February Snow

First day of work back from a warm vacation and it's blanketed by a white layer of fluffy snow. It's been the coldest yet for the UK in over a decade, with the heaviest snowfall in around 18 years. In the meantime, the dog came back with a cold and is sneezing, and so am I.

But I'm welcoming the white. For the first time I've been in this part of England, there is a thick 4" of snow on the ground, and more is still falling. Continuously. Previous experiences have always been with a disappointing touch of icing that melts faster than you can say "it's snowing!".

There's something powerfully cathartic about the vision of delicate white flakes indiscriminately covering everything that it falls upon with a smooth, white layer. It speaks of the power of the small in the resilience of one or two flakes persisting at the end of a branch, but also of the power of the collective, in the blanketing force that snow becomes over a blue car, a red berry, the asphalt ground, the green fields. Every colour converted to white in a resistance is futile kind of way.

The snow falls like a meme, an idea. A single flake at first, tossing and flicking in one general direction. And then another, in a slightly different direction. Then another, and another, and before long, a series of snowflakes, some catching on each other as they fall, gaining weight, gaining strength.

The half-pleasure, half-guilt of leaving footprints in the snow where no foot had trod before is soon forgiven as the new snow delicately dab away at the traces of my weight upon the white. No postman or milkman has walked today up the driveway to leave a set of heavy shoeprints upon the ground. No one will disturb the pristine levelling of the ground today, I am willing the snow to disappear as softly as it came, in the shade of a tree or a roof.

If colours mean something, and white often means purity, cleanliness, sometimes death or defeat... if only for the snow scene, white must surely to me mean redemption and force.

As colours go, white is the only colour that in nature dominates all other colours, like it or not. The only colour that can say, "Well, be whatever colour you want to be, but when it's my time, I will surpass you, exceed you, blank you out and become the colour that you will wear, regardless of the colour you are inside." Royalty may wear yellow to be like the sun, and purple to be of noble birth. In my world, royalty will wear white - the all encompassing, all dominating colour. It is the unassuming, yet celebratory colour, the colour that says "in my time I will colour everything else across the world with my shade". And I think, quite possibly, because of the prevalence of snow and cloud, it is the single most frequently occurring colour in nature.

I remember...

Many things have changed.
You are you, and I am me,
In places so different, literally
Miles away, a different world in concept.

Sentimentality is a dirty word.
A song currently not on the top 25
Most recently played on the iPod
Crept up random, uninvited.

Deja vu doesn't quite capture it.
I could run but realise, Memory
Like fire is radiant and immutable.
To remember that I remember.

Mesh is the new Net

[And now in my myriad chameleon phases, I am now operating temporarily as a Tech blogger. I promise this will terminate at the end of this post.]

Those who know me know that I don't normally rave about a product that Microsoft produces, unless it's very very good. I have high standards for technology, not least in the area of look and feel, and so it's very seldom that I come across a product that meets all requirements in form and functionality.

With that context, I'd like to momentarily rave about Live Mesh. The technology and concept isn't new, leveraging peer-to-peer download technology, Live Mesh allows the multiple computers and devices that everyone these days tend to own (the laptop at home, a mobile phone, the desktop at work) to talk to each other and share files. It also comes with the ability to allow remote desktop access, to extend the user's reach into the interface of computers and devices not immediately at your desk. All these brought together with and by a virtual desktop called Live Desktop, that allows you to sync with a virtually hosted 5GB+ of online storage. All that... and synchronizing across mobile devices as well as Macs. Beauty.

I may be using Live Mesh beyond what it was touted to do, which was allow seamless integration across the same platforms for similar files. What I found it did enable:

• One click back-up onto the virtual desktop of key folders in Documents through the synchronization function
• Remote Desktop'ing allowing me to now completely treat my laptop as well as the personal one at home as merely virtual terminals into a seamless workspace
• If my laptop crashes tomorrow, well, the one I use most frequently anyway, I will not cry, because there is literally nothing on it that doesn't have a sync copy somewhere else

Mesh is that fabric of a safety net to catch me when I fall, with hopefully less holes than will let an elephant through. Am loving the interface and speed so far - will have to see if this ends up becoming a paid and potentially slower service as more users start cottoning on to the idea.