Web – Page 6 – Auxiliary Memory

Blogging, WordPress and the Future

I’ve been blogging for awhile. I started with LiveJournal, and then moved to WordPress on my hosted site, and finally to WordPress.com. I like the convenience of WordPress.com maintaining everything, and I’m developing a wish-list of desired features I hope they will roll out in the near future.

First, let’s think about blogging in general. The basic idea is to write a post and get comments. Older posts are pushed down and stored away, and the general method used to find these older stories is either by categories, search box or calendar grouping. It’s pretty effective for what it does, but I wonder if other methods might be developed to organize the overall site and expand the theoretically limits of what it means to blog. WordPress is constantly adding new widgets, so their structure is built around adding features, so this post is going to suggest some features I want and imagine where I’d like blogging to evolve in the future.

Paid For Feature Modules

I don’t know if I can expect all my desired features for free, but what if each module was a paid add-on or part of a plus service? I have no idea how WordPress makes its money. It’s a great free service that doesn’t appear to use ads and what few add-on features they do sell don’t look like big revenue generators.

Some of the features I’m wishing for could be part of a $49.95/year plus package. I’ve invested a lot of time in WordPress, so I don’t mind paying. I don’t want them to go bust – I want WordPress to be around for generations to come. I assume WordPress wants to maintain their current marketing plan of offering a free service, but I can picture my blogging needs expanding, and I imagine so do others.

Right now there are too many Web 2.0 services. I can share my thoughts on WordPress, my photos on Picasa, computer work on Zoho.com, friendships on Facebook.com, genealogy on Ancestry.com, my book lists on LibraryThing.com, and so on.

What I’d like is one place to present the digital me. MySpace and Facebook want that place to be their services, but I’m not happy with those sites. They are too restricting. What I want is one place to combine all the features, and for now I’m thinking my blogging home at WordPress.com is the place to start. I have no idea if the people who produce WordPress want to be such an enterprise, but I’m guessing my desires are just part of an evolutionary process on the web and somebody will offer them.

The Digital Me

Let’s think of a blog as an analog for a person’s life. Right now blogs model people with the diary format. Before computers, memoirs and autobiographies were two ways to convey a person’s life. However, those formats depend on linear progress and some random discovery. When you meet someone at a party you don’t get to know them in a start at the beginning, end at the end, fashion. Generally you start talking about a subject, and this is covered by blogging with categories. But if you’ve ever been to a blog site of someone you like to read and they have a long list of categories it’s not very inviting. And if their current three posts are all boring then you’ll get the wrong idea, even if they wrote a brilliant post just before that.

Science fiction has for years imagined artificial beings or speculated on machines recording people’s minds and converting them into computer beings in artificial worlds. I’m thinking a blog could be something like that – a download of your personality. But you need a face to represent the whole of your being.

Table of Contents

Magazines use their covers and table of contents to promote their top stories, hoping an eye catching headline will get you to buy a whole magazine and read the rest of the issue. However, magazines are not good structures to model a person’s complete life, but the TOC could be a good format to use for an introduction, or your face. Home pages on blogs take you to the latest post. I’m wondering if WordPress could create a Table of Contents page to use as the default home page, something that would combine the features of the About page and table of contents, to welcome blog visitors and help bloggers introduce themselves, giving guests a bigger picture of what you are like. Also, let this page have more layout options, use a 2-3 column HTML table to organize the structure, and allow the maximum customization.

Since the word categories is already used, have an organizing unit called “Projects” to be a super-group above categories. I like the word “projects” because I like to think of organizing my life into projects. Marketing people might come up with a better word. Maybe tie it in with major personality traits. Here’s an example of what I mean. For the Table of Contents page have several user-created Topics or Projects called Family, Friends, Work, Hobbies, Travel, and Reviews. Under Reviews I might have category listings for Audio Books, Books, Movies, Television Shows, Music, etc. Under Family I might have categories for Parents, Wife, Kids, Genealogy, etc. Then allow each Topic/Project to have an icon or small photo in the layout, so visitors at a glance can see how the blog writer organizes his or her life.

TimeLine

Another fun format to add would be the TimeLine – something to help people remember when and were things happened. Since people have imprecise memories, you’d have to have a Date field that could handle years, months, seasons, and days. I don’t think hours and seconds would be needed. (Fall 1949, 12/7/82, January 1971, 1963.) Users could enter birthdays for family, and then school years and schools. That way people could quickly know how old they were in a during a particular school year, or what years they worked as a bag boy. Bloggers could enter dates for when they met people, got jobs, saw concerts, had children, went on vacations, etc. Additional fun features would be hyperlinks to web sites that show the TV schedules, top news, best selling books, big movies, etc. for each year to help prompt memories.

Lists

I like keeping a list of the books I’ve read, my favorites, the ones I own, favorite songs, my CD library, favorite movies, DVDs, movies seen, etc. Lots of people are list makers, and so having a list making module would be awful cool. Like the TimeLine module above, this would force WordPress to get into the database business, which moves them more into the Zoho.com type service. WordPress could offer both custom database applications and do-it-yourself kits.

Genealogy

Blogs are about people. I use my blog to help remember things. One of the things I’ve always meant to get into is genealogy – but not in a big way. What would be amusing for blogging is to enter enough information so it links to other genealogy sites and to other bloggers, so when you meet people you can glance at their ancestry and maybe check if you’re related. If this linkage grew eventually we’d be able to say to our blogs, “show a family blogging tree.”

