I've been quiet for a while because I've been considering some complicated things while juggling fragments of reality. This particular entry was brought on by advocates of a certain technology in education being unable to prove that technology in education has had a positive impact on educational results.

In one line, this could all be read as educational institutions wondering who moved their cheese. I'm just showing my working.

The societal definition of success arguably changes from one generation to the next. If we ignored the previous generations definitions of success, we could say that the definition of success is democratic. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily so since bureaucracy in institutions has a tendency to mitigate change, and the processes of bureaucracy are built upon societal definitions of success - sometimes surviving many generations.

Historically, this is where revolutions take place - not necessarily the violent revolutions but the successful revolutions. The Industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution. And, if we look at the course of the last century, we might find ourselves living at the tail end of a Democratic revolution.

But when is the last time there was an Educational revolution? A true change in the definition of what academic success is?

While at first I thought that technology improving education was putting the cart before the horse these days, I did not acknowledge that technology may be useful in evolving our definition of success in education.

The Alert Retrieval Cache concept constantly reminds me that technology is almost never the problem.

People are.

I've written today that emergency SMS is required beforehand, but I've written that before. And the idea has yet to take off - which at first frustrated me but now only puzzles me.

Today, I had an eureka moment while changing the oil in the pickup.

The problem is that the bureaucracy that was created to manage society - or better, bureaucracies - are resilient. They pointedly resist change. They were made not to change. And the main problem with the sort of technology use I've been advocating is that it seemingly requires so many changes to existing bureaucracies.

Anyone can implement it - but which budget will pay for it? Who will 'own' it such that they get the budget and manage it?

And that's why it's so hard to get some useful technologies to be used. A single person beating a drum loudly isn't enough to change anything. A prominent media lab might be better suited - but then, why is that?

Because the bureaucracy accepts those innovators, but it disdains the others who run around the world in their problem-solving mayhem. Their bureaucracy has an imprint on the greater bureaucracy.

But, remember, bureaucracy is slow to change.

I don't know if it's good or bad. I don't even know that it's true. But I'm wrapping the note around a rock and throwing it into cyberspace.

There will be no ripples.

It was bound to happen sooner or later - the phone jostled free of the worn holder on my belt and returned itself to the void where it had come from - the void where technology explorers found it and engineers copied it to sell other people imitations.

Or that is the fiction many believe. That said, the void is real. The phone could be stolen, dropped or disintegrated by aliens - it doesn't matter. It's gone. The details are only for emotional framing. It entered the void without bothering to make an excuse. That's not only a smart phone - it's a rational phone.

And so it was that I found myself without a phone on Saturday. I missed calling someone I really wanted to call the evening before - aside from that, there was no emergency. Everything could continue without me. The inertia of time and space is so great that one person falling out of touch is almost unnoticeable.

Meanwhile, I reacquainted myself with the elder world I lived in - a world that some younger people might consider alien. Certainly, technology makes communication better - but people themselves have not improved much since before smoke signals. The ability to utter sounds that spread like a virus across our existence seems extraordinary; propagating it beyond that only furthers the great depths of the evolution we have created in our own society.

I have devolved for 2 days. No ringing phone. No maintaining the charge on the battery. No disruptions. And while there are those who I wished to speak with, and there are those that I need to be able to get a hold of me, I wonder if the insane ringing should be turned off on weekends anyway.

It's a brief respite - and as rejuvenating as it is, I fear I must re-evolve myself again tomorrow. The inertia of time and space have swept me up; the black hole of finance must once again pull a mobile phone out of the void.

While I'm recovering data from 2 120 Gigabyte 5.25" SATA drives, it occurred to me that I have over 1 terabyte of storage on my desk. Younger people may not think it's a big deal, but it's a bit of a shock to someone who remembers 10 megabyte hard drives.

I started counting the laptops hard drives - 250 Gigabytes and 40 Gigabytes (Solid State) comes up to 290 Gigabytes. The recent addition for both laptops is a Western Digital My Passport Elite 500GB (Blue), and that brings us up to 790 Gigabytes. Toss in the two Barracuda 120 Gigabyte SATA drives (240 Gigabytes), we're now up to 1030 Gigabytes. Two 16 Gigabyte USB sticks brings 32 Gigabytes more, for 1062 Gigabytes. The 16 Gigabytes in the camera brings it to 1078 Gigabytes. The two 80 gig IDE drives is... 160 Gigabytes, which brings us to a total of 1238 gigabytes. Assorted older USB sticks give another 6 gigabytes for a total of 1244 Gigabytes.

That's 1.244 Terabytes. If I were to count RAM, we'd be looking at 1.250 Terabytes. Mobile phone would add more...

28 years ago, I had a 5 kilobyte Vic-20 and a cassette drive.

I never filled a cassette with my code and data from a Vic-20. And I've only once actually ever run out of hard drive space (real-time data recording at work in the 90s)...

And now I've got 1.25 terabytes scattered over my desk. Wow.