The Concept of sLogs

Let me start this post by asking you two questions:

What did you do on 27 July 2023?

What did you eat for lunch 2 days ago?

I can practically guarantee that you were not able to answer these questions instantly. Furthermore, you might not have been able to answer them at all, unless 27 July marks (or marked) a special day in your life (birthday/anniversary/birth of a child/promotion/job change etc.)

Has it ever happened to you that someone asked you “What did you eat for lunch today?” and you completely forgot what you had? Even though you only ate a few hours ago.

I am sure it has.

Have you ever wondered, “How is time flying so quickly?” 2023 started like a few months ago but in reality, only 3 months are remaining for it to end!

I am sure you have.

In 10 years, apart from your Google photos, do you have any means by which you can look into your memories? Maybe, maybe not.

I cannot say this about you, but I feel like days weeks months are passing very very quickly and there isn't any means for me to look back on my days lived.

Yes, I know, this is the reason we take photographs, but the thing is, I just don't want to look back on the good days. I want to look back on ALL days.

This is precisely the reason people used to (or still possibly) write diaries/daily journals. So that one day, when they are free, they can open their journal to a random date of their past and see what they did on that day. I LOVE this idea.

But there is a BIG problem in writing a journal. I am lazy. It does not matter whether I am writing a journal IRL or online. I calculated that it would take at least 30 minutes for me to describe the events of the day if I write/type them. I do not have the time or energy for this everyday. 99% of the people do not.

Photos serve a different purpose and cannot help in keeping a log of the day.

Now comes the option of video recording or VLOGS as they are more commonly known as today. There are lots of people who do daily vlogging. Actually, “lots” is an understatement. Nowadays, every other person is uploading vlogs on YouTube and I fucking HATE it. I read the following line somewhere, and I completely agree with it:

“The moment someone says 'hey guys', they should just explode.”

Those vlogs with their cringy ass titles and clickbait thumbnails. I don't get how much free time people (vlog viewers) have that they are daily spending some of their time to see what some stranger (the vlogger) is doing in his/her daily life. Which in turn becomes a source of income for the vlogger.

I for one, am not interested in making money. The solution is simple, I make daily vlogs and just keep them with me.

No, it's not that simple. All the phones in today's market record 1080p at least. There is a storage factor involved. Double the storage required because I need to keep their backups offsite somewhere.

Fun fact:- I am a data hoarder. I don't care about the storage. I have files dating back to 2009 when I started hoarding.

The real reason why I would not make vlogs is that I would be called a vlogger, regardless I upload them somewhere or not. I don't want to be associated with this word.

I don't have what it takes to pick up my phone, switch to front camera and start recording myself. I just can't. Also, I hate to do things just because everyone is doing them.

So, vlogs are out of the picture.

Now......

There is one thing that everyone knows about, but no one uses it.

AUDIO RECORDINGS

In my opinion, audio recordings (in general) are very underrated and have great potential. I use them extensively.

I have been toying around a particular idea for almost a year. I even discussed with it some of my colleagues back then. In the beginning of September 2023, I started to implement it. I mentioned this in my previous post also. I call them sLogs (sound-logs). I also thought of calling it “aLogs” (Audio-logs) which sounds better, but “sLogs” just rolls off the tongue.

The dictionary meaning of a "slog" is "work hard over a period of time".

But in this context, I would like to describe a sLog as an audio recording (a time-capsule) which is recorded once every day, preferably at night, to capture and store the events of the day, with no intention to be shared with anyone.

Before starting it, I was wondering what are things I should mention in sLogs. Impromptu recording was an option, but I ended up creating a template. Just like in IT field, in daily standup calls, we discuss:

•  What did I do yesterday
•  What will I do today
•  If I am facing a problem, can someone help me with it.

  Based on this, my template for the sLogs included:

•   State today's date and day
•   What I had in lunch
•   What I had in dinner
•   What did I do today (professionally and personally)
•   What are the plans for tomorrow (professionally and personally)
•   What did I watch today

I also was thinking about the ideal duration for a sLog in minutes, but decided to try it out for a month first and then take out the average time for a sLog.

Here are some other things that I thought of including in the sLog, but did not.

For the language, I decided to go with Hindi.