Who Is Your Blog For?

When you’re typing away at your blog posts do you do it for friends, strangers, or yourself? I call my blog Auxiliary Memory because I’m getting more forgetful all the time. I really would like to use my blog as a supplemental brain. If WordPress had the security, I’d even like to save private information on my blog. Not bank account numbers, but just data only I would want to see when I’m trying to remember something, maybe something personal like address books, Christmas card lists, work and home To-Do lists, etc. I’d also like to keep my last will and testament and parting thoughts, so when I die, especially unexpected, I can leave some last messages.

Now do you see what I mean when I think of a blog as a digital analog of myself? Right now blogs are a collection basket for thoughts, but it could collect other personal items, like photographs.

Photos and Time and Place

There are plenty of online photo galleries for people to share their pictures, but I’d like one integrated into WordPress. Why separate thoughts from images. I’d like to tie photographs to the TimeLine and to the Genealogy. Currently we enter posts by today’s date and time, but I’d like to be offered a field that would let me enter posts for past dates and time, that way I could organize my photographs chronologically, and work to remember the past.

It’s quite obvious what would happen if you could link photos to genealogies. I’d also like to link photos to streets and cities, and I would like to connect to other people to share photos linked by time and place. I moved around a lot when I was a kid. Imagine putting all my photos from Maine Avenue when I lived at Homestead Air Force Base from 1962-63 into the system and someday getting a message from long lost friends who went to Air Base Elementary with me?

Photo Rotation and Linking

Right now we get one photo for our header to represent our personality. It would be great to draw from a pool, so on some pages visitors would see images from a random rotation from the pool of personal or stock photos and for other pages, specific photos to go with the content of the post.

This would be a nightmare to roll out for WordPress. It’s much easier to manage the system when there’s a limited number of templates for users to build their sites. For this to be practical, WordPress needs to designate certain sized photographs – so all header photos would be the same size for a particular template, as they do now, but offer you the system to switch photos on the fly. When you create a new post you’d have the opportunity to link to a photo pool folder or link to an individual photo. This wouldn’t require a major programming change, and WordPress would sell a lot more space. Of course, it would be nice to link to Flash videos and animations too.

I’m Sure You Get My Point By Now

By now you should see the trend. I supposed with XML and web services many of these features could originate on companies outside of WordPress, or allow these features to work across all blogging sites. I love the idea of OpenID and that needs to be expanded. Selecting a blogging service like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal is like selecting a nationality, but we shouldn’t have language barriers to keep us from communicating across borders.

It may even be possible that various blogging services could work together so you’d have memberships on more than one service and combine the results. I see people trying to do this now but the results are disjointed, like they have multiple personalities, or they want to have separate public identities. I hate when I leave a reply on a Blogger site and it wants to send people to my Google identity rather than my WordPress identity. My FaceBook page should just have a widget that displays my WordPress blog instead of trying to duplicate a blogging feature.

Has anyone thought about the ramifications for blogging for decades? Or generations? Permanent storage needs to be addressed for historical purposes. I always like to ask people, “What would the world be like if Jesus had a blog and we could read it today.” Whose blog would you want to read from history? File and data formats are going to have to become standard if they are going to be readable in a thousand years. And if you spend a lifetime crafting your blog so it represents who you are, do you want it to die just because your body can’t go on?

These are just some idle thoughts on my part. Start thinking about what blogs could really become. Just wait a few years for when WordPress rolls out its AI widget that allows you to program a talking personality to go with your blog. All it’s personality will be based on your past blog entries. Eventually, we’ll be able to talk to our AI and it will automatically create our posts just from interviewing us.

Jim

Roping A Wayward Mind

In the excellent essay, “The Myth of Multitasking,” Christine Rosen opens up with this 1740s quote from a Lord Chesterfield to his son that I can’t stop thinking about:

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.

I wished my kindergarten teacher had started every day of class with that lesson because it’s obvious that I have never accomplished anything significant in my fifty-six years because I’ve always been trying to do two things at once. I’m a jack of all trades, master of none kind of guy, and it annoys the hell out of me.

This morning’s activities will well illustrate my need for focus and the pitfalls of multitasking. After my shower I started ripping CDs with my second computer, rolled out my exercise mat and started doing my yoga-like back exercises while daydreaming the opening scene of a novel I’d like to write, while another part of my mind kept reminding me to work on the short story I had been fleshing out in my imagination yesterday while exercising, and thoughts of three or four blog ideas buzzed like bees around these main ideas hoping to get more bio-CPU cycles themselves, while I was also trying to remember who I wanted to see today, where I wanted to go, and what I wanted to do with my Saturday.

If I followed Lord Chesterfield’s advice I would have had a single-minded Zen-like focus on my exercises and my back would be much better for it. (I just jumped over to put a new CD into the burner and ran to the kitchen to feed our cats.)

After my exercises I got up and checked my email and stats on this blog page and followed a link to a web site that mentions John Scalzi’s comments on fame, followed the link to Scalzi’s site and then found a link to Wil Weaton’s site where he discusses fame and then I found a link to Stephen Fry’s site, also about fame, but a very long well thought out essay. This gave me an idea to write a blog post about how it’s more rewarding to read a famous person’s blog than to actual meet them for a few minutes.

