Month: December 2006

More eMail Overload

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

It seems we are not the only ones feeling the massive pinch of the eMail spam bug. In my earlier posts (1, 2) on email and its obvious abuse as a communication tool I focused on other tools to enable more efficent collaboration. I just sort of ignored Spam. It is hard to ignore …

Every morning I get up around 6 AM and head straight for my computer while making my tea. I typically do my last email check sometime around 10 PM (for sanity and sleeping sake) and clear out my Inbox at that time. This morning was not unlike all the others … fire up Mail and watch it pull in 50-60 new emails from the evening and early morning hours (that doesn’t include the ones that got auto filtered into the junk folder). This morning there were 4 real emails — one sent last night around 11 PM and three from this morning. That is a lot of stuff to filter. That same link from above is from a GigaOM post today in which they they cite Softcan in that close to 90% of email is spam. Again, that is a lot.

This is not intended to be a long post about the evils of spam — that is well covered — but just another thought to fuel my need to expand the information architecture within my organization to support more effective collaboration.

New Mics and Recorders

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I wrote a while back about Extreme Mac’s MicroMemo for the iPod Video.  I have one and now use it as my primary iPod recorder.  The one problem that still shows up every now and then is the noise from the hard drive spinning on the 5th Gen iPod.  When the new Nano came out we all discovered you could plug a voice recorder into it … the good news is that the Nano doesn’t have a hard drive to spin up, the bad news is that the Nano is so small the regular voice recorders look silly on them.  Well I just noticed that there is now a Nano specific version of the MicroMemo.  When it gets to the Computer Store on campus we’ll pick one up and put it through the paces.

Nano Recorder

The other little thing that MicrMemo released is a stand alone lapel microphone that works with the MicroMemo.  Simple little thing that plugs into the recorder and clips on your shirt.  I noticed when I did my review of the original recorder that using it with my 80GB iPod made the whole thing about the size of a wireless transmitter.  This mic will be worth a test as well.

Mic

QuickTime is Old

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Not that the technology is aging, just that December 3rd is QuickTime’s birthday! According to Apple Matters, 12/3/1991 was the day QuickTime 1.0 came out. This is one I remeber very well … I was a sophomore psychology major at WVU. The Mountaineers were not heading to a bowl game, so I guess I was paying attention to a whole host of other things. We had a computer store on campus that I would stop in to see the latest from Apple. At the time I had a Mac SE with a giant 20 MB hard drive … but I wanted more! When I saw QT I was amazed at what you could do with it … it took imagination as the movies were really just the size of a postage stamp, but there was real potential.

When QuickTime hit I instantly started talking to a faculty adviser of mine who was a Mac head as well about the thought of capturing the best of Psych lectures on video and embedding them into text documents to share with people after the fact. HTML wasn’t around, so there wasn’t a way to do this as easily as you can now — and you certainly couldn’t just upload stuff to youtube. About a year later, Apple introduced a technology called OpenDoc that allowed you to build experiences from multiple document types … perfect for combining video and text. My SE wouldn’t touch the stuff, but a year and a half later I had an LC III that actually had enough horsepower to pull it off.

I was never able to make my QT/Text study guides work, but a couple of years later I headed off to Bloomsburg University’s Instructional Technology program and got my first real view of media authoring for educational purposes. I was still using QT, but now easily embedding it in Authorware, Director, and other tools to create learning experiences. It just sort of surprises me that back in 1991 I was struck by the power of a postage stamp sized piece of video for educational purposes. Back then I couldn’t have dreamed that I would end up at PSU working to create teaching and learning environments powered by technology. Life is funny.

FTB is Gone

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I let the From the Basement (FTB) domain expire last week. FTB was a podcast that Bart Pursel, Chris Millet, and I did on a weekly basis from November 2004 through March 2005. This was back when Google would return the, “did you mean broadcasting?” question when one would attempt to find information on it all. We started FTB really as a research project — I wanted to know about RSS enclosures and I really wanted to understand what it took to create a “podcast show” like Adam Curry had. What happened was a very fun weekly event that ended up gaining some listeners … once we realized people were listening we started to feel both terrified and amazed all at the same time. It was hard to let it go, but at the end of the day we weren’t using it and I have enough podcasting in my life at the moment.

Every week we would gather in my basement to create the show. Over the weeks it got very complicated … we couldn’t just fire up GarageBand, we had to get really creative with the whole thing. By the time we figured out how to really pull it all off we were using three laptops, a 7 band equalizer/mixer, two microphones, and a Kaos sound effects pad — and that was just the hardware side. For software we would routinely bring in “guests” using iChat A/V or Skype, iTunes to mix in music, a web browser to find interesting information and to mix in sounds from websites, and Audio Hijack Pro to record it all. Let’s just say setup took us a while.

At any rate, the shows got better and better, but more outrageous each week. We ended up taking them down in about June 2005 when it was clear they were not safe for office consumption. It was a great time and really laid the groundwork for our understanding of the power of the podcast. In our minds we were radio personalities … we also feel like we were the first vodkasters out there!

limes_table.jpg
Long Live the Limes!

Crazy Comes in all Flavors

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Indulge me … Traveling sure can be interesting.  Airports, airplanes, rental cars, and the people who work, interact, and seemingly live within them can make it all so difficult. I know it must be a real pain to get up everyday and head to the airport for work — there are always people there wanting you to help them, or show them to their gate, or ask you questions like, “is this where I drop off my car?” Believe me, I can understand, but at the end of the day they picked the career path.

Flying in from Austin to DC earlier today the steward (I am guessing that is the male term for the guy who hands out the drinks and scowls at me for asking questions) made my life tons of fun as I was sitting there. Every other person (correct that, passengers) who walks down the aisle works very hard to avoid slamming into people’s arms as they sit in the size challenged seats. I even paid for the upgrade to get an “extra 5 inches of legroom.” Every time he walked by he slammed into me harder and harder as to tell me I was in his way and to make me realize how lucky I was to be in his airplane.
At the Dulles International Airport as I waited to catch a rubber band powered glider back to State College I got to watch a show that would never make it on cable TV — the language and drama would make Tony Soprano scratch his head — or whack someone. Let me share a couple of examples of the love that is present this time of year in the airports …

Scenario one … Two guys showed up at the bar at the same time at the only open stool … they stared each other down like Rocky does the Russian dude in the one sequel … after about (and I am not kidding) 10 minutes of stare down, the one guy just yelled out, “fuck this, you are a real asshole!” He then just stormed away. Hmm, not all that together for an airport. How’d he get through security? I honestly thought there was going to be an all out fight break out between these two guys. The one who stayed just laughed and stared at him while the stool loser walked away. BTW, the winner didn’t even sit down.
The other was this woman who told her husband that she didn’t want to sit with him and top piss off so he stormed off … she then proceeded to cozy up to some guy at the bar and tell him to order her a drink — did I miss something here? She then yelled at the bartender for not paying attention to her and got pissed at the guy next to her as he sat down — I guess because he was too close … who knows. I went back to listening to my audiobook only to look up and notice this same lady was now crying and showing the stranger next to her pictures of her when she was young. I hate to say it, but I tried to listen, but I couldn’t make out the crazy talk through the tears.

crazy_travel.jpg
This is what travel does to people.

All that happened in about a 20 minute span as I grabbed a quick beer trying to kill time between flights. I know Steve Martin and John Candy already made the best travel movie ever, but just hanging out at the airport could create a TV series that would rival anything Seinfeld ever pulled off. Sorry for the rant, but a full day of traveling and watching the drama around me was just too much to keep to myself.