Tagged: Technology

The End of Ever Needing to Scan A Doc

Ever since the first scanner came out, the promise of being able to scan a text document and digitize the text has been so tantalizingly close. The problem has always been firing up that scanner. Which is definitely not something I travel with. But now there’s another solution. Google Drive.

Yes, if you upload an inscrutable text, like old newspaper clips jaggies and all, and Google Drive does the rest. Including indexing the docs, which is really the more important part.

So I can now snap a picture of my handwritten notes, have Google Drive convert the document and get text. Neato.

Earthquake!

At Norwalk’s Calf Pasture the beach during East Coast Earthquake 2011. Best reporting on the event was on Twitter. @theHourNews had the local angle covered. But the big story was the overloaded wireless circuits in NYC. The secondary story, Twitter ruled the news cycle with every reporter tweeting live and the #earthquake thread filling fast and furious. This is the MySpace moment for Facebook.

Meanwhile best tweet reports include @reachAngi with reports on a spontaneous rendition of Carole King’s “I feel the earth move under my feet” as the New Haven Open stadium evacuated. Another highlight from @psaffo “Massive post-quake looting underway in Manhattan! (Wall St traders allowed back into their offices.)”

UPDATE: Mashable says-

The 5.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia and rolled through much of the east coast Tuesday caused more inconvenience than damage. Case in point: though no cellphone towers were knocked out, high call volume meant massive service interruptions for users of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

But one cellphone-based service managed to work as normal,according to Bloomberg: RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger.

BBM, which can run on either a phone’s data connection or local Wi-fi, and uses unique wireless protocols, has gained a reputation for reliability and security. In the Chilean earthquake of 2010, and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in New York, it was the only service left standing.

 

 

 

You Can’t Streamline If You Don’t Get Tech

One of the most frustrating aspects of living in Norwalk is how out of touch City Hall is when it comes to tech. Out of touch is one of the nicer things I have to say on the subject. There are other more demeaning things that are utterly factual that I rant about in emails to various officials in periodic spurts. So it is with the general malaise of how can we suck so bad at such simple things that I post yet again, about another city using tech to solve the intractable problems of government that isn’t working. Behold Los Angeles:

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The Bridgeport Ballot Shortage

Both the Courant and the Advocate have good stories on the timeline of ballot counting in Bridgeport that are worth reading. But no one seems to have addressed the most perplexing of issues. The shortage of ballots was widely spread as news on election night in a kind of holy abacus batman style, the Bridgeport registrars were being pummeled for only ordering 21,000 ballots for a city of a little over 68,000 registered voters.

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Downfall of a Digital Career

Today I’ve been working on updating some navigation code. It wasn’t working, so when that happens I like to take a step away from the computer and do something mindless until I figure out what is wrong. Today’s mindless activity was locating a ten year plus business plan that contained some rationale I wanted to self-plagiarize for another project. This mean using the skills that I actually trained for, a Jurassic age ago, archaeology. Today’s dig was in the back corner of the apartment where supposedly boxes of old stuff were stored. The trick, since I apparently don’t believe in labeling boxes, was to figure out via stratification dating techniques which one would contain the business plan.

Along the way I uncovered previous career lives, stratified along with the office cube accompaniment of the era. So we find 5.25 floppy disks along side with plastic whales. Early perverse management ideas, “you have to save the data before you save the whales.” Can you date that? Old business cards, old scraps of once important notes, it was really important to call Dan in Wspt. asap some time ago. Who was Dan? Did I ever call? I can barely remember corporate life before email. My notes on programing the Onyx ACD. Call time management theory. Game intelligence theory. The years were slipping together in the boxes but that didn’t mean the technology co-existed. It wasn’t too long ago that every personal computer was beige. A leftover I guess from the brilliant minds who dreamed up harvest gold, avocado green, and coppertone brown. Was that ever copper looking?

At the end of about an hour, I had a stack of CDs on my desk. They represented software games and applications I either produced, designed or authored. They represented a stack indicating that I am older than dirt. And they were completely locked up into a time capsule of a digital nature. The software applications were now too old to run on my current set of computers. And the older computers I kept around for these purposes predated those formats. A conundrum. Why had I kept these? I figured it was always a good thing to take a look at old creative work to see that evolution that transpires that you don’t get to see as life rolls along.

The videotapes I still keep, can still play. Same goes for the music CDs. But not software. For years I dutifully moved word processor documents from one version, one platform to another. Every once in while I’d forget and some arcane formatting would be lost, but overall text survived time. Digital photos, thankfully, they made it too. Digital video, that turns out to be problematic. I still have a few college textbooks kicking around. Micro economics, physical anthropology and the Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Why did I keep those and abandoned the rest?