(Next CD to rip, which requires getting up and using the computer on the opposite side of the room.) Before I could start writing that blog, while doing a previous CD change, I got the idea I wanted to reinstall my Roku SoundBridge, so I could play MP3s on my computer through my stereo in living room, and got up and went looking for it. While tearing through two closets trying to remember where I put the Roku, I got ideas for several projects dealing with organization. I have boxes and boxes of wires for stereos, computers, televisions, DVD players, etc. that I really must organize one day. I was slightly distracted by the tight squeeze of clothes hanging in the closet, making it hard to get to all the boxes and remembering my promise to my wife to throw some worn clothes out, when I finally found the Roku.

(Next CD) I was surprised by how easy it was to put the Roku back into service but I discovered something interesting. The Roku was listing the music from both my computers, iTunes on the main machine, Windows Media on two machines, and FireFly media server on the second machine. This revelation inspired me to write a blog about the most efficient way to serve up MP3 files in a home network. (Next CD) I wondered if I booted up the laptop if it would see that machine too. (A pause to go pet a sick cat and think about a blog about the pet healthcare crisis.)

As you can see my mind is very far from Kwai Chang Caine’s focused mind in the old Kung Fu TV series. (I’ll stop the annoying interruptions about the CD changes and other diversions while writing, but you get the idea about how I’m constantly trying to multitask.) If I was a Kung Fu master, I wouldn’t own a wall of CDs and be trying to convert them to my computer library because I wouldn’t be into owning things.

If I was a real writer, with a focused mind, I would get up each morning, work on my novel and not think about about a dozen blog ideas, or another dozen short story ideas, or even worry about organizing a CD collection, or care about my clothes closet or boxes of wires. I never finished a novel because, like Lord Chesterfield says, I’m trying to do more than one thing and there’s not enough time in a lifetime to do all that.

On the other paw, I am pretty good at multitasking if I’m willing to accept that I do so many things in a half-ass way. I have four clunky websites (not counting several I manage at work). I read about fifty books a year, and see a hundred movies on DVD and at the theater, and watch several hundred TV shows and documentaries. I have a big collection of computers, books, magazines, CDs, gadgets, and other crap that I maintain and help do my part to keep the economy going. I read a zillion web pages every year, and my Karma level is excellent on Slashdot.

Task Switching

Now over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann offers his opinion in a podcast also called The Myth of Multitasking. Mann’s take is multitasking is impossible for humans, that people aren’t parallel processing machines like supercomputers, and the best we can do is be very good at task switching. Furthermore, it’s his belief that some people are good at task switching and others are not. The implication being that some people can easily bookmark their place when they switch tasks. Mann also believes once you discover you can’t multitask, you will lose the anxiety over getting so much done and focus on getting the job at hand accomplished.

My theory is the human brain is a fantastic bio-computer that parallel processes on vast scales, but the conscious mind is just one thread that runs on top of everything else that can’t really multitask, but like Mann suggests, can task switch. Whether this is a good feature of Human 4.0 is yet to be proved. Maybe multitasking will be a prominent feature of Homo Superior 1.0, but for now we have to decide what’s the optimal operating expectations for who we are now.

Attention Span

Should I trade all that fun chaotic juggling to be just a guy focused on writing a novel? Is it even possible for me to be Mr. Zen Lit Man? This brings up the second lighthouse beacon of an article I read this week, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly, that only fuels the fire of my desire to seek a simpler focused life. Mr. Carr confesses that Google and the Internet living has reduced his ability to read long works.

If we could multitask, the length of any working process could be infinite, but if we can only task switch, then the critical factor is the time segment devoted to each task. What Mr. Carr is suggesting is the Internet is making us used to living with short task segments and we’re losing our ability to process longer tasks. This is an interesting idea, but I have to ask: Did people have the knack for focusing on longer tasks before the Internet?

Long before Google, magazines and newspapers were featuring shorter articles with lots of side-bars, and short attention getting blips of information. Television, with sitcoms and more and more commercials started dividing up our attentions starting back in the 1950s. The car radio has long had buttons to quickly switch between shows for those weak of attention. Imagine what the television clicker has done to our minds?

I too have found that I can no longer read hours at a time on a single book or long essay. I had a different theory as to the cause of this, and assumed I had been corrupted by audio books which allows me to listen to other people read long books. I justified my laziness by pointing out that those people are much better readers than I am, and that I learn so much more when I can concentrate on their readings.

So now I have two theories to test. There might be many reasons why I can no longer read books hours at a stretch. One that comes to mind is comfort. I get back and neck strains, and my eyes weary quickly. Large print helps, but to be honest, I genuinely prefer audio books. After reading Carr’s article I will strongly consider my continual effort to multitask or task switch as a cause of attention deficit. I will admit that when I read too long on anything I get antsy for new input. The Internet might support my addiction for keeping multiple threads of thought going.

Conversely, if I’m going to be a real writer, as opposed to a blogger, I’d need to focus on one piece of writing at a time, and keep focused on that piece, draft after draft until it’s perfect and I could sell it. In other words, I’d be forced to do ONE thing for weeks at a time. I don’t know if I could handle that. Task switching might be natural, and the ability to focus on a single task may be a special talent. My friend Mike who is also a programmer says when he programs he feels like he’s in a deep well and all distractions are far away. I truly envy him for that gift.

