My teenage daughter is just starting the Photography unit of the art course she is taking in grade 10. I was asking her about it last night, and heard a couple of things I really liked. The class will start off with the students making and using pinhole cameras. Secondly, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the students will be taught traditional darkroom techniques.

I switched over completely to digital about five years ago, but I learned traditional darkroom techniques in the 1970’s, at the age my daughter is now, and even though it’s been been years since I’ve seen the inside of a darkroom, I feel that learning darkroom skills influences my digital photography, and I’m happy to have had the chance to learn those skills.

For my daughter (and the other students in her class), even though eventually most of the work will be done digitally, being exposed to the “old school” craft will provide a deeper understanding of the art of photography, and hopefully encourage the development of a slower, more thoughtful eye.

Kudos to her teacher!

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This week, I speak with Peter Muller of PRT Consulting about Personal Rapid Transit, an approach to solving some of the issues around traditional public transit that have hindered its more widespread acceptance.

Direct link to episode

This week’s music

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It is difficult today to understand how revolutionary VisiCalc was when it came on the scene in 1979. As the first spreadsheet application, it empowered users in organizations and businesses to do their own financial analyses, and freed them from the tyranny of the mainframe data centres of the day. Before the spreadsheet, for a lot of computational work, programs were run in batch mode, as opposed to being run in real time. A user would get in contact with Central I.S., adopt an appropriately deferential attitude, and meekly ask the stern analyst in the white lab coat behind the glass doors to run the job.

If you were lucky, and hadn’t pissed off the analyst recently (causing him to “forget” to schedule your job), the next day a large printout would be on your desk for you to dig through. Business at the speed of thought? Hardly. With the advent of Visicalc, you could get your numbers when you wanted, and insult I.T. nerds at your leisure, in safety.

No wonder the PC was resisted by traditional IT staff for so long; with the loss of control that applications like VisiCalc represented, the power of the I.T. staff was neutralized, and like Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.

It’s sadly ironic that three decades later, the battle for control is being fought again, but the the role of the traditional IT department is now filled by companies such as Apple, the people who were the rebels thirty years ago. The battlefield has shifted from the data centre to the mobile device; Apple’s capricious, murky, and inconsistent App Store application approval process is seen as a heavy handed attempt by Apple to maintain dominance, even as prominent developers publicly abandon iPhone development efforts. The term “jailbreaking” for installing software allowing the user to install whatever they want on the iPhone is most app.

Apple is not alone in its desire for control. The recently released Google Chrome OS seems to be designed to push the users towards Google-controlled services, and away from running the apps they wish to run, and storing the data where they wish to store it. The Cloud is being shaped into a tool for giving the public freedom from choice. And who knows what Microsoft has in mind for Azure.

Throw in a soupcon of DRM, erode fair use, patent everything in sight, and whip up some security fears, and the three decades of relative computer freedom we have enjoyed could be just an anomaly.

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I’m working today on a presentation I’ll be giving at work this coming Wednesday. I’ve spent a good chunk of the day on it so far, but I haven’t opened PowerPoint yet, and I believe my presentation will be all the better for it.

So many PowerPoint presentations I have seen all seem the same to me, and I’d be willing to bet that the presenters created their presentations by opening a blank PowerPoint template (or Keynote, Impress etc.), and started plunking in bullet points. Without realizing it, they surrendered themselves to the typical PowerPoint mode of thinking, and structuring of information.

I believe a better approach is to use your presentation software last.  Today, I’ve used three tools: Evernote for information collection, Xmind (a free mind mapping tool) for high level structure/framework of my presentation, and Omni Outliner Pro (an outlining tool) for the lower level structure and presentation notes, and I’ve been able to focus on content and organization, rather than getting sidetracked by formatting bullet points and font sizes.

When I am done preparing my content (and not a second before), then I can open PowerPoint and start creating slides, slides that are organized around the content (as opposed to content being shoehorned into slides)

I think presentation software should be treated as PDF generation software, i.e. as a renderer of finished content. The Adobe Acrobat format was not designed for editing, and similarly Presentation software should not be used as idea generation software.

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This past weekend at Podcamp Montreal I attended a presentation by Adele McAlear on protecting one’s digital legacy. It was a great presentation, and we also had a great discussion during the session, and it really got me thinking again about the fragility of our media.

I stated that is ironic I have century-old photos of relatives that are in good condition, and CD-ROMS I burnt in 1997 that can no longer be read reliably.

In museums around the world we have ancient clay tablets, scrolls, ancient codex’s, ancient fine art. Much of the material from these ancient times was lost, but some survived, and properly cared for should last indefinitely.

Contrast this with the present day methods of storage: CD’s and DVD’s of suspect longevity, video and audio tape flaking oxide, hard drives (often as not with no back-ups), old data tapes and obsolete diskettes/cartridges, and cloud storage that be a company shut-down or an electromagnetic pulse away from oblivion. Many of the old films of the early 20th century on cellulose nitrate have decomposed, and for many others no quality prints, let along negatives survive. Many of the publications of the 20th century were printed on acid-filled cheap paper stock, and are deteriorating rapidly.

