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| 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 |
|
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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.
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
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
The soundtrack was overlayed over a scene from Parliament with Boris Johnson at the Despatch Box to create this spoof video
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
New Year 2020
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