I can’t take a crap without reading a magazine while thinking through a handful of ideas about what I’ll do when I pull up my pants. What if I got up this morning and just worked on writing that short story I’ve been meaning to finish for years. The one I come back to the most often? And what if when I needed to consume or evacuate I’d continue to think on that one story. It certainly would help if I lived in a studio apartment with little beyond a bed, desk, writing equipment and four white walls. No wonder Pride and Prejudice was so great, there just wasn’t that many distractions back in Jane Austen’s time.

I guess the real question is whether or not I could do the focused thing just one hour a day? It’s an obvious compromise of where to start. However, I think real writers probably sacrifice a giant pile of fun diversions to get a quality book finished. Maybe I just don’t have that kind of mental makeup. If I found a magic lantern and the Genie granted my wish to concentrate, would I be happy trading in a year’s worth of active diversions to produce one science fiction novel? That scares me. It sounds boring and lonely.

Dedication to Details

Last night I saw an episode of Nova about making Japanese samurai swords, and Friday night I saw a documentary that included a piece about a Chinese guy making traditional bows and arrows. In each case, these were complicated skills handed down from the past and required the artisan to devote his life to his work. Both documentaries pointed out that these acts of devotion to extreme details were being destroyed by modern culture. Few people in our society dedicate as much of their time to a single-minded objective, but there are some. Olympic athletes, classical musicians, and other successful people in any discipline.

There is always the chance that multitasking and Googling is common in society because that’s how the brains of most people work. If I had a brain for single minded focusing I would be a person pursuing something very focused. We see all those enchanting martial arts fables, like Kung Fu Panda where a slob of a mind can be polished into a diamond-point jewel of focused attention. Is that really possible? Maybe such training is possible if we start as children, but I doubt it for middle-aged adults. Can I and others improve our minds with incremental improvements, especially late in life, well I think there’s plenty of evidence for that.

We know that doing the crossword puzzle or the sudoku will exercise our brain, so I would imagine reading long articles from The New Yorker and The Atlantic will condition our mental focus towards longer attention spans. I would also assume we could follow Lord Chesterfields’ advice by starting the day by making a short list of things we want to do, and then work on them one at a time. My closet is still a mess, but if I stuck with it, focused my mind, and only worked on my closet, it would be finished with an hour’s effort.

A New Theory of Multitasking

I think some kinds of multitasking are possible and aren’t bad. I wouldn’t want to sit and burn CDs until I had finished all 1500 of them. I think I could safely work on cleaning out my closet, listen to an audio book and burn CDs and be a success if I finished the closet in a reasonable amount of time and did a perfect job. Actually, this may be a form of true multitasking, because my mind would be focused on the audio book story, and my body would be working to organize the closet and rip CDs.

People can do two things at once physically, but it’s uncommon – like rubbing your abdomen in a circle with your right hand and patting your head with your left. I can’t sort speaker wire and switch out CDs, so that would be task switching. But is it task switching or multitasking to listen to a book and do something physical that doesn’t require much mental processing like walking, doing the dishes, sorting wire or swapping out CDs?

The Good Old Days

I think many people would like to return to the good old days of a less hectic life. They feel that life would be better if they didn’t have so many programming events demanding time slices. Makes me wonder what my Main() loop looks like. The belief is we’d be happier with fewer function calls and more time where our CPU usage falls to 0%. Personally, I’d be philosophically happier if my log files showed more completed jobs, and fulfilled if I routinely shipped some fine 1.0 products. I have learned that achieving a zero email inbox is very satisfying. I don’t think we need to become Amish or Tibetan to find happiness. I do think that learning to tame the mind is a worthy goal and all these mental lessons that are a byproduct of computer usage and Jetsons-fast living is helping us evolve.

I am reminded of some odd advice. A modern day guru, or maybe it was a comedian, suggested getting up every morning and pistol whipping yourself if you had crippling fears of being mugged. I wonder if I got up every morning and focused my mind intently on any kind of mental exercise, if I wouldn’t build up some focusing muscles? If my flitting attention ever settles down to allow me to pursue such an experiment, I’ll let you know the results.

Jim

Inventions Wanted 006 – The Data Bank

I’ve worked with computers for decades and backing up has always been a hassle – both at work and at home. I used to have a tape system for home but it became impractical years ago when hard drive space far outpaced the expense of tape drive technology. In recent times I’ve been using external USB drives, but they’re not backup paradise either.

Unless your backups are frequently taken off site there is always the problem of your house burning down, blown away by tornados, submerged in a flood, or invaded by thieves. In the early days of personal computers valuable home data was limited to word processing files, spreadsheets and financial records. Most of that stuff could be saved to floppies. Now I need 63 gigabytes of space to preserve my digital valuables.

Since our parents died, my wife and I have became the librarians of family photos. We have boxes and boxes of photos that we’re scanning to digital files. I’ve also converted dozens of old cassette and CD audio books to MP3 files. And I converted LPs and CDs to MP3s. Now I have an every growing expanse of valuable binary data.

The weight of all these digital files is becoming a burden. Last year I bought Second Copy and two USB 250gb drives. I made a copy of my files to one drive and took it to work. I then connected the other drive and let Second Copy replicate my hard drive activity to it in real time. My plan was to switch drives every week so I’d always have a fresh backup off site. I never developed the discipline to follow this plan more than a few switch outs.

So this week I subscribed to Mozy.com, an online backup service for $55 a year. My plan was to create a Mozy backup and then restore it to a drive at work to test it out. When I purchased Mozy I knew it was going to be slow but I had no idea how slow. The first backup I set up with 63gb of data was predicted to take 5 weeks. I have the third fastest DSL from AT&T. High speed internet access is built around downloading speeds not uploading speeds which are a fraction of downloading speeds.

