Last Thursday evening my wife gave birth to Daniella, our new baby daughter. My wife says our family has now grown by 2 feet, but having been brought up on the metric system, I prefer to say we’ve just put on an extra 3.3 kg.
The last couple of times we announced a birth, 8 and 10 years ago, we had a lot of phone calls to make. With the close family spread over three continents (or four, if you count those on holiday), it’s also difficult to get the timing right, especially when you want people to hear it directly from you and not via someone else. This means a lot of phone calls in a very short time — quite a time-consuming task, and just at a time when everything at home has been turned upside-down.
This time, we are getting away with almost no phone calls. Email has become so pervasive these days, even my almost 90 year-old great aunt checks her messages regularly. Now that we’ve got the announcement out to everyone simultaneously via email, we can take our time and gradually touch base on a more personal level with all our far-flung family and friends.
I wonder how my kids will announce the births of their own children in ten or fifteen years’ time. Maybe they’ll just blog about them on the family RSS feed…
Microsoft’s VIBE team has developed 
The feeling of information overload is proportional to the amount of unprocessed information we have. I have a name for places where this unprocessed stuff piles up: “inboxes”. The email inbox is the obvious one, but there are others too.
