2004 December

Remembering — and Preserving — our Past

December 31, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

One of my passions is taking old family photos, films and video, digitizing them and finding archival quality media and methods to preserve them.

Thought I’d take a moment this New Year’s Eve day to go through some old photos. I decided to quickly jam together a videoblog post too (this is still in beta, so the quality of the pristine DV audio & video didn’t come through) as it showcases an old 16mm film preserved as well as a few of the thousands of photos I’ve already done to date.

What are *you* doing to preserve your past? In a Scientific American, January 1995 article entitled, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents” (Download PDF here) discussed were the problems of preserving digital media and hoping it can be played back at some point in the future. To illustrate what a problem we’re all facing, do you have a 5 1/4″ floppy drive? How about access to a Beta video deck? Got a 3.5″ floppy drive? How about a SyQuest removable hard disk drive? (..and SyQuest was *really* hot at one point). How about a Zip or Jaz drive to open all those old files?

You can see what we’re all up against. While it’s been a laborious and time consuming process for me to digitize several hundred family photos and re-touch them, what if they weren’t even available to me? With the explosion in digital photography, how many people do you think have thousands of digital pictures sitting on their un-backed up hard drive? Photos that may never make it to the point one of their children or grandchildren take up the family archiving cause and do what I’ve been doing.

Filed Under: Gadgets & Hacks, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, Technology, Vlogging

Podcasting 101

December 30, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

One of my first posts back on December 10th had to do with podcasting. Tonight I was reading about a new tool called ccPublisher (a tool which allows users to easily license their work, and optionally upload it to the Internet Archive for free hosting and cataloging). This tool has been delivered by the Creative Commons (CC) folks and a host of content is available there offered under this new CC method for copyrighting and licensing works.

Some Mac radio guys have uploaded something interesting called "Podcasting 101". It’s a nice primer on what podcasting is…but is a teensy bit sophomoric. Still, it gives the basics and has a nice overview of RSS ‘wrappers’ for an audio file, etc. Take a peek.

Filed Under: Podcasting

Another step for VoIP acceptance

December 29, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

The Associated Press reports that the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling by a lower court that The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission can’t regulate calls made through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) like it does with traditional phone lines.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Innovation, Technology

The Internet as our Collective Consciousness

December 29, 2004 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Had lunch today with a self described “curmudgeon emeritus” who is a guy that has been an entrepreneurial tech leader, political operative and businessman in the Twin Cities — and someone who proudly considers himself a geek. It was a very intellectually stimulating discussion.

Our conversation ran the gamut from pre-internet history (and even pre-industrial age stuff like guilds vs. the way things are organized today in to companies) and we did quite a bit of thought exploration about the next big thing and what are likely to be great business models in the next phase of the Web (Web 2.0 if you will).

Here is a brief recap of our conversation…

Wow…what a different user experience!

December 27, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Late today my bride and I purchased a new HP/Compaq tower to replace an aging Sony to run the accounting in her business. This evening we purchased a new G5 iMac 17″ to replace an aging 15″ iMac whose screen and power had become too limiting for one of her employees. So I had a personal experience with migrating data from a machine running WinXP-to-WinXP and a Mac OS X-to-Mac OS X machine the same day.

I gotta tell ya, it’s night and day.

diagram_20040617 Apple has made it brain-dead-simple to copy *all* relevant files from an old Mac to a new one by simply hooking up a firewire cable between the Mac’s and starting up the old one in firewire disk mode (this is where the old Mac looks to the new Mac like a firewire hard drive). Click a button and wait for everything to copy over (in my case 4GB’s took about 24 minutes) and it’s done. I was stunned to discover that even the file placement on the desktop had all of them in exactly the same spot as they were on the old Mac!

What was my experience with the PC like? I ended up copying 950MB’s of files scattered all over the place (luckily I’d received a new 1GB USB thumb drive for Christmas or I woulda been burning CD’s) and copying them to the new machine. With about a half dozen round trips to the Sony and back to the HP/Compaq, I’d finally copied over all the relevant files. NOT a job for Joe Sixpack.

Oh yeah, it took me about 3 hours on the HP/Compaq vs. 45 minutes on the Mac (24 to copy and 21 to tweak a few things).

I understand there are tools you can buy to assist with migrating data from an old PC to a new one, but shouldn’t the manufacturer make this a painless process for the customer? Gee…if it’s really simple to migrate to a new machine, wouldn’t people be more apt to buy new machines? As my son would say, “Doh!”

Filed Under: Computing, Innovation

Continuing broadband adoption

December 26, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Broadband adoption just keeps on growing. Now an article on CNN Money describes that the FCC states that broadband subscription jumps 38% in the U.S. as of June, 2004.

As I mentioned in my first post entitled, "Video games and the internet bubble. Is it time for dot com…the sequel?" there are many data points about broadband adoption and why this is important for innovation.

My contention always was that the dot com crash was due, in no small part, to people having to "suck a flood of internet content through a straw" since the bulk of people were still on dial-up modems in the early 2000′s. It’s different now and getting more so.