I called AT&T and asked about getting their fastest DSL service but they told me it wasn’t available in my neighborhood. I even considered switching to Comcast high speed cable internet but I’m living with slow uploads for the time being.

The next thing I did was stop the current backup and cut it down to 7 gigabytes of essentials. I was able to upload this data set in a couple of days. At work today I ran the restore to test things out. Mozy.com offers different ways to restore your data. The fast way for large backups is to have them burn DVDs and express mail them to you, but this costs extra. I used the free web restore method. You log into Mozy, request a restore and wait for them to email you when the files are ready for downloading. It took about an hour to be notified.

Mozy makes one or more compressed .exe files for you to download. I assume they divide your backup into the same DVD size chunks as they do for when they actually burn DVDs. I got two 3gb files that I downloaded in less than an hour. Download speeds were 1.1 – 2.2 megabits per second at work.

I discovered that my backup had no .mp3 files in it. I then read Mozy’s manual and discovered you can configure your backups with all kinds of filters. The basic data set of My Documents files were set up to filter out .mp3 files because I had unchecked the Music backup set. But I was expecting to get my audio books, which are also in .mp3 format.

In other words you will have to play around with the settings to get exactly what you want. If you don’t have much to backup I’d just backup everything at once. Mozy is light on documentation so I’m guessing at some of their methods. I emailed Mozy several times and got answers, but for other things I just speculated about how to do things. It’s easy to use, but you have to second guess them at times.

One problem with online backups is how and when to copy files. My Second Copy program patiently waits and every ten minutes copies any newly created files to the USB drive. That’s great as long as I don’t mind an ever growing backup because it never deletes files on the backup drive. That’s great if you want to fetch a file you’ve accidentally deleted last week, but bad because your backup contains all those files you thought were deleted.

Mozy works by creating backup sets. Each set is a snapshot of the moment. If you make a backup with Mozy one week, clean up your hard drive and reorganize your files and make another backup the next week and that backup will reflect your new system. That doesn’t work with my USB system. Working with the Second Copy method I’d have to wipe the folder on my USB drive and start Second Copy running fresh.

What I would like is an online backup that copies files as I make them but waits one week after I’ve deleted a file on my hard drive and then delete it off the online backup. In other words I want backing up to be totally automatic and without backup sets. Mozy doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is best for the technology we now have.

All this begs me to put on my wishing cap and imagine a perfect service. What I would like is a Data Bank that protects my digital wealth the same way a normal Bank protects my money. I want to feel totally confident that my data is always protected, maybe even with government regulations. I’ve read horror stories about online backup companies going out of business. Online backups is a fantastic concept. It would be nice to know that Mozy or companies like it replicate their stores to multiple cities and I’m 99.999999999 percent sure I’ll be able to restore my files in case of a catastrophe.

I’d also like my Data Bank to work with a standardize filing structure so I can easily find my files. Mozy copies Windows My Documents’ structure and appears to use Vista’s new structure with my Vista machine. Mozy is starting to support Macs and I hope they follow on with Linux. It’s a shame that all the OSes don’t use a similar filing structure so people could learn data organizing principles. I think it’s great that Microsoft started segregating music and photo files. I wish the OS could tell the difference between music and audio books.

Because we can’t trust online backup companies yet, its important that you restore you files to a computer not in your house. I did mine at work, but if that’s not possible you might want to find some backup buddies to trust. It would be wonderful, that in the future, Data Banks do become a reality and they are guaranteed 100% trustworthy.

What I also want from the dream invention is perfect access from any computer I’m working on. Just as I can log into my money bank from my work machine I want to be able to log into my Data Bank and have easy access to my home files. For instance, as I rip my CD collection I’d like to copy it to my work computer to play songs there. Or if I start a project at home on the weekend I’d like to get it out of the Data Bank on Monday. Mozy isn’t set up like that.

I’d love to log into my Data Bank and see two folders at the root level:

/data

/library

Data would be where I go for any files I created and Library would be media files like music, photos, audio books, video, ebooks, Acrobat files, etc. It would be very cool if the Data Bank worked like a network drive and I could just play my media files from that location. However, I don’t know if that’s practical. If a Data Bank had six hundred thousand customers could they handle such a load? Maybe in the far future where everyone has fiber optics and gigabit bandwidth. But for the near future I think causal access for backing up and retrieving should be practical now.

Even that is beyond Mozy at the moment. Mozy is designed to backup your files and then in an emergency restore them. I think I’m pushing their system when I plan to backup my home system and then restore it on my work computer a couple times a year. Since Mozy could go out of business I don’t trust them yet to hold my files without having them on a second computer. I’m mainly using Mozy to eliminate messing with the USB drives. That’s another source of saving electricity for those wanting greener computing, but I’m also getting tired of hearing my USB drive grind away. Mozy should make my life simpler, and that’s good. It will take a year or so of living with Mozy to really decide how they do.

Jim

Living in a Science Fiction World #1

The Internet is truly amazing, but I’m not sure if Millennials who never knew a world without the Internet know that. I thought I’d pass on some old fart stories about how social networking among science fiction fans used to work. They aren’t as bad as the stories my father told me about walking miles to school in the snow in Nebraska, and as some jokester once quipped, uphill both ways. Actually, when I lived in New Jersey in the late 1950s there were times my little sister and I did walk miles to school in the snow. It was a blast. Life then was still very much like that movie A Christmas Story. No computers, cell phones, GPSes, video games, high definition TV, or iPods. Cars didn’t talk to you either.

