Poet Ponders the Digital

English: Dual disk drive (Combo Floppy drive) for 5.25 and 3.5 inch with floppy disks Deutsch: Duales Diskettenlaufwerk (Combo Floppy Drive) für 5 1/4 und 3 1/2 Zoll Disketten der Firma Canon Modell MD5511-V6 mit Disketten (Kombilaufwerk), Herstellung ca. 1995 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley March 1, 2015 Deadline April 2015 Issue Sharing files and collaborating elevate computers beyond being glorified typewriters, ledger books and filing cabinets. I appreciate the convenience of using a word processor compared to typing on my old manual Smith Corona and nobody wants to trade spreadsheets for paper, but it is the portability of data that makes computing revolutionary. Beyond automating and improving the efficiency of tasks, moving data allows us to collaborate and develop better ideas. Today, we use “the cloud” to share data via the Internet. We upload files to servers operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple and several cloud-specific companies like D...

Earlier this semester, there was a "glitch" with the Blackboard shell for my writing course. I had spent hours and hours uploading content, organizing the shell, and trying to perfect the course. And then it was gone. The Blackboard team eventually restored most, but not all, of the content. It was a tough reminder that online systems are, like all computing systems, imperfect. Systems crash. Databases get corrupted. Things go wrong and you need a contingency plan. The Blackboard bungle left my students frustrated and has cost me more than few hours. While I had copies of all materials, they were scattered about my hard drive. I didn't want to duplicate files, which I thought would waste space. I sometimes used "links" (aliases) to original files, as a compromise. On my computer, which is backed up to three external drives and mirrored to another computer, I now have a directory system that aligns with my Blackboard shell. There are folders for each w...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 5, 2012 Deadline December 2012 Issue You Need Backups: The Benefits of Off-Site Storage Hurricane Sandy reminds us that in a matter of minutes everything in a building can be destroyed. Though we can predict some disasters, others come quickly and without warning. My wife and I have lived in places with earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and blizzards. Those are only some of the natural disasters that can upend lives. And then, there are the unfortunate events beyond nature. When things do go so horribly wrong, they take possessions and memories. Sometimes, the losses include computer hardware and storage media. In a serious disaster, the best place for personal and business data is somewhere far, far away from the event. Yet, most of us don’t have off-site backups of important data. It is time to adopt an off-site backup strategy. Because all storage media fail, my wife and I do all we can to maintain backups of important data. I have th...

8-inch floppy disk drive compared in size to 3.5" floppy disk of 1984 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley June 4, 2012 Deadline July 2012 Issue Data Ghosts of Hardware Past Iomega Zip disks were, depending on your experiences with them, the greatest idea of their time or one of the worst digital storage media ever sold. The Zip disks I own were purchased between 1995 and 2002; until recently, I was unsure why I kept them. As this summer began and I was preparing to teach summer school, my wife stumbled upon a printed version of my website from 1996. There were several pages of text on the topics I would be discussing in class. My wife offered to scan the pages, which was a better option than retyping the content. Then, I remembered we had an old Zip 250 drive and stacks of disks stored in a cardboard box. As readers of this column know, I encourage everyone to make weekly, monthly, and annual backups of their data. I’ve migrated data from one m...

For the last few weeks I have been eagerly waiting to start preparing online course shells related to my new university post. Unfortunately, I still do not have access to the Blackboard servers used by the university. The delay, I am told, has something to do with the HR department. The odd part of that explanation is that I do have access to the other online services to which the university subscribes. As with many smaller colleges and universities, the information technology at this university is contracted out to specialists. I believe the Blackboard services are subscribed to directly via Blackboard, while email and website services are hosted by other companies. Currently, the university email and calendar system is on a Novell GroupWise hosted service, while website and intranet servers running Microsoft SharePoint involve yet another service provider. I don't know if HR and other departments farm out IT to yet more companies, but I wouldn't be surprised. When you create ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 24, 2011 Deadline March 2011 Issue Archives Aren’t Backups: Storing Data for the Future Do you remember WordStar? Lotus 1-2-3? Harvard Graphics? If you’ve been using computers as long as I have, you created documents, spreadsheets and graphics in too many applications to remember. Yes, I have 25-year-old data. I have copied those files from floppies to Iomega Zip disks , from Zip disks to CDs , and most recently from CDs to a trio of external hard drives. Each time I upgrade computers, I migrate data to whatever happens to be the leading archival format. I migrate data every two to four years. That is important, because media do fail. However, what has enabled me to use old documents is a habit of storing data in two or three formats. In my “Documents” directory, I have created folders named “Archives of…” to store data in neutral formats. Recently, I wanted to use an old image created in a DOS-based application. I tried several applic...

I am in the process of upgrading my MacBook Pro to a 500GB hard drive. (Let's not get too technical, since I know it's not "really" 500GB.) The one thing digital media do well is consume hard drive space. This is the third or fourth time I have updated a PowerBook or MacBook hard drive. As with all new laptops, you wonder, "How will I ever use so much space?" The excitement of having twice or three times whatever you last had soon fades as iTunes, GarageBand, and iMovie eat the bytes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash are there to help, too. A colleague said, "Why not just store it all on the campus servers or on Google Docs?" Okay, this entire cloud thing is nice -- for sharing some files and for backups -- but I am not about to put my projects out in the cloud. I'd never upload confidential files, and I certainly don't want some company to have my student projects. No way. Plus, I'm no...

Sometimes the technology wins. The reality of computers is that they are still machines. This means that parts wear out — hard drives certainly come to mind. We rely on fragile little boxes, in my case a MacBook Pro, to store our daily work, our family memories, and much more. Even the "non-moving" parts are technically moving on an atomic level, with heat slowly taking a toll. Memory chips start giving "exception errors" and video cards make abstract art of our virtual desktops. This is why I make lots of backups. It is why I have three external hard drives, and hope the digital demons never cause all three to die at once. One drive is a clone of the MacBook Pro's drive, so if disaster strikes my current work is ready to be revived on another system. The other two are archives, saved for those "I think I did something like that before" moments. With the preceding in mind, I now admit that even following good, defensive habits is not ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 2009 Issue December 8, 2008 Time for Computer Housecleaning Blurry digital photos I will not print, mediocre music I will not listen to, documents I will not read again, and software I haven’t used in a year. It is time for these wasted bits to go. When a terabyte hard drive costs $100, it is tempting to fill the trillion bytes with every digital picture I have taken and every song I might want to hear at least once. I could also store every assignment I have written as a student — and every paper I have received as a teacher. If it can be stored, why not store it? There are several reasons to not store everything, despite the temptation to do so. Organization is important to me. Keeping everything makes it hard to locate anything of value, even with the help of software. Also, old files might have been created in an application that’s discontinued or incompatible with a newer version. My annual cleaning ritual lets me remove old docum...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 2008 Issue July 7, 2008 You Can Always Go Back, If You’re Prepared Digital pictures and digital music. My life is stored in bits on my laptop hard drive and an iPod. I can’t remember the last time I had film developed and my last music purchase was a hard-to-find jazz track downloaded from Amazon. My life is definitely digital. Memories are convenient… and at risk. I was thinking about this while watching the residents of Big Sur and Santa Barbara try to gather their belonging to flee fires. Like the victims of this summer’s horrible floods in the Midwest, these families sometimes had only minutes to gather important possessions. Losing pictures of my wife, my family (including the pets), and special moments from our lives would be devastating. I realize the Valley is extremely “safe” when compared to many other locations. We don’t have hurricanes, tornado seasons, or horrible fires. It is easy to forget we should protect our digital ...