Microsoft researcher stores digital life  q&a Senior Microsoft
researcher Gordon Bell has been recording his life for a decade.
Now he wants a database.  Gordon Bell  Chronicling our lives has
been part of our culture for as long as we have kept personal
diaries. Today, technology offers many different ways of
recording our thoughts and feelings, which makes the task far
easier.  Ten years ago, Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at
Microsoft, set out to chronicle his life by recording everything
that happened to him. Visit him in his office and you will face
microphones and video cameras. As he travels, he goes "laden
down with stuff."  The Microsoft-funded project is still going,
and Bell sees it as "one of the most important things I have
done."  Seventy-four-year-old Bell is no stranger to ambitious
projects. A computer engineer, he joined Digital Equipment
Corporation (now part of HP), in 1960 and is best known as the
designer of the some of the early PDP minicomputers and of the
VMS (virtual machine ext