When I discovered science fiction in the early sixties I didn’t even know there was a separate genre of books and movies called Science Fiction. Well, it certainly wasn’t something they’d teach in school or your parents would tell you about. Before the Internet information was scarce. Back then the philosophy of adults were kids should be seen and not heard. It’s not like now where parents are your pals and they do everything for and with you. Kids lived in Kidworld and information passed from kid to kid. And if you worry about the accuracy of Wikipedia, kidnet was completely unreliable. Theories about where babies and Santa came from were as varied as the religions of the world. Parents like to pretend their kids knew nothing, and would even smack a kid upside his head for saying something smart, so it was better just to pretend to be stupid. So how did I find out about science fiction?

I knew I loved monster movies that would come on TV on Saturdays and sometimes they were about trips to Mars and Venus where four earth guys would find a whole civilization of pointy-bra wearing women. What more could a kid ask for in life? How could I find more movies like this? I liked reading, but mostly read non-fiction books about NASA, dinosaurs and war. In the sixth grade a teacher read A Wrinkle in Time to us after lunch and I wanted more books like that. In the seventh grade I stumbled onto When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, and then Jules Verne and H. G. Wells after seeing movies based on their books. It wasn’t until 1964 when my eighth grade teacher produced a list of approved science fiction writers I could read that I learned the magic words were “Science Fiction.” I then got systematic about finding SF books. A major discovery was some libraries even had SF sections, like at the Homestead Air Force Base Library. Now that I had discovered this wonderful genre I wanted to meet other fans.

My point of that long story is to explain that ideas passed by word of mouth. Networking used to be called friendship. Nobody talked about computers or owned one, they were mysterious giant machines mostly referred to in cartoons, and normal people couldn’t comprehend them except in humor. Not only did kids not have cell phones, but grown-ups frowned on the idea of kids using the family phone. People joke about TV being a vast wasteland with 200 channels and nothing on, but back when I was a kid there were just three channels and the Beverly Hillbillies and Bewitched wasn’t very informative about the real world. Kids today just don’t realize how rich they are in information.

I got to thinking about this when I was reading my RSS feed for SFSignal and it made me realize just how easy it is to locate people interested in the same subject I am. In 1965 I read science fiction pretty much in isolation. I had no friends that read science fiction and whenever I’d meet someone that did we’d strike up an excited conversation. In other words, meeting people with similar interests was random. The science fiction book section wasn’t at a mega-bookstore but was half a twirling wire rack of paperbacks at the drug store.

Social networking meant joining a club of likeminded individuals and meeting face-to-face during monthly or weekly meetings. Before I could drive I felt like I belong to a group by joining The Science Fiction Book Club or subscribing to Galaxy and Analog magazines that had fan letter columns.

Before computers it seemed like science fiction fans were few and far between. Communication with SF fans was through letters in the magazines or fanzines. At first I lurked, like lurkers on a BBS (a bulletin board system, an early attempt a social networking via computers). I just watched and learned. In 1970, just after I moved to Memphis, I noticed a letter in Ted White’s
Amazing from a Memphis guy and I called him up. He told me about the Memphis Science Fiction Association. That’s where I met Dr. Darrell C. Richardson and Claude Saxon, two old time collectors of science fiction and pulps, and Greg Bridges, a guy my age who wanted to produce a club fanzine.

Before there was email, IM and text messaging, there was something called a letter. Most people wrote letters by hand using a pen and forming their personally invented typeface by scratching ink marks on pieces of paper. Individual fonts were hard to decipher because size and shape varied widely. Fans, as we science fiction fans would call ourselves, used a typewriter to create letters to send to one another. Letters worked like emails in that they went anywhere in the world with the correct email mailing address, but they were slow, usually taking weeks to make a two way exchange.

Typewriters are like the keyboard of your computer, but they had a mechanism for handling paper – imagine a printer built into your keyboard – with a typeface installed on a piano key type arrangement that struck an inked ribbon above the paper and left a mark. Typewriting was sort of like using Microsoft Word but infinitely aggravating. You couldn’t edit or correct without a lot of trouble, so the easiest thing to do was strike over words with mistakes. Yet it was a giant step in technology over handwritten letters. The technology originated during Mark Twain’s lifetime, so think steampunk. If you wanted to save a copy of your email message, it required inserting two pieces of paper sandwiching a piece of carbon paper into the printing mechanism – very messy. It was more work than walking miles to school in the snow.

My first proto-computer like high tech gadget was a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter. After I joined Memphis Science Fiction Association I was brave enough to join an APA – amateur press association. APAs go way back to the 1930s I think, and I joined SAPS (Spectator Amateur Press Association), an informal network of 25-35 people who communicate via publishing zines. Think listserv. You printed 35 copies of your zine, usually mimeographed, and sent them to the central editor, who collated them with the zines of all the other members, and then snail mailed the bundles quarterly back to all the members. Again, picture mailing list, but instead of a computer program doing the work, an actual person had to do all the work. Like letters, this listserv took months for a two way communication.

