dêtre of this site). So it's not silly as much as scary.

I firmly believe that my memory has gotten worse since the Net and then Google came around. After all, why remember stuff when you can just remember where and how stuff can be looked up? It's easier for me to store pointers to information than the actual information itself as long as retrieval is straightforward and inexpensive. I used to have books and a library and notes; now I've got the economy of scale that is the Internet satisfying both conditions to the extreme. I don't have to remember that the numeric entity reference for an e with a circumflex is 234, for example, as long as I remember that htmlhelp.com has a nice Latin-1 entity reference two clicks from their home page. Now all I need is some sort of hard-wired neural interface (think Snow Crash or a Gibson novel) into Google I'll really be able to off-load mental storage capacity. The one thing I'd have to remember "locally" is to stay on top of applying the latest security patches to my head.

Of course, my system breaks down if either me or the places my "pointers" point to are offline. Which makes this a little worrisome for me. I'd be in trouble without the Net since it's holding so much of my memory. If I ever move to the boonies where Net access is slow or unavailable I'll have to actually start remembering things again.