I had a colleague a couple of years ago that told me she had 10mbps fiber in her loft building in downtown San Francisco. I corrected her, "You mean 1mbps don’t you?" "Oh no," she said. "It’s really, really fast. In fact, a guy that lives upstairs is running a server farm and his startup company is in his unit." Thinking about risk management issues like heat buildup, server backup and scalability as she was describing his business, I found myself nonetheless really excited thinking about the possibilities of having access to that much bandwidth.

If we want a jet engine driving our economy, *real* broadband like hers is what’ll do it.

Filed Under: Computing, Innovation, Technology, Web 2.0

Duct tape and a gun to my head

December 25, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

2334_l Those are the only two things that would’ve made me feel even more captive in my seat at the AMC theatre in Eden Prairie tonight. Thought we’d catch a movie as a family on this Christmas evening, and we were forced to endure seven commercials and half a dozen movie trailers (over 15 minutes worth) before the movie started!

I was not happy and went out and talked to a manager (she was a young woman just doing her job so I was kind. She’d obviously been beaten up over this in the past) and she told me that it was corporate “…and the NCN subsidiary that controls the ads. We have to put on 5 minutes worth”. I then called AMC’s hotline when I got home to complain. Looks like I’m not the only one who is hot about this and there is a lawsuit about movie commercials too.

A couple of years ago, I was equally hot over the fact that studio movies on DVD would “lock out” the ability to fast forward through previews so a viewer was forced to watch several minutes worth of stuff to get to the movie. Now the U.S. House of Representatives is getting lobbyed hard and had a bill pending this session to criminalize methods of fast forwarding but it was voted down…for now.

The content producers are clearly wringing their hands over how to prevent piracy of their intellectual property and I’ve historically been a huge defender of the rights of content producers to own their copyright and the products that result. But I gotta tell ya, I’m rapidly losing my patience with the “duct tape and a gun to my head” crowd forcing me to sit through their inane crap to get to the content I paid for and want.

If you too are not happy about either movie commercials, not being able to fast forward the DVD’s you buy and watch in your own home — and in any way being metaphorically duct-taped to your seat or have a gun to your head held by content producers — write to Congress, the President or State Legislators.

Filed Under: Commerce, Conversational Marketing, Open Media

Merry Christmas

December 24, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

As I think about the world and the myriad of spiritual interpretations of universal truth, one basic thought on this day is my Christian tradition (and a version of the truth as I was taught it) vs. other paths taken by others in the world. (There are A LOT of humans that practice other religions which begs the question: what is the truth?).

Humans are so close genetically it’s pretty certain that we all spring forth from a common ancestry. Is the world’s collective conciousness and all of our respective spiritual interpretations really that far apart? It makes me think that I’ve got to step-up my understanding of the world’s religions since there are more similiarities than differences among us.

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

‘Twas the day before the night before Christmas…

December 23, 2004 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

nancystevejeannexmas Yeah…that’s me giving the fake, melodramatic reaction to the Give-A-Show Projector my older sister received for Christmas in, I think, 1969.

Today I had one of those “Wow!” reactions. I haven’t experienced last minute, day-before-the-night-before-Christmas, crowds of power shoppers like I did this afternoon. Over the last couple of days, I’ve been struck by the huge volume of inventory that exists on retail shelves and racks and took it as a sign that this was NOT going to be a very happy holiday for retailers. Markdowns and sales are already occuring, stores like Marshall Field’s have cheerfully announced that “We’re Open until 7pm on Christmas Eve!” (an unprecedented move), and anecdotally most of my friends, family and acquaintences are spending less on higher quality items this year (i.e., less total stuff is being jammed under the tree).

So what’s going on?

Birthday Blues and Gen Y

December 22, 2004 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

itsa_won_life Today is another milestone on my path in life (my birthday) and I always grow contemplative and melancholy on this day each year. When I was a kid it was all about having my birthday being ‘lost’ due to the impending Christmas holiday (“hey Steve, you’ll get your ‘combo’ bday/xmas present on Christmas!”) and I was more sad than anything else. As I moved in to adulthood, this day was all about thinking through the meaning of the year of my life just passed, what I accomplished, and whether or not I made a difference in the world.

Has mine been a wonderful life? I often wonder. Today, more than any other, is the time these thoughts swirl around in my head faster than any other day throughout the year. Though some think it’s sappy and is an overused metaphor for contemplating one’s impact on the world, I still watch It’s A Wonderful Life almost every year…and it has the same heart-tugging, introspective effect on me every time.

Most people have reflective thoughts like these on New Year’s Eve. Me? That evening feels like I’m on the precipice about to leap in to the future — and I always find myself enthusiastic, optimistic and eager for the new year to begin. I consider a new year to be all about renewal, possibilities and being my opportunity to re-engineer myself and focus on making a difference and being a “bright light” once again.

On the next page is content from an email I received from a buddy of mine last night. It is of the type that I almost *always* immediately delete — but I didn’t this time and it sparked thoughts about my “generational place” in the world and the continuing process of renewal.