Very few people, mainly hard core science fiction fans and other nuts took the trouble to be in an APA. 99.999% of people just communicated by talking. There were probably less than two dozen lists APAs in the world. The hunger to know likeminded people and form worldwide communication was limited to those crazy Buck Rodgers fans and similar sub-cultures. At a higher level fans tried to create their own magazines, also called zines, but genzines, rather than apazines (you see we had our own jargon). These had circulations from 20 to 800. They were like frozen web pages or blogs, made out of thick colored paper, again mimeographed and stapled together.

The mimeograph machine was a printer, but very primitive. Affordable models were hand cranked. You’d buy stencils, long sheets of waxy paper that you would type on. Striking a typewriter key on a stencil cleared away the wax leaving a thin area ink would ooze through. Fanzine producers would always get the best typists in the club to type up the stencils, because any mistakes made a mess to be corrected with corflu – you figure that one. Stencils were attached to the mimeograph drum that bled ink through the typed letters on the stencil thus printing on the paper rolling under the drum one sheet at a time. Printing with mimeograph machines was as messy as changing oil in a car, but then Gen Y and Millennials wouldn’t know about that either.

In other words, you had to really want to communicate badly to spend your personal money and time to go through such a dirty process. Producing a zine, like I said, was like creating a web page or blog, but you had to convince someone to read it. There was no Google. Usually you traded your zine for someone else’s zine. Again, another primitive network. Instead of having DNS servers, some people would be zine reviewers, because you could subscribe to their zine and have a Google like listing of current zines to mail your zine to – a type of push technology.

Think of a zine as a web page that could only be read if you held it in your hands and the URL was identical to the creator’s home mailing address. Some would take weeks to load receive. Getting a zine in the mailbox was major excitement and I got them from as far as Australia and England. It was a world wide web, just made of paper and very slow.

It used to be so thrilling to get a SAPS mailing. Think of a mailing list that takes months to get a reply. My zine, The Blue Bomber, named after my first car contained blog like natter about what I was reading, and then a long list of comments about the other zines in the previous bundle. For my first issue of The Blue Bomber, I had to drive from Memphis to Tupelo to use my cousin’s husband’s church mimeograph. He was the pastor. So my next high tech gadget lust was for a Gestetner mimeograph which I bought with Greg Bridges and another fan in a cooperative printing venture.

Fans lived and died by the typer. This was long before word processing. Kids just don’t know how easy life is if you haven’t tried using a typewriter. In 1977 I got a job as an IBM MT/ST machine operator, which was a primitive word processor using two tape drives to edit and save files connected to an electric typewriter. Boy, I thought I was living in the future using that machine. As soon as I heard about personal computers I wanted one, but it was 1978 before I could afford one, then a lowly Atari 400, which wasn’t good enough for the task. I then got a TI 99/4A which also proved useless as a word processor. It was when I got a Commodore 64 that I first had all the components for word processing – CPU, disk drive and printer. By then I discovered bulletin boards and networks like Genie and CompuServe with my 300bps modem.

This put communication with other science fiction fans in real time and that was a major breakthrough. All of a sudden I found thousands of people who loved to talk about science fiction books. Eventually I created my own 2-line BBS with my second 286 PC clone (our current chips should be a 886 by now). At first monitors were green screen and all text. Then I remember spending a small fortune for a VGA monitor with 256 colors. This was the 1980s.

Luckily I worked at a university where we had access to BITNET and other networks including the wonderful NNTP (network news) for group communications. By then I was finding science fiction fans from around the world to talk to by quick messaging called emails, but not the flashy emails of today’s Outlook. By then graphical operation systems were showing up and we could send photos, if you know what I mean, and share cool things like Linux. Finally Mosaic showed up and computer networks blasted into orbit.

A lot has happened in the last 43 years. If I could take my current computer with its hi-rez 20″ widescreen LCD to the past and show my 1965 self he would have thought it more wonderful than anything science fiction had ever imagined. If I could show him how people shared interests with blogs and social networking software it would have blown his little mind. In 1965 I dreamed that by 2008 I would be living on Mars, but living on Earth in 2008 with the Internet is far more science fictional and far out.

Hell, science fiction never predicted the iPod, but don’t get me talking about how much trouble collecting music was when it was stored on vinyl discs.

JWH

Magazines v. Web v. Newspapers v. Television

Yesterday I sat down and read through the latest issue of Time Magazine. I am an information junky, but I don’t read magazines as much as I used too, not since the web. Reading the web is an exciting way to take in data – I can start with Slashdot and follow a link to MSN to an article entitled “Sci-Fi from Page to Screen,” read it, and from there start googling the concept for more information. It could lead to an hour of diversion and maybe even a couple hours of blog writing. The casual way to read a magazine is to start with the cover, flip and read until you reach the back cover. With magazines and newspapers you read by picking and choosing what you like, but they are self contained because they don’t have hyperlinks. Television is a horse of a different color altogether. If you discount channel surfing, picking a show and watching it from start to finish, means being a captive audience. If you count channel surfing, then television is more like web surfing, but not quite the same because a couple hundred channels is nothing to the billions of web pages.

What surprised me yesterday while reading Time was the quality of the experience. I seldom sit and read a whole magazine anymore. I read the letters to the editor, the small and large pieces. Towards the end I started skimming more, but I tried to take in the magazine as a whole. It felt like I got a small snapshot of what was going on in the world this week. If the web didn’t exist magazines would be my web. The world through a magazine eye felt distinctly different than the world I see from surfing the web or watching the television news or reading The New York Times.

