Around Christmastime at apple.com, the site featured a cartoon of the well-known “Get A Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/ ads on their homepage. I got a screenshot of the ad from Cabel Sasser. He “described it this way”:http://www.cabel.name/2008/01/2007-cabel-yay-awards.html:

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Best Desktop Picture You Can’t Download: Mac & PC
Hooray to Laika (Portland represent!) for their awesome work on the Apple holiday commercial. But when super-talented character designer Shane Prigmore posted his illustration of “Mac & PC” to his blog, the long-time Apple-understander in me knew it might not last — and it didn’t. (The good news? Naturally, I saved it before it was pulled — and you can download it right here — for now.)

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Here’s the image.

Note what PC guy is holding in his right hand — a manila interoffice envelope. You know, like the kind they’re using to advertise a certain lithe sub-notebook computer announced at yesterday’s MacWorld.

Coincidence? Or a clever hint from our glorious leader Steve?

We’ve been closing out 2005 in order to try to get a handle on how our spending might look for 2006 and how soon we’ll be able to achieve some goals. Stuff like paying of all our debts, buying a house, and maybe even (gulp) starting a family. It’s funny to look back over a year or two of financial history. Birthdays, new car, doctor visits, job changes: they’re all there large as life in the numbers. It gets me thinking about all the data — in a previous generation, I would have said “paper” — we generate with our lives.

Emails we sent, notes we scribbled, blogs we published, documents we wrote, financials we recorded, appointments we kept, videos we made, contacts we made, songs we listened to, places we went and the pictures we took there will all one day be indexed and integrated into a singular user interface for you to query, categorize and pivot any way you want. Consider the Google Desktop search and its growing list of indexing plugins. Forget This Day in History, my kids will be able to see This Day in Ken Walker.

Not that any of this is new: people dig through the the archives to learn about other people all the time. It’ll just be a lot faster than it used to, shuffling through mountains of paper, stashed into shoeboxes. Instead, what will likely be left of me when I’m gone is an electronic storage device, about the size of a USB key, with my life’s history on it — indexed and tagged with all kinds of metadata.

But it will probably still be in a shoebox.