LIVING A DIGITAL LIFE — And life before digital content.

I was decommissioning an old computer and found a packing list for summer teaching in 2000. Clothing was essentially the same as in my packing list for the upcoming summer session but everything else (which means content and equipment) is completely different. Well, I still take a computer, of course.

I used to take several paper books, including a full size textbook for the class, notebooks and a binder with class notes, a ZIP drive for backups, ZIP disks, paper photos for the family, a magazine or two to read at the airport, a Discman and CDs (being at the forefront of packing technology, I used a CD pouch instead of the jewel boxes), and a few DVDs.

(The following year I got my first MP3 player and my first digital camera. And a ginormous 5GB firewire external drive!)

Now: all content is digital and travels in my laptop, backed up on a 1TB portable hard drive, several 16GB flash drives, and the cloud. I might still take a [disposable] magazine, but otherwise my music, audiobooks, eBooks, research papers, teaching materials, photos, movies and TV shows, and computer code all travel as files.

A new cultural meme has arisen where people ask casual acquaintances what is on their content consumption devices, so in that spirit, here’s what I’d put on my iPod Touch and iPad if the trip was tomorrow (engagement takes about four weeks):

Music: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Purcell, Chopin, Liszt, and Fauré playlists, a playlist of 216 “classical” albums, my standard Jazz playlist, an auto-generated 1024-track playlist of “classical” music that I haven’t heard in at least three months, a nostalgia playlistlist of 70s-80s-90s music, and a few new jazz albums I bought from Ted Gioia’s “Best of 2011” list. (Except for the last ones, all of these reside permanently in my iPod Touch and iPad.)

Podcasts: Back To Work, MacBreak Weekly, TED talks (video), SALT from the Long Now foundation.

Audiobooks: Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen and Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse, On China by Henry Kissinger, Quantum Man by Lawrence Krauss, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinford by Evelyn Waugh, and Worm by Mark Bowden. That should be enough for the flights and the various train rides, plus elliptical exercising (for oxygenation) in the hotel gym.

Movies: Since ripping DVDs with Handbrake to watch the movies on the iPad is a violation of the DMCA, I can’t have any movies on the iPad, can I? In an alternate universe I’d load the second season of V (2011), the first season of Sherlock, the first season of Hawaii Five-O (2011), the latest season of House, Cowboys and Aliens, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Despicable Me (a feel-good movie for all occasions), The Incredibles (ibidem), Margin Call, Moneyball, and Wall St: Money Never Sleeps.

Kindle books: Civilization by Niall Ferguson, Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, Notes from the Hard Shoulder by James May (of TopGear), The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, and Holidays in Heck by PJ O’Rourke.

iBooks: Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street (shown above), Émile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, and Voltaire’s Candide. (I downloaded several public domain iBooks.)

PDF: All my class readings, many additional research papers and reference materials, and the O’Reilly books Beautiful Visualization and R in a Nutshell.

Games: I usually don’t play computer games, but my iPad has Solitaire, Mahjong, and a few crossword puzzles.