Strangely, I was. And it made me realized how time flies.
Ten years ago, we were strangers. At 20, I was still flirting. By chance, technology allowed me to know a girl. I used to communicate with her through internet. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was the most commonly used at that time. The journey with IRC allowed me to have a virtual me, another persona detaching from reality.
At that time, I was still an architectural student. Just now as I was browsing through the page of a senior back then in architecture school who is now a lecturer there, I saw several photos of his students that bring back old memories. But it also marks some distinct difference with what we had those years. The apparent is the tools used for learning.
What I saw in the new photo is still the same studio that I used to do my course work but somehow, the atmosphere felt and look different. It was hard for me to figure it out at first but then I noticed the first disparity. The studio wasn't fully furnished - the personal touch we used to make when we first occupied the studio. The personal carpet, posters and pin-ups, personal desktop, some storages, extra lightings for personal ambiance, probably words of wisdom (as if making us any wiser) pasted somewhere on the wall with decorations etc. and the most importantly the drafting table, which tells we spent more time in the studio, crafting our work manually, mostly.
I figured it has to do with the wide usage of laptop, probably an essential tool for present undergraduates therefore reducing the needs of such space we used to have. As one photo clearly shows, a girl sitting with an empty table except for a laptop. Perhaps, the existing layout might be considered a redundant if based on the current needs. Putting aside the argument of effectiveness for both learning methods, personally I feel they are missing something.
Last two days, as what I posted in my Facebook, there was an incident in the house where Dhea got hold of an old cassette and she mistook it as a toy gun and used it for a shooting spree around the house. Despite still wondering (until now) how on earth that she could figure it as a shooting tool, I showed her a skill of rewinding the tape using a stick of pen - a technique I frequently used to save power of the batteries for my walkman during my life in the boarding school. Later on, as I was still holding the cassette, she brought to me my iPod and by holding both items in my hands, it drew an immediate comparison between the two.
About the same size and both function to contain sounds, the similarities end there. While the cassette needs a player to produce the sound, an iPod holds a lot of other functions - surfing the net and play movies to name the few. What I need to enjoy my favorite sounds back then is greatly simplified, enhanced and packed with other capabilities.
My first personal computer only has 4 gigabyte of hard disk storage available. Yet I was able to accomplish tasks given. Now, a device smaller than its given name, a thumb drive can store more data than what I could ten years ago. Imagine having everything running in that little thumb drive of 4 gb for a personal computer, from the operating system to softwares and datas, most kids nowadays would not even able to think about it.
Having said all of those, however not everything changes. The familiar faces of the very same teachers who have taught us to be what we are today were still there in that photo. The sounds that were playing from the cassette are now still playing, through my iPod. That girl I met in IRC is still communicating with me in another currently popular platform - the Facebook but is now limited because we both spent more time in real world as a married couple blessed with a daughter and another one coming soon.
There, a simple retrospective 10 years back dug out some of the best memories we had. Back to the current day, once again, Happy 30th Birthday dear Lira.
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