Maybe we should be looking for data storage methods that focus on archival permanence rather than technical trendiness. If you have text you cannot afford to lose, print it out on high quality paper. For audio/video I’m not sure what the long term solution would be, we can’t all have analog disk cutters in our homes.

In the far future, the 20th and 21st century could be know as the Age of Ephemera, if little of our present day content survives.

Clay tablets, anyone?

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Every family that celebrates Christmas has stories about the holiday: Stories about family traditions, funny incidents etc. that collectively help form the sense of specialness about the occasion for the family.

Sadly, family history is fragile. Unless you’re famous or historically significant, biographers will not be lining up to write the story of your family. The result? Through the passing of generations, stories fade, and voices are eventually stilled. It can happen very quickly: I have family home movies of Christmas celebrations from the early 1960’s; these are silent movies, and there are many people I don’t recognize.

This Christmas, if you have a sound recorder, why not record some family stories? In particularly, why not record Christmas memories from more elderly members of your family? If you preserve family history in this way, future generations will thank you.

Recently, recordings of more than 90 years ago were discovered in England. Efforts are underway to locate the descendants of those whose voices are heard on these fragile cylinders. Imagine the excitement if these voices are reunited with their families! This is the kind of excitement we can all give to future generations.

Merry Christmas, and hit that record button!!!

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Recording, Family

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Recently, I have seen articles/blog posts about Social Media in the Enterprise (such as this one by Mitch Joel) which paint a picture of Internal IT departments as the home of baseless obstructionism when it comes to innovation. The IT department is seen as an obstacle to be overcome or circumvented, or even as the enemy of Progress.

As an IT worker for fourteen years, I have to say enough! Even though as a software developer and social media evangelist, I often butt heads with the support and operations groups in our IT organization, I still feel I have to come to the defense of internal IT departments. For any business large enough to have an internal IT department, if the IT infrastructure is offline, the business is offline. Without network infrastructure, ERP systems, CRM systems, email etc. the business cannot function.

And in the event of a catastrophic outage, who is on the hotseat? Certainly not the high-priced social media consultant, who has split the scene to attend the next conference or power breakfast. It’s the folks with the unglamourous but vital role of keeping the IT infrastructure running. It’s easy to dismiss IT as stodgy and uncooperative if you don’t have to assume responsibility for things going wrong. I’ve had to explain to high level executives why a critical system is offline, and it is not fun. How many of these “IT is the enemy” consultants have had to do that?  IT has to assume the accountability; regardless of how it happened. (And by the way Mitch, there have been exploits of Flash, so to dismiss Flash security concerns as absurd does your customers a disservice.)

IT assets are among the most important assets a company has in today’s business environment. They cannot be treated as a playground into which to dump trendy toys. A competent IT department will obviously do its best to protect them. Consultants who are truly looking out for the interest of their clients will accept this as a given, and will work with Internal IT groups to provide safe, secure, scalable, maintainable solutions.

Technorati Tags: SocialMedia, Web2.0, IT

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While I produce two podcasts, have a blog, am on twitter, Facebook etc., I cannot accept the Orthodoxy of Social Media in full; in particular, every time I hear the phrase “Personal Branding” I grit my teeth.

To me, the phrase smacks of artifice and insincerity, as if one’s personal brand is a virtual mask to be donned, a persona to be foisted on unsuspecting members of the social cloud the Internet is becoming. I don’t care about my brand, if I am forced to put it in these terms. I’m more concerned with being genuine, and honest with myself, and I am not going to second-guess every step I take online, worrying if it is consistent with my brand.

I see branding as the creation of a burn scar via the application of hot metal. No thanks.

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Imagine if one company owned email on the Internet (meaning that if you wanted to send/receive email, you had to use this company’s services.) Imagine the company’s service crashing, or terms of service changing, etc. What can you do?

Twitter has had another outage today, and some are suggesting that they need to be bought by an outfit like Yahoo, to get a better architecture. People have also complained about restrictions on services such as MySpace and Facebook. These are all walled gardens, or perhaps a better metaphor is the Shopping Mall.  You get the illusion of public space, but the reality is you are on private property, subject to the whim and fortunes of the owners.

I long for the day (and Open Social is a welcome step in this direction) when these services are like email, and not under the exclusive control of single companies. Right now we are playing on their field, and we are not the ones in control.

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Tags: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Web2.0

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I got home from work a couple of days ago, to discover that my 13 and 10 year old daughters had discovered GarageBand (an old version on the old G4-based notebnook I’m letting my 10 year old try right now). WIthout any help or documentation they figured out how to use it, and created some very nice sounding songs using Loops.

When I told my younger daughter that I was impressed that they had figured out the program by themselves, she replied (in that “parents can be so stupid” tone familiar to anyone who has kids) that is was easy; really no big deal. Contrast this with the attitude of so many adults to technology — they’ve been told over and and over that “using computers is hard”, and thus find a way to make it hard.

To me it seems that if someone says something is hard (unless they are referring to difficulties they themselves are having), there can often be an agenda involved; there is either some “gatekeeping” going on, or it is a case of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt — this tactic will be familiar to any Linux fans out there).

Yes, of course some things are hard, but my kids tell me that a lot more is possible than we might imagine. Kids make the best teachers, sometimes.

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Tags: GarageBand, Computers, Children

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