As many people already know, the statement that “a diamond lasts forever” is false and a myth spread by jewellery companies to convince women that such items are for them and force men into spending their hard-earned dollars. I reflected upon this fact today when I was uploading photos up to my Photo Gallery.

The actual content of this post has nothing to do with actual diamonds, but rather the realization that nothing really lasts forever. Looking through my computer’s collection of photos, I realize that I can’t really keep ahold of my memories in any everlasting form. I’m already missing some photos from my old computer because of a malicious or accidental sibling erasing them while I was gone, and those were photos from important teenage years. So what can I really do to make sure these memories last?

Printing photos out won’t work because old photographs fade away. I can’t really rely on burning them on CDs or DVDs, because such media will eventually deteriorate over time. I can’t leave them on a hard drive, because of its magnetic nature and the eventual failure of drive mechanisms. Flash drives can get shocked and wiped. I’m uploading them onto Flickr and other services, but they limit the sizes of the photos and how many I can upload at a time, causing a loss in quality and carrying with it the possibility of data loss and depending on the fates of the companies as well. Etching them in stone won’t help, as evidenced from the lack of artifacts from the stone age.
Nothing we create truly lasts forever.

This ClashBang.com article was written by Chris Chu. Tired of privately venting his frustration in vain, Chris decided to share his discontent with the rest of the world.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 11:41 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.