Inside View from Ireland

Making Digital Tangible

WHILE AT A FAMILY FUNERAL, I saw a few things that made me realise the importance of making some of my digital items more tangible. A very interesting collection of family photos passed around a few tables for review. Anyone over the age of 50 enjoyed holding the old photos, feeling their edges and commenting about the settings in the shots. Those over-50s, many of them grandparents, had a more difficult time looking at camera phone images on the tiny screens. It made me think that I'm overdue converting some of my most popular family photos from digital to something more tangible. I also saw something after the funeral I'd never witnessed before. A retired ESB employee used his Nokia N95 to snap shots of the family photos that were being passed around. His technique was really good and he snapped dozens of high-resolution images of old and worn-out photos. He was converting the physical photos into digital. Then he planned to tag them into a photoset before printing the best of the lot as a series of 4x6 tangible images. I likened his N95 tabletop work to field rostrum camera work. He was actually scanning photos without using a scanner. Before I left the afternoon pub session, I saw a 16 GB memory stick fastened to his key ring. That reminded me I'm overdue for upgrading to a 16 gig stick myself.  I'm sitting on top of a pile of abundant data, now shared on line with dozens of my brothers, first cousins and their families. There has to be a way for all of us to share our digital collections and to explore our family identities that way. From all the communities I've joined, I know the stream of digital activity that I share from multiple sources helps me define my communities of choice. These intangible lifestreams also define my roles in those different communities. Now it's time to convert some of those digital definitions to more tangible handheld objects.

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Image from my Flickr photostream, originally shot in 1941 by my aunt on a high school field trip.

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Relatives Fighting Over Scraps

LOSING OUT to some fast-fingerered family members on the heels of a death in the family will always remain a burning memory of mine and as we pack up to attend another funeral, the fighting has already started over wannabe heirlooms. There's a missing watch, some early 20th century military campaign ribbons, and pages from a family photo album that have disappeared from a small bungalow that used to be home for the senior member of the family tree. When things got messy in Pennsylvania over furniture, statues and 19th century kitchenware, I didn't get involved. But I did resolve to articulate in a will the way I'd like to see things handled in my case. I want to have everything worth bickering about put into one room and let everyone draw straws for the rights to claim lots of stuff. Then I consider the little pieces of paper that I value from deceased relatives--the pages from notebooks, the single dog-eared photos that used to hand in lines of sight throughout the day--and I wonder how similar things from my life will fare. Since most of my notebooks and photos are digital, will they be the cause of a clash between survivors? Should I reduce some of my most popular items to physical form? Should I work out a plan where the stuff stays in the cloud for a few decades, ensuring the process by having my estate pre-pay Blacknight or PutPlace for three decades of service? Or should I destroy all physical property and save its memory in digital form so there's no fighting? I'm thinking about all these things as I make plans to ship a container of valuable things from the neighbour's barn (at left) to our Irish home.

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Mobile Online Without Laptop

ANOTHER MONTH HAS PASSED as I travel around several events in Europe without my laptop. I'm using the little keyboard at left. Over the years, I've become smart enough to figure out how to shrink my portable computer so that it fits in my pocket. I've also discovered that personal media is just that--people personally decide what works best for them and who am I to impose my values? Nonetheless, gadget lovers have never had it so good. They can choose between the Palm Pre, the Blackberry Storm, the Nokia N97, the iPhone 3G S, an HTC Touch Pro 2, the SonyEricsson Satio, a wide assortment of netbooks, tablets, Android phones and more technology in a segment of devices I have just seen but not touched. People are buying this mobile internet technology (often called mobile internet devices, or Mids) during the current recession because this assortment of kit offers exceptional value for money.

State Examinations Commission Needs Media Monitoring Training

THE FRONT PAGE of the Irish Times has a shot of an iPhone with "Twittergate" emblazoned over it with the teaser "How the Leaving Cert leak spread on the net" (see below). Inside the paper, Paul Cullen writes, "The rescheduling of English Paper 2 would not have been required but for high-tech tools." [1] That conclusion overstretches the mark. The test would not required rescheduling if normal protocols were followed when invigilators realised they had distributed the incorrect exam. I supervise invigilators and those specialists know the immediate actions that must occur whenever exams are compromised. If you see a compromise, you stop everything and upchannel the incident. That didn't happen and the exam supervisor has been suspended. Because no one admitted the error, too much time elapsed and that prevented the State Exam Commission (SEC) from distributing a back-up exam.

Electricity Metre Running Backwards

ONE OF MY CLEVER colleagues has an electrician friend who has helped him run his electricity metre backwards. He's working with a backyard wind turbine and although its power output will hardly justify the cost of its purchase, it's still nice knowing that the initial installation is affecting power used by the house. And it's nicer still getting the news through a reduced electricity bill. Family living in Arizona pointed out how it's possible to get creative solar financing. Because photovoltaic panels are high-priced at the moment, some installers offer innovative ways for homeowners to afford the initial costs of installation. Arizona residents who jump over the cost barrier can discover that they can generate more than half of the electricity they need in their home. Throughout the States, you can often go solar with a company that agrees to install high-quality panels on your roof for no money down. So you let a solar installer put smart cells on your roof and you maintain them until you own them. The panels come with a smart metre that tells the company how much your home has resold to the electricity grid. The installer keeps the revenue generated by the panels and the home owner gets a metre that winds back a few units for the power produced. So basically, your roof is paying for the solar power installation and within 20 years, you own whatever is on your roof again. But right now, there's an enterprising lad in Tipperary who has figured out how to make his electrical metre turn backwards on peak wind days and that's a story that I hope gets repeated throughout energy-hungry Ireland.

