Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley June 2, 2014 Deadline July 2014 Issue Owning is So Yesterday: Streams and Clouds Conquer Discs Almost eight years ago, I sat on the living room floor of our apartment and imported music from our massive compact disc collection into iTunes. The year was 2006, and I had purchased an iPod for my wife. We still use this ancient white iPod in our car, and it works fine. During my graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, I discovered Cheapo Records. There were two massive Cheapo outlets, one in each of the Twin Cities. The Uptown Minneapolis location offered the best selection of CDs I have ever seen. It reminded me of the glory days of Tower Records and the Virgin Megastores. The St. Paul location, conveniently located near my campus office, was smaller, but still impressive. I bought a lot of music, and imported the discs into iTunes. Our music library includes 1785 artists and groups. As an example of my compulsive need to own complete sets...

English: Image of a Viking Modular SATA SSD in an MO-297 form factor (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 5, 2014 Deadline June 2014 Issue The Need for Speed: Get More Done, Faster Spinning beach balls, hourglasses, hula hoops and progress bars signify lost time and frustration. Watching icons bounce in a dock or slowly populate a taskbar as software loads only adds to the annoyance of using a slow computer. As a tech consultant, “My computer is slow” might be the most common issue I hear. Often, the complaint is followed by a revealing explanation: the client has used a newer computer and realized how soon today’s cheetah is tomorrow’s snail. Systems start to “feel slow” compared to new computers after three to four years, and that assumes you buy mid-range to high-end hardware. If you buy an inexpensive computer, it feels “slow” much sooner. Do you need the fastest, latest and greatest computer? Or, do you need “fast enough” to get your work don...

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...