Arranged Delirium

I’m constantly harping on students to take personal responsibility for their data. When you’re working with central, networked, systems it’s just easy to get lazy:

“I’m not worried about my files - Someonesomewhere is backing them up.”

This never works out well. In any event, I’ve always encouraged students to use USB flash drives and just carry around their data so they’ll have access to it on any machine. They just need to remember to make their own backups at home : )

But in the last few years, several online storage services have popped up and are now reliable enough to recommend. Essentially these are services which store a limited amount of your data for free, and a significant amount if you are willing to fork out the cash. But for students - ever on a limited budget - the amount of free storage available is actually rather compelling. Thus if you can’t afford a flash drive, you can still have a free way to access your files. You must remember though that you have to have access to the internet to get to them - that’s another reason why the flash drive is still preferable.

Anyway, there are two primary models for these services: either you log into a web site and transfer files, or you download software to your machine and it attends to synching files for you. Services like Dropbox and Synchplicity take the route of installing software and handling the synch for you. I think both of these services work well. Of course, organization schemes vary, so you’d probably want to try these services out for yourself, but here is a mac-centric review of Dropbox which would probably be my choice. I’m sure you can find numerous reviews of Sychplicity as well. SugarSync is another similar tool if you’re really getting into comparisons. Comparing the features might lead you to the tool that works best for you and SugarSync’s web site has a convenient table...

But if you are working in a shared lab environment like my students, you’re not going to be able to install software. That’s what makes Box.net a nice alternative - with no software to install, it works via web browser. In fact, this is why I prefer it over the other services - I want to access my files anywhere, at any time. There’s a review of Box.net here, if you are looking for more information; and there is an iPhone app for added convenience.

All of this was just a long-winded way of saying: if you don’t want to buy a flash drive for my course, you can use a Box.net account instead. The free one give you 1 gig of storage. Just try it out before you need it - you don’t want to find out the night before the project is due that it’s not working.

...I guess that last paragraph alone could have made this a much shorter blog post. Oh well, studies indicate that you didn’t read it anyhow.

Crap. My RSS feed is broken. I’m on it…

...fixed. You may need to refresh your settings.

I’ve abandoned all broadcast television for good. The process began years ago when I became a disciple of TiVo, and realized that there was no reason why I should ever watch anything at any specific time again. I also realized that I could avoid commercials - which I abhor. (I actually enjoy some commercials - just not during programming.)

More recently however, I’ve eschewed all forms of broadcast TV by ending my DirectTV subscription. Essentially at this point, I get all of my television via Netflix and AppleTV. I was inittially quite surprised at the quality of the performance of video streaming over broadband - it’s very good (especially if you have 3 mbps or better). Netflix also has a robust selection of content available via streaming, so all’s good there. With AppleTV you can run anything you get from iTunes. Add in Boxee and you’ve got access to even more content. (Although no Hulu - which is sad. And stupid.)

In the end, I went from paying about $60/month for DirectTV and Netflix to an $18/month Netflix expense. With that kind of savings I could buy a series each month on iTunes, own the content, and still come out ahead. Of course, I could never watch that much TV - so I stand to save a lot of money. The only real loss is live sports programming; but I haven’t given up hope for finding a solution for watching Ohio State football. If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably invest more to buy a Mac Mini and install Plex on it - which would give me added features and content - but it would have cost me more too. Meh.

If you are interested in moving to Internet video and leaving your cable/dish subscription behind, Forbes has published a very readable article on the topic, and I’m more than happy to answer questions if you leave one in the comments section…

I finally got around to re-designing my web site as well as this blog. Several folks have written in asking how I did certain things. It’s virtually all XHTML and CSS,with a lot of CSS doing the hard work of the rounded corners. There isn’t an external style sheet since the inset boxes with the pics are specific to each page - so I’ve included the styles in each file. If you’re running IE6 or earlier, you’re out of luck…but then again, there’s no good reason to be using IE as a browser.

The effect for the examples of student work comes courtesy of a javascript called Lightbox. You’ll find it on numerous sites. You can achieve a similar effect with straight CSS code, but I thought the js was less tedious to implement. I tend to avoid javascript whenever I can, but convenience and lack of time won the day this time through.

Just in case you were wondering we now have more data on the pointlessness of Twitter. Don’t get me wrong - the technology has been used effectively for some very important issues. But don’t kid yourself about how this content is actually more regularly used and consumed. Here’s a recent study by Pear Analytics. Read the entire White Paper (its quite short) for some interesting detail including a comparison on Facebook usage.

And if you are interested in the topic of how this kind of superficial communication limits our understandings of the world, take a (not so quick) look at Is Twitter Making You Stupid?