Birthday’s come and go annually for all of us. It is a ritual that reminds us with some frequency of the passage of time in some calculable format. Somehow putting a number to a process as seemingly ephemeral as aging both comforts and frightens those who exhale over the lit candles on a cake while others sing songs that may or may not be owned by a corporation (but certainly shouldn’t be, right?). It is customary to give and receive both gifts and cards. Most cards will come from a store. The best one’s will be personalized with notes, smiles, signatures and other personal relationship info between the giver and the receiver. Recently, though, I received one of the most innovative cards I’ve ever been given. I’ve stated many times before that I’m a technology nerd. That one piece of information is the preface to this wonderful card/gift combo I’m going to describe for you.
It starts like this: remember 3.5″ floppy disks? You do? Good. If not you should head to your nearest search engine and look it up. Pathetic plastic-exteriored precursors to the much faster and larger flash drives of today. The sticker on the front of the disk (which was my card) had an arrow pointing toward the metal on top that said: “Secret message.” Pushing the metal to the left would normally reveal (I think) a magnetic tape/surface in the shape of a disk that could turn and write/read data. It had been replaced with paper. Slowly rotating the disk with my fingers (the hole is quite small) revealed a rather short (but personal) message loaded with geek speak and other items. This was awesome. The gift was a floppy disk notebook created by linking two disks together with string and placing carefully hole-punched paper (the size of the disks) in-between them. I’m sure all of my best ideas will fall between those two symbols of (now) antique technology. Our son won’t even know what physical media is in the future. Right now, though, it’s really quite wonderful.