Leaving a Digital Legacy

 

In Memory of George Szubinski (1946 - 2020) 

One defining memory I have is being at the local Council rubbish tip one day and whilst I was about to dump my rubbish into the skip I noticed a pile of photo albums, celebration cards, invitations and letters blowing about in the wind. I decided to look through the pile and it was all the documents relating to someone’s life. Photographs of family holidays, wedding invitations, birthday cards, Christmas cards and hand written personal letters. The remains of a whole life just dumped to go to land fill. Could there have been any friends or relatives that would have appreciated these documents? Being physical items the storage of these items may have been a problem for remaining relatives. Just being scattered they lacked any structure or chronology. Chronology being the arrangement of the documents in their order of occurrence thus providing a proper sequence of past events. Even relatives and friends may have found it difficult to create this chronology. In my own life trying to remember events over the years can be very difficult. Fortunately I have been an enthusiastic diarist and documenter but even I can struggle to pin down an event.

Now step forward to me working in 2017 with my good friend and business partner called George Szubinski in an enterprise we called ZigZag Digital Associates. We created and developed software products. Now unfortunately George had tragically lost his son, James Jerzy Szubinski, in 2007 and he had put a lot of effort into the creation of a digital memorial. George wanted to preserve James life digitally so he could revisit his life events and his friends and family could also revisit them. It was about bringing James as much back to life as possible. George came up with many ideas to brand this concept including “OurStories” and “TIM” for “This is Me.” The concept was to have stored every digital artefact from someone’s life in a chronological sequence. It included photographs, letters, emails, social media posts, video and audio all stored precisely by the time and date of creation. In fact the basic design was established and we experimented with some of the component parts including the start of a written biography by George on his early life.

Then the unthinkable happened. George died of Covid -19 in April 2020. If only we had put in place these ideas using George as the prototype we could now have an excellent digital memorial to George. This started me off on some investigative work to see what could be pieced together as a digital memorial to George. Could I build up a digital facsimile (replica, likeness, copy) of George Szubinski? What digital traces had George left over the internet that could be accessed to rebuild him as a digital cyborg.

In fact his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts provided excellent chronological content that in viewing them allowed you to re-experience George’s personality. The “posts” allowed you to track his consciousness as he moved from experience to experience and subject to subject. Even written engagements, not always friendly, with others brought out more of his personality. George came alive again through Social Media.

So below is the opportunity for you to meet George Szubinski based upon these Social Media accounts. But what is really sad is we had formulated through “TIM” how we could aggregate all these scattered materials into one centralised digital object that you could use to meet George again.

Now DMB Publishing has an objective to try and continue the work that was started with George Szubinski with the idea to use a Binary Large Object (BLOB) ideally to an Open Systems Architecture like EPUB to act as “your life” repository. But more about this idea in future posts.

So let us meet George Szubinski : -

Internet Web Hosting.

George invested much of his effort into websites where he owned the site domain name and paid annually for the hosting of these sites. There are several problems with this approach in that you have to have the technical skills to maintain these sites often HTML, CSS and JS but also you have to pay annually the hosting charges. Unfortunately when George died these skills disappeared and the cost of paying for the hosting of these sites become uneconomic for his family. It maybe too late now but I am going to investigate the costs of continuing to host some of these sites. The sites we know of are as follows but note these are all currently suspended or deleted depending upon what the web hosting company has done after the monthly hosting fees have ceased being paid  :-

Name	Expiry
Adcard.xyz	10/09/2020	Goes to Facebook.com/myadcard
Adsell.xyz	25/02/2021
Adstore.xyz	07/03/2021	Works a bit
Advideo.xyz	28/02/2021
Eflow.xyz	21/08/2020	Works
Geosz.com	9/05/2021	Shows Director making Gin Adcard
Jamesszubinski.co.uk	30/04/2023
Jamesszubinski.me.uk	30/04/2023
Mybutcher.shop	27/01/2021	Working Butchers site
Mysra.xyz	27/07/2020	Smallwood Residents Association
Mytim.zyz	13/04/2020
Ourstories.xyz	12/08/2020
Zigzag.associates	06/03/2021	Works a bit