Thus our musical guest for this post, Radiohead (yeah I though of something off ok computer but …) High and Dry:

A career in the tech industry is a harsh darwinian experience. You are what you’ve most recently done, and if you don’t selectively adapt to the right technologies you are pretty much toast. Yes there’s always someone who will hire a COBOL programmer or two, some systems just never get upgraded. Think air traffic control. But even those too will disappear. Are the there technology museums busy preserving the dead end formats for posterity? We can barely figure out how to preserve celluloid films.

Fifteen years ago there was barely a market for an interactive comic book, today you can read them on your iPhone. But I can’t read my work. So the stack of 12 will head out the landfill somewhere. Does it matter that no will remember any of these projects? Some future archaeologist will dig them out and wonder did the 5.25 disks and single layer CD, ps/2 mouse and model m keyboard exist in the decade, and did these primitive tools accelerate the growth of a civilization of were just a wrong turn? Or maybe they will just wonder if the shiny thing was some sort of signaling device, the printed images long faded away.

Kinda makes you nostalgic for the luddite ways. Alas, such is the impermanence of the digital world. So when you make those all important backups remember once in awhile to try and open the stuff to check if it still all works.

Thus our music guest today, Radiohead, (yeah I though of something off ok computer but this was actually the track that was playing then, and today) High and Dry:

Media 3.0 Living La Vida Without Television

When I used to speak about technology and media back in the pioneering days of the 90s to crowds of uninspired youth, I used to whip out my palm pilot and point out that in my lifetime, the processing power of the handheld pal pilot was twice as much computer processing used in the Apollo space program. Needless to say that didn’t mean anything to the audience, since the Appollo program was about sending man to the moon, and in the lifespan of my audience, they hadn’t actually scene any  manned moon flight program and instead picture space flight as some sort of weird commuter shuttle that occasionally orbits the earth.

But talk to an older generation and they remember the energy that fueled countless dreams of exploring other planets. It was as inevitable as the eventual hover car and single person jet pack. Er, we didn’t get those either, did we? But one staple seems to have transcended time, the box in the living room was going to deliver all that rich visual news right to us, with maybe the promise of 500 channels. Not so fast.

In many ways, this little tid bit from the New York Times illustrates something just as earth shattering about portable computing power portending the smartphone (blackberry or iPhone) reality of today.

As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories.

“Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge.

That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of theDisney-ABC Television Group.

“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”

But she does not, actually. For 60 years, TV could be watched only one way: through the television set. Now, though, millions watch shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on demand and online on network Web sites like Ms. Sweeney’s ABC.com and on the Internet’s most popular streaming hub, Hulu.com.

The era of the television is over, but you wouldn’t know it from the media corporations who still think there’s value in forcing people to choose their entertainment from a short list of broadcasted stuff. They still hold on to the idea that there’s something fixed and scheduled about when that “show” will be seen. The reality is there’s a whole new generation of audience that has quickly adapted to the choice of when, what and where they will watch. And thus television programming has achieved the portability of another old media format, the book.

When you live in an urban environment, the time between destinations paints the media landscape quite well. People read books and newspapers and iPods and ebooks, chat on phones, listen to music, text, email, chat (even in person) and tap on little keyboards attempting some work productivity. They also watch clips from youtube, downloaded music and soon enough streamed content. We are not far off from the day that an NFL stream of a game can entertain you on a train trip down to Washington DC. TV? Who needs that.

This spring I made a decision to kill me cable TV subscription. With the exception of football, I can’t say I miss it. Everything I want to watch is on DVDs or the Internet. I don’t miss cable news, or the endless stream of commercials. I can get the highlights of the stuff everyone is talking about on youTube. When I want to watch it.

Comcast, the country’s largest cable operator, has already been using its considerable muscle to limit how many shows are available online, lest people think they can cancel their costly cable subscriptions and watch free online. Now the company — which, if the NBC deal passes government muster, will own a piece of the biggest site that threatens to undercut its core business — is looking for ways to charge for ubiquitous access to shows.

The danger for Comcast and all the media broadcast giants, is that if they make it so I can’t see the shows I want online, I may very well choose not to watch at all. And until the advent of live broadcasts at the dawn of the age of the television, there was a whole generation out there that didn’t watch TV. At 320 million devices sold world wide, the iPhone, capable of streaming live broadcasts is just about at that place where a television was in the 1950s. The danger for broadcasters isn’t the free stuff on the internet, it’s the idea that all you need to entertain yourself can be found on a device that goes with you everywhere.