Consistency was the key to these, so I aimed to record a sLog every day in the month of September. I only forgot to record on 22 September 2023. The best part is the whole recording is over in 3–4 minutes, which I can spend in a day without any difficulty. There is no visual element, so I don't have to worry about how I am looking. Audio recording feature is available in all phones, smart and dumb. The size of the audio recording is very small. I am doing this just for myself so, I don't care about background noises and overall quality of the audio. As long as it is understandable and clear, it is fine.

I do NOT intend to share ALL of these with ANYONE, but I will make an exception for just this one time and put one of them here, so you can listen to how it goes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18S7X5tY60sn0GPlapSZzlGpnXet7RAOl/view?usp=sharing

Here are some technical details for a sLog:

• Average file size: 3.4 MB
• Average duration: 3 Minutes 44 Seconds
• Total file size for a month (30 sLogs): 107 MB (approx)

Based on this info, we can calculate some other stuff:

Total file size for a year: 1284 MB

Let's round this off to: 1400 MB (considering leap years, months with 31 days and, extended recording duration on some days)

  1400/1024 = 1.36 GB  

A traditional 1 TB HDD has around 931 GB of usable space

  931/1.36 = 684.55 years!!!

I am not good with mathematics, so feel free to double-check the math. I know there are similar units for measuring file sizes, like GiB and GB. This was not planned when I started this activity. I thought that I will do the math when writing the post itself, and now it's blowing my mind.

If it is correct, then let's assume a hypothetical condition where a person starts creating sLogs from his/her day of birth everyday till he/she dies. In theory, a 1 TB HDD would be sufficient to not only include that person's whole life's worth of sLogs, but also include several other people's as well. I have not even factored audio compression techniques, which can reduce the file size of a single sLog even more.

DAMN!

And this is just 1 TB we are talking about. Server grade HDDs like this are capable of storing around 22 TB!
Furthermore, multiple disks like this are used in conjunction to create Petabytes of storage space.

Also, I know that text takes even less space than audio files so if a text-to-speech utility is used, One can have sLog+Transcript or just the transcript itself. A single day's worth of transcript would I THINK be less than the file size of the audio file.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I am watching a new series called “What We Do in The Shadows”. In the show, a similar thing happened. This was around the time when I was around 15 days in making sLogs, so it was quite the coincidence. I won't give any spoilers, but a character finds his life worth of written (by himself) journals in a secret room.

Later he says, “The great thing about keeping a detailed diary is if you ever forget anything about your life, you can look it up. It's also great for receipts. Now, a lot of people keep receipts, but they forget to write down what they were for, which causes a major headache come tax time. Whether you hire an accountant or you do it online by yourself, you're gonna miss some deductions because you won't be able to reference what they were.”

I was astonished to see the same things that I believe in mentioned in the episode. What he said about receipts is exactly the reason I keep my expenses in the following form:

I also saw a similar* scenario in The Big Bang Theory S08E10, where a professor kept a record about everything he ate.

In Harry Potter, Dumbledore's pensieve is also based on a similar* idea.

"One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form." — Dumbledore explaining the purpose of a Pensieve to Harry

Rick and Morty, S03E08 (Morty's Mind Blowers) showcases a similar* idea.

Overall, I was quite happy with this 1 month experiment. Now, a decision is to be made. Should I make this a daily thing or not? Even though the math is very interesting, it's not that easy. Making a sLog daily will come with challenges like I'll have to record even if I am having a particularly bad day. Am I strong enough to record when someone close to me has died? I don't know. 

There is still an option to skip the bad days, which would leave me with recordings of good days + regular days. Another option is to record only the good days.

I will take some time to decide this. I do not intend to make my final decision public, so you (the reader) will not know what I finally decided. For you, it will be a “Schrödinger's Cat” kind of a situation about me making daily sLogs.

Till now, This might be the weirdest post that I have written. I completely understand if you find this totally bullshit or a waste of time. After all, it is just my OCD getting the best of me.

Even if I decide to not move forward with daily sLogging, I am not done with sLogs. I will be exploring a lot of things I can do with audio recordings. There is story-telling, narration, and what not. There MAY be a Dreampace post of Dumbledore's pensieve and the mindblowers mentioned above. I GUARANTEE that in 2024, there will a post here completely in audio format. It will in dual audio (Hindi + English) and I will record that using proper equipment with the highest quality. I cannot tell you it's date or the topic because even I don't know it yet. But “stay tuned” for that.