    

On Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/GeorgeSzu

On Twitter where George turned all the tracks on Spotify he listened to into a Tweet with a link to Spotify. These links currently work extremely well (2020) lets see what time does to them.

https://twitter.com/zubo01

George set up a Twitter account for his beautiful lady dog Braidy. The posting were from Braidy's perspective often when she had been taken a walk by George. George could have really developed this genre to become an internet sensation since the internet is full of dog lovers who would have loved to follow Braidy's adventures normally over the Arrow Valley Park in Redditch, Worcestershire.

https://twitter.com/BraidyWildBabe   

The Instagram account that covered "Szubinski Palace" and "Szubinski Kitchens". With his interests in cooking at home including his legendary "Friday night is Curry Night"  where he cooked and invited around for all his family. It also covered some of his holiday experiences and family photographs. He was well known for his pickled eggs, homemade mincemeat, bread and fudge.His Christmas Mince Pies marked the start of his Christmas celebrations with this a very important time of the year for him.  

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ZA5ZzhD5l/?igshid=1g728oxy54ggv

On YouTube Mystories Geosz

Mystories Geosz - YouTube

On YouTube MyKempinski

https://www.youtube.com/user/MyKempinski

Dedication to his son James Szubinki using a new at the time free Social Media site called Social Shorthand. There is a lesson here. This site has closed for new accounts and postings but fortunately they still support what had been previously posted. For how long I dont know. The lesson is be careful where you invest your time and effort.

https://social.shorthand.com/zubo01/jC41NksYYu/dedicated-to-james-jerzy-szubinski

George started to write up his life story. I read the start of it and told him it was excellent and he should write up the rest. Unfortunately this never happened. But read the start  below which makes very interesting reading. Once again George used Social Shorthand which is no longer a few site.

https://social.shorthand.com/zubo01/ugUArLtDRn/who-do-i-think-i-am

Popular Monty Python - What have the Romans ever done for us. (Reference Brexit)

The original scene out of the Life of Brian from which George extracted the soundtrack

https://youtu.be/Y7tvauOJMHo

The soundtrack was overlayed over a scene from Parliament with Boris Johnson at the Despatch Box to create this spoof video

https://youtu.be/wjazKNRQFnw

George's "OurStories" YouTube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwiBwCBZ3wTh7io4Qo8eJbg 

George and Dave's Admin Adcard YouTube Channel

https://youtube.com/channel/UCCp5db8ydEVeoec01epLXMg

George was very busy over Christmas 2019 and New Year 2020 producing these two video's for his family. He loved both Christmas and New Year with these being his last creations with him dying in April 2020 from COVID - 19. He looked to invoke emotion by the use of both audio with visual imagery.

Christmas 2019

https://youtu.be/-WnaFwM_dhg

New Year 2020

https://youtu.be/NfOna7ygWvY

 

Publishing a Blog

 

The development of the internet blogging on a weblog preceded Social Media. Before the arrival of Smartphones and Tablets, using the early Personal Computers (PC) the techie’s started blogging using the native HTML (hypertext mark-up language) to create their web sites. With Social Media now hosted in the cloud using it has become non- technical and very easy. Just a case of simple posts. Unfortunately using social media to blog has its inherent risks. Using the dedicated blogging sites with some morphed into content management systems is a much safer option. But the only problem is they don’t offer the level of readership that Social Media generates. So bloggers tend to want to play to the largest possible audience. So bloggers are increasingly putting their blogs into Social Media.