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Photo from Kevin Kelly.

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Connecting Teachers to Irish Networking

ONE OF THE UNTAPPED resources for primary schools in Ireland is a deep mother lode of dedicated talent just a few miles away in the homes and business locations of parents and former students--like Rachael Cooke standing tall at left. Those people, often willing to share their time and talent, normally sit beyond the school gates without any form of connection to their old school grounds. The closest some former students come to the alma mater is when youngsters ring around with raffle tickets, prize competitions or when the kids bag groceries for tips in the local supermarket. With a little thought, many Irish parents could follow the flow of their local primary schools. With a little effort, some school boards could ensure their names, events and needs became relevant news items on Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and on discussion threads at Boards.ie. Some local newspapers will facilitate comment sections online that continue thoughts arising in letters to the editor. On the heels of a very successful Schools Conference in Tipperary Institute, I am trying to piece together an initiative that coalesces the energy so evident in the hallways of Tipperary Institute last weekend.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2-Typepad service near Fethard, County Tipperary, Ireland. Photo shot of Rachael Cooke interviewing Josie Fraser.

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Keys When I Die

THE RECESSION OF 2009 is forcing me to zero-base many of my activities and as I start closing online accounts, I've discovered I know dozens of passwords but many of them aren't written down anywhere. I've got some high-powered ones tied into EMC Cloud Storage and another 128-bit AES key on several user partitions on legacy machines. Some of the information in these partitions deserves to be read by my descendants so I'm starting to log some user names and passwords onto my Nokia E90, instead of embedding them into an RFID implant (at left). I'm also snapping screenshots of logos and profile screens of several online properties, then inserting the keys into the layers of Photoshop documents. It's like stegging my passwords for posterity. My wife knows how to find hidden or locked layers with Photoshop and even if Adobe dies, some company will keep the PSD format and my stuff will get unlocked.

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In Search of a Rich Experience

IN THE MIDDLE of a staff meeting, I'm hearing ideas about the importance of fostering a rich experience for students and staff. In an academic environment, you get a rich experience through a student dynamic. You get that dynamic by increasing numbers, offering social functions and engaging students with fun things. In my current role as a third level lecturer, I see a gigantic scissors just over the horizon and those scissors will cut a significant budget line out of the way the status quo gets funded. There is a shake-up directly ahead in Irish third level education. Some Institutes of Technology won't achieve university status. Some universities won't draw down funding from collaborative programmes. There may be some consolidation ahead as Irish third level institutions discover open collaboration is a prerequisite to ensuring a rich learning environment for everyone.

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Sent mail2blog using free wifi in Tipperary Institute.

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The Legacy of Backing Up

THE CUMULATIVE AGE of all the local storage devices shown at left is 19.4 years. Because of that, I need to burn some of my most precious stuff onto DVD while also pushing it up to an internet location where I trust Putplace or Blacknight to keep things in safe hands. I'll admit that I'm not the best at keeping a routine about back-ups but nonetheless, I'm into a fortnightly schedule that works well. The easiest thing I do involve saving my phone's data to hard drive, to ZYB.com and to a CD. The second easiest thing I do is upload key operating material to Putplace. That's an easy process because of software from Putplace. I'm also saving money-making material over onto secure space at Blacknight because FTP-Voyager prompts me for that. At the end of the month, if I cannot find a back-up of every critical file, I drop a fiver into a piggy bank for my little girl to enjoy when she breaks it open on her fifth birthday. In her first 19 months of life, she's been gifted EUR 15 for my complacency.

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Photo from my Flickr collection.

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There Ought To Be A Skip Cert

WE SPENT PART of a sunny weekend excavating more building rubble from the side and rear of our house and then filled a one tonne bag with the remnants of the house itself. Things like electrical cable, bathroom fittings, masonry nails, plastic pipes--those were expected. But we also unearthed two more decomposed bin bags filled with domestic rubbish. Since our home was left unfinished for nearly two years, it became a magnet for over-the-wall rubbish and all the building crews did was scrape a hole and roll the bags into the ground. After a few years, the bags and their ingredients decompose. The soil emits a curious odour, depending on the kind of mixture contained in the bags. We have another series of weekends to scrape and shift because there's a mound behind the house we haven't explored yet. Through all of this gardening, I wish Irish builders were forced to show a movement record for rubble they create when they build homes. In our case, it looks like one tonne of rubble for every 500 square metres of living area was created. And some of that rubble was put right next to the kitchen window.

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Photo from one of the excavations.

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