December 2006 Archives

I've been busily creating to-do lists since my third year at Kent State, when it became obvious there is a better way to live than worrying if you are forgetting something every moment of the day.  Once I decided to make the slow shift to being As Paperless As Possible, I searched for ways to keep my lists on my computers and PDA.  After trying several possible solutions, I finally settled on a great piece of software called OmniOutliner and used it religiously for a few years.  It became impractical over time, however, because one soon learns that--despite owning a laptop and a PDA--you are sometimes on the road with neither and need access to your lists.  Additionally, OmniOutliner doesn't sync with PDAs, limiting its usefulness to only when near the computer.

I began using Backpack as a web-based alternative and have been keeping my lists there for a year and a half.  Over time, using Backpack created a shift in my overall thinking: if I am going to house all this data in a digital format, why in God's name would I want to bind it to my laptop drive that (a) is too small to hold everything; (b) can only be one place at a time, perhaps a place where you are not when you need the info most; and (c) is guaranteed to fail at the most inopportune time?  (I've lived through a few hard drive crashes.  One was especially bad--a physical crash of the drive--and the data has been lost forever.  I am notoriously bad about backups; that is, I don't do any.)

The answer became obvious: I am paying out the wazoo for unlimited high-speed internet access, so I may as well put it to good use by storing all this vital information off-site.  There are benefits to this strategy.  First, hard drive space offered by these companies typically exceed what is available on my physical laptop drive (within limits, of course).  Second, we assume such companies make routine backups of your data, increasing the safety factor over my less rigorous methods.  Additionally, with free high-speed access available many places in even smaller cities, your data is never too far away.

For a short time, I used a paid Backpack account to begin storing this data remotely.  Recently, however, I have decided that making monthly payments seemed silly when I could house the data on the iPower server I use to host my various web sites.  I installed MediaWiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.  This will be the storehouse for all of my text and image files.  I wondered briefly if I could also use this remote storage space as a place to back up all my other files.  However, Mac OS X has trouble natively and transparently connecting to remote servers using FTP.  Even when you are able to make the connection, the drive space is read only, which makes backing up to the server space an impossibility.  If anyone has suggestions on this, I'd love to hear it.

Several years ago, I decided go digital.  My dream looked something like this: Every letter/email I write, every lesson I plan, every resource I need for teaching or any of my many pet projects would be locked away on my laptop's hard drive.  These files would be organized in such a manner that they could be located and recalled nearly instantaneously.  Files would be cross-referenced by category (using aliases/shortcuts, etc.) and possible usage.  Papers I had on-hand that were not yet on the computer would be scanned in and stored as either an image or OCRed and converted to RTF files.  This data could then be accessed for use at home, the office, or in my classroom.

Over time, I've realized this is an impossibility in our society as it currently exists for a multitude of reasons.  First of all, we are not even close to the paperless society that was promised us years ago—at work last year, for example, our faculty printed more than 2.5 million pages using our three copy machines.  (Management was none too pleased when reporting that this is more than the local Kinko's does in a year on ten self-serve copiers.)  I am flooded with paper at work, and so the dream of the paperless office is much more the vision than the reality.  So, I've modified my original goal and am working to be As Paperless As Possible (APAP).  More on this to come.

Add to this the inherent technology problems associated with my visions.  Storage space, for one.  Although hard drive sizes are increasing rapidly, I was naive to believe even for a moment that storing all this info would be possible on any factory-issued drive.  My laptop is now essentially pinned at its 40GB limit, and I have but a fraction of the information I would like to store on the drive.  It's all the digital media that clogs thing, of course.  My iTunes music library alone accounts for something like 14GB of this used space, and I don't have anywhere close to my entire CD library stored digitally.  As above, more on my plans for overcoming this little obstacle soon.

Another issue is the organizational structure itself.  How was the data to be stored?  As individual files in category folders, indexed for searching?  In one of the many storage database apps (that followed my own effort, the packrat, I might add) on the market?  (I have purchased more than one, only to have them essentially unused.)  In some other manner?  Honestly, sorting all those files, cross-referencing them, adding keywords, etc. is a much larger undertaking than I had originally imagined.  Hell, I routinely save downloaded files to the desktop until it is practically covered, then "organize" the problem by creating a new folder ("Untitled Folder 17") and dragging them all into it.  I still don't have it figured out, and this is one point of the blog: "talking" out loud and sorting through things as I go.

I added a wiki to my website this weekend.  Why not post and organize these thoughts there?  I considered it.  However, I decided that the blog is a more appropriate forum.  The wiki is locked to public access, and this seems like a project that at least might be of interest to others.  Additionally, I would love to hear comment from others who have taken on similar challenges, with success or no.  The only way to get such feedback is to offer my story up to the public for review.  Thanks for stopping by.