Once again it was the purchase of a book at a Second hand bookshop (Oxfam) in Harborne, Birmingham that stimulated me to think in greater depth on this subject of blogging. The book was simply called “note book” by Jeff Nunokawa published in 2015 by the Princeton University Press, America and Oxford, United Kingdom. Jeff Nunokawa was a Professor of English at Princeton University. The book had a tagline by Rebecca Mead of “A work of strange and enduring wonder”. The book had a profound impact on me because it was just so different to anything else I had read. It was different in that it often described thoughts I had never had and I was never likely to have whilst in some cases managing to hit the spot. It was this difference in his normal thought processes in relation to mine  that captured my interest. To this day this applies to his continuing Facebook page posts. Before we analyse the book just consider this reviewer’s comment below which says it all in a way I could never express.

“Born in the digital medium, Nunokawa’s extraordinary literacy experiment fuses many forms – journal, essay, criticism, aphorism, anecdote, letter, commonplace book – into what he calls “notes”, which are not so much supreme fictions as they are the humbler fictions that sustain the true heroism of everyday life.”

John Gullory. New York University.

So what is this book? It is a transcription of a small selection of the daily posts that Jeff Nunokawa made in the “Notes” option of his Facebook page. Written every day at the rate of one per day from August 2007 to July 2014. He numbered everyone sequentially. So like many bloggers this set a pattern that he required to complete one everyday. Importantly he developed a structure to what he termed his small essay’s. They begin with a quotation typically literary or philosophical in nature. They are from a variety of sources some old and some more up to date. He then follows the quote with some of his thoughts about the quote which is really his essay. This in itself can be at odds to what you would expect. He may elaborate on the quote using his own experience but it may just trigger a totally disconnected set of thoughts. The quote triggering something else in his consciousness that he chooses to record. Being a logical thinker it is this disconnection that I find so stimulating as a reader. You think where is his mind going now ? Thoughout his writings you become aware of the very strong influence his mother has had on his thinking. Then following the body of the essay narrative he includes a footnote. These are really examples of very oblique thinking sometimes a quote from another book or song or something completely different. Then finally in his later notes he includes a photograph that looks to offer a visual metaphor or symbol that represents the thoughts and feeling in the written text. Personally I like some imagery. It could just be a photograph of the desk top or a view out of the window. Just something the author is experiencing or thinking about at the time of his writing. His latest Facebook posts (2020) include video but I find video can be a distraction preferring text and photographs. But that maybe just a generational thing. The current younger generation no doubt prefer the video experience. Having written about these essay’s it may be best to see two examples below so you can appreciate how they work. Firstly a page out of the book followed by a written up example from the book.

5281 Then I Don’t Feel So Bad (June 2014)

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon the upward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils

 

Wordsworth. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

 

You know those days when all you want to do is to lie on the couch and make it go away-you’re not even really sure what it is, you just know that it makes you too tired to do anything but lie on the couch. (It doesn’t even bring you to tears, although things seem like they’re headed that way.) All you can think about is how all you can think about is lying on that couch and dreading the next time you have to be around anyone else. So there you are, lying on that couch, and suddenly the sound of some stupid pretty song or the sight of some stupid pretty scene will pass your way as if it’s come for you. And then you think maybe it really has come for you – only not just you: it’s come for everybody else on that couch, too. (It’s a big couch, though you only see your own small section of it.). You suddenly know in a flash they’re not as stupid as they seem. (For one thing they know we’re sad.). And once you know they’re not stupid, you know you can take it from there.”

Note: “And then I don’t feel so bad” (Oscar Hammerstein, “My Favourite Things”).

 

 

 

Copyright. “note book” by Jeff Nunokawa. Princeton University Press. (ISBN 9780691166490)

 

This example illustrates what an excellent piece of philosophical thought on feeling depressed was recorded real time. Jeff Nunokawa’s daily blogs benefit by being written “in the moment” without any difficult barriers being put in place by the software between the thought processes and the recording of the narrative. The Facebook “Notes” option being just a very basic text editor. But unfortunately from a publishing perspective that is where the severe limitations then arise. Readers do not tend to go back over older blogs. It is all about moving forward and not backwards. To me the real value of his work does not come to light until you see it presented in a book format. This being a format you can easily pick up and put down dipping into different parts and sampling the thought of the day. So DMB Publishing has an interest in the development of techniques that take blogs and automatically convert them into book formats both printed and digital. This needs to be an automated process so the “writer” can concentrate on the writing rather than the production aspects.

