jims musings

Did you know the future gets closer– every day!
By the end of 2009, around 4.6 bil­lion cell phones were in use– nearly 70% of the world pop­u­la­tion, and nearly the entire adult pop­u­la­tion. This is an amaz­ing sta­tis­tic! In prod­uct terms, cell phones rival food. Only oxy­gen and sun­light have a solid lead on cell phone use.
Cur­rently, most of these phones are pretty basic– phone calls only. This will change rapidly. Soon, more than half of cell phones will be internet-capable. They will have cam­eras, GPS receivers and all sorts of doo­dads. They will also be pro­gram­ma­ble, with thou­sands of down­load­able appli­ca­tions. These appli­ca­tions are the key to suc­cess of these bil­lions of mobile devices. They will cater to the myr­iad needs of mankind– whether it is help­ing a New Yorker find a great new place for lunch or a Niger­ian dry farmer plan his crop and coor­di­nate a plant­ing sched­ule with nearby farm­ers.
In terms of ‘sur­vival of the fittest’, these devices help make us ‘fit­ter’. Com­bin­ing sub­stan­tial com­pu­ta­tional power, inter­net access and the need of the moment, these devices allow us to respond more pow­er­fully to our momen­tary needs.
I fore­see not only GPS and cam­era ubiq­uity in these phones, but also barom­e­ters, ther­mome­ters, incli­nome­ters, and mag­ne­tome­ters. Pos­si­bly some sort of laser or sonar-based mea­sure­ment capa­bil­ity as well. Also, there will be built-in net­work­ing of sub­stan­tial sophis­ti­ca­tion. Phones will be able to ‘talk’ with one another, shar­ing user data, posi­tion infor­ma­tion and per­haps even using shared sig­nals. In many places, you will be able to use your phone like a remote con­trol– order­ing a soda from a vend­ing machine just by point­ing and click­ing (there’ll be an app for that). Also, data col­lected by these devices (baro­met­ric pres­sure, for exam­ple) will be sharable with the NOAA or other trusted orga­ni­za­tions.
There will be inter­est­ing social effects. Par­ents will be thought odd if their chil­dren do not have a cell phone. “How do you know if they’re okay?” will be the ques­tion. Gov­ern­ments every­where will seek the abil­ity to push and pull data from these devices. Emer­gency broad­casts and even ‘a direct line to the peo­ple’ will be the rea­son­ing. We may even see true democracy-style remote vot­ing tried in smaller pop­u­