Lightning in a Bottle

One of the technologies I’ve grown very fond of this fall is del.icio.us. Once you set up an account on this site (that name is pretty cute, huh?), you can store your bookmarks there. Since they’re stored on a website, you can access them from anywhere. As a person that uses multiple computers, I find this a pretty keen thing. Even better, you can “tag” your bookmarks with key terms and they are sorted by those terms.

But what really makes it powerful is that the bookmarks are open to other people. So, if I wanted to share with someone all of the web pages that I have referred to in my weblog, I could give them one url: del.icio.us/cmcquinn/weblog (no www at the beginning).

Now if you follow the link, you’ll find over thirty web pages I’ve stored with the intent of writing about them here. If you read this blog with the spotty regularity it is published, you’ll also notice you don’t recognize some of the articles. Ok, I meant to write about them.

I will be using this for all my presentations from now on as well. I can group all of my references into one spot (say, del.icio.us/cmcquinn/ncce06) and give participants one simple url to find everything. Sweet!

There’s only one fly in the ointment. Twice now in the last week, del.icio.us has been offline. And when it’s offline, the bookmarks simply don’t exist. I have a lot of bookmarks I’ve stored in there over the last few months, and it gets kind of scary when they suddenly aren’t there. (I just learned how to export those bookmarks as a standalone file, just in case.)

Still, the functionality of this service (and similar ones, such as furl) is worth the potential hassle. I love being freed from being tied to just the one computer, or not knowing which computer has the bookmark you’re searching for.

Every once in awhile, I have an experience that illustrates why some people shouldn’t be involved in designing technology. One of the latest involved a camcorder. My son has taken an interest in creating videos of his online videogame exploits to share with his friends. Being the techie sort of guy that I am, I knew how to hook up the digital camcorder to accept analog video and audio, and how to navigate down into the obscure menus to enable the camera to actually receive the analog input. After a couple of minutes of cabling and camera tweaking, my son and I can see and hear Halo 2 on the camcorder screen. Success!

Oops, not quite. The camera will display the signal, but it won’t record. Hmm. Maybe it’s because we’re in “VCR” mode. So we flip the switch to “Camera” mode, and yes indeed, recording works. But the analog signal won’t display. No problem, I think, and again visit the obscure menus to enable the analog input. The menus are identical to the VCR mode with one single exception - the option to turn on the analog input.

I spent a good ten minutes switching back and forth between the two modes, exploring every menu option and pressing every conceivable button on the camera. No matter what I do, I can’t record the analog signal. This is particularly maddening because I’ve done it before. What am I missing?

Finally, I resort to the most unthinkable of options. I get out the manual. And there it is, on page 89 - to enable recording of an analog signal, I have to use the remote. The little, stinking credit-card size remote which I have no other use for and (of course) can’t find. Finally, after much hunting, we find that my daughter has it in her camera bag at school. The next day she comes home for a visit, and brings the remote.

So what do we need the remote for? To push the “pause” button. Once the “pause” button is pressed on the remote, then you press the “play” button on the camcorder to start recording. That’s it - you only need the stupid remote to press one button to enable a function that has every other control built into the camera itself.

I have to believe that some engineer somewhere had an actual reason to do this. Maybe it’s to prevent accidentally recording onto a tape while playing back in VCR mode. Still, it reminds me of many frustrating experiences trying to help teachers hook up VGA converters to VCRs or televisions, only to find that to enable the video-in function on the TV or VCR required the use of the remote, which either a) was lost long ago, or b) is locked away somewhere for safekeeping, or c) has dead batteries and there are no batteries to be found in the school.

So, when you’re shopping for video-related equipment , add one more thing to your list of criteria. Whether it’s a television, VCR, DVD-player or videocamera, make certain that there are no important functions that can’t be controlled from the device itself without using a remote. Believe me, you’ll be glad you did.

I’m on the cusp of a transition that I never thought I’d really consider.

I’m ready to throw out my magazines.

I have several file drawers of back issues of magazines full of important articles (not to mention good advertisements). Things like Teaching and Learning, Presentations, Edutopia, and many more than I care to admit. It gives me a huge thrill when, in the course of a conversation, I can say “Wait a minute! There was an article about that a couple of months ago!” and whip the magazine in question out of the drawer.

Thing is, just about all of the periodicals in question are in Proquest now. And instead of having to remember which magazine it was in, which issue, and what page, and then trot down to the photocopier to make an article, I can instead do a search, find it, and either print the plain text or, when possible, print a PDF of the article. (That has the added advantage of the good advertisements still being intact.)

Still, I remain awfully skeptical of digital storage. My old magazines will be readable for much longer than the content will be relevant. And I don’t need a fast Internet connection to take advantage of them, either. I’ve also listened to Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper(here at Amazon.com), who documents the destruction of hundreds of thousands of pages of print media after converting to other formats for archiving, only to have many of the archived versions to be of lesser quality or more easily degraded than the original materials.

Hmmm. I’ll let you know when I finally pull the plug. If.