This will amount to experimentation with publishing packages using the blog adigitalthought.blogspot.com to explore this particular genre. This blog is about getting my thoughts on everything recorded. With me being more of a scientific person it is my attempt to engage with a culture of literacy. It will have no defined schedule of production. In this respect I have several author heroes to try and emulate whilst lacking their academic superiority. These are A.C.Grayling and Yuval Noah Harari who paint very big historical and philosophical landscapes that I can lose myself within at anytime. Whilst Kevin Kelly, William Sims Bainbridge, David M. Berry and Ted Nelson are the authors who get it, that is the impact of technology, in ways that never stop ceasing to enlighten me.

Publishing Artwork

 

Jack Vettriano (b 1951). Bluebird at Bonneville. 

Oil on canvas, 24 by 40 inches. 1996.

 DMB Publishing has an interest in the publishing of all artwork. I have always had a strong emotional attachment to specific pieces of art. It has evolved from my father and grandfather both being water colour artists with many of their paintings still in my possession. The aspect of art that has always fascinated me is how you can become so emotionally attached to a piece of artwork which then generates a strong desire for you to want ownership. Once owned it can still carry on giving pleasure over many years if not a lifetime. You then realise what often motivates the artist to create a painting and find a buyer for it. They want the owner to be someone who would feel bad if they didn’t have it. The owner forming this very strong emotional attachment so in fact inheriting some of the emotions of the artist that he or she put into the painting. In fact the artist letting go of their artwork to someone who will have the same level of appreciation and love of it.

The painting above by Jack Vettriano had this effect on me. I first saw it in an exhibition on a canal boat in Stratford upon Avon. It instantly attached itself to my consciousness. Love at first sight. It was obviously a copy using the Giclee printing technique basically sophisticated ink jet printing onto a canvas. At £200 at the time it was not to be an instant purchase. But for some reason this picture became an obsession. I purchased cards of the print but always wanted to get back to the experience that the Giclee print had given me. Some years later I brought a Giclee copy and hung it on my wall. That was probably 10 years ago and this picture has never stopped being a source of pleasure to me.

Oddly enough painting of cars was outside of Jack Vettriano’s normal genre where he had been, unfortunately, put down by the art establishment as being a painter of “dim erotica”. The car paintings were the result of a commission from Sir Terence Conrad in 1996 to create a series of paintings for his new Bluebird Gastrodome in London. The seven paintings, inspired by the life of Sir Malcolm Campbell, hung there for ten years. The Bluebird paintings were auctioned by Sotheby’s at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire on the 30^th August 2007 and made more than £1m in all. The most expensive was the Bluebird at Bonneville at £468,000.

But from a publishing perspective Jack Vettriano could earn up to £500,000 per year in print royalties. Where his painting, The Singing Butler, has been one of the bestselling images in Britain. On the 21^st April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500.

In February 2009 Vettriano launched Heartbreak Publishing and with his own London gallery, also called Heartbreak, which exclusively represents him. This is the very effective commercial implementation of an artist’s work through Heartbreak Fine Art Ltd with other artists now represented. In 2010 Heartbreak Publishing produced a boxed set featuring signed, limited edition prints of all seven of the Bluebird paintings to mark the 75^th Anniversary of Sir Malcolm Campbell’s final World Land Speed Record. This was on the 3^rd September 1935 with Bluebird powered by a V12 Rolls Royce R supercharged aero engine exceeding 300 mph.

 

Look at these websites for more background.

Jack Vettriano on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vettriano

Jack Vettriano’s own website www.jackvettriano.com

Heartbreak Publishing website www.heartbreakpublishing.com