The cover story intrigued me, “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School” by David Van Biema. So did another story that was the cover story in the Europe, Asia and South Pacific editions, “The Truth About Talibanistan” by Aryn Baker. I’m an atheist but I find the study of the Bible fascinating. I’ve often wondered why it isn’t taught in school. Of course the way I would teach it by linking it to anthropology, history, language, psychology, sociology, grammar, etc., is very different from the way it is being taught. While reading the article I was itchy to click and research. Then reading the article about the Taliban I was reminded of seeing a documentary on Frontline about the same topic, “The Return of the Taliban.” They didn’t tell the same story, but that’s not the issue I want to get into.

Seeing the Frontline story on HDTV had far greater impact than reading the article in Time, but the magazine article had more to think about. This brings back the old issue of television journalism versus print journalism. Right after reading that issue of Time, I went and watched “Arctic Passage” on NOVA on HDTV about the mysterious and tragic Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. While watching that show I was struct by how much richer the experience of learning was through the 56-inch HDTV than reading and seeing photos in a magazine or book.

The magazine was about ideas in my head. I read many exciting bits of information that made me think and want to write and research. The show about Franklin was rich and educational in the best way and I was satisfied with the subject when it finished. I have read about the Franklin expedition before, and the NOVA site has more reading material, but the show left a sense of completeness. Given its fifty plus minutes, the documentary makers summed up the issue in a very satisfying way. I then selected from my PVR, “Monster of the Milky Way,” another NOVA documentary.

The impact was fantastic. I read a lot of astronomy magazines and websites, but the 56″ astronomical photos and videos they showed were stunning. The animations were gorgeous and awe inspiring and totally filled me with a sense of wonder. The trouble is NOVA only comes on once a week with maybe 20-25 new shows a year. What if every topic I wanted to study had a 55 minute NOVA quality documentary to present the information – would that be the best way I should take in information? I don’t know. Maybe? It certainly feels more real than reading.

Newspapers, magazines and the web are great for taking in mass quantities of informational tidbits. The web excels at ready access to information, but I’ve got to wonder if NOVA made a documentary about “Sci-Fi from Page to Screen” it would blow away the reading experience of the MSN.com piece. What if the web was surfing a vast library of high definition videos and our computers had 24-inch 1980×1200 high definition screens? What value does the written word have over the spoken word with visuals?

I buy courses from The Teaching Company and I always agonize over whether to get the DVD option, the audio edition and whether or not I need the print supplement. Their DVDs aren’t hi-def, and just contain photos to supplement the lectures, but often those photos have great impact.

Do I prefer the NOVA shows because hi-definition television is as close to reality as any media can get? When I attend lectures I hate PowerPoint presentations and videos. I want the speaker to say something interesting and be engaging. I just finished a very rewarding book, Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers. I have to admit that if that book were presented as a long mini-series on PBS it would probably be my favorite way to study Twain. Photos and videos just have too much impact to ignore. Maybe that’s why YouTube is so successful on the web. But would I learn as much about Mark Twain, or remember as much?

Where does that leave me as a writer? Should I add photos to my blog? Should I go into video blogging? Should we all become documentary makers? Blogs tend to be of lower quality writing than professional magazine writing, and video blogging is a far cry from PBS documentaries. However, what if communication between people becomes more visual in nature? Cell phones with cameras are getting popular. People email me digital photos all the time. How soon will it be before I start getting personal videos? I already get joke videos. What if the video we got were high definition?

The question I started to write about today is: What’s the best media or method for getting a feel for what’s going on in the world each day? Television is like having extra eyes that rove the planet. Blogs are like getting to read people’s diaries. Newspapers and magazines are like getting letters from well traveled friends who are great writers. Communication speeds are so fast now that news delays range from hours to weeks. In the nineteenth century it took weeks or months and sometimes years to hear about things going on around the world. Of course reading non-fiction books is like getting the news centuries late, and with cosmology the news is a billion years old.

Slowly high definition televsion is coming to news programs. Watching The Today Show or The Tonight Show in high-def on a large screen has a very real immediate feel. The disadvantage of television over magazines is details. For me, seeing details in print are more memorable than hearing them. I can study them and reread easily. It’s much easier to quote a magazine than to quote a television show. And I tend to think print is more philosophical than the visual media. But most of my book reading is through audio books, mainly because I have more time for them that way, and the fact that I think I experience novels better though audio than though my eyes. That’s because I listen to books at a conversational speed, but speed read them with my eyes, often skimming words. But to study them for a test I’d need to see the printed page.

What I’d really like is to combine high-definition television with computers and the Internet. The PBS sites are doing something like what I’m thinking about. You can get a transcript of their shows for study and quoting, you can link to videos to show friends, it stays on the web for reference and it has hyperlinks for more surfing, but I need to see the videos in high definition on my computer screen. When will that happen?

Imagine a Wikipedia entry for every topic no matter how tiny, and each entry had links to all the media related to that topic. So for the Franklin expedition there would be links to all the documentaries, the primary research, secondary research, articles, essays, photos, diaries, etc. Also imagine this Wikipedia’s front page with news streaming in about what’s going on in the world in current time. I picture a map of the world with a visual interface that helps spot new and interesting events. Other tools could track with keywords and photos. Let’s say the idea of teaching the Bible in school becomes newsworthy in this interface and catches my eye. Wouldn’t it be fun to follow a link that takes you to cameras in the classroom? What if one teacher calls up a documentary about translating the Bible in different times and places, and I could fall out of real time to watch it?

A lot could happen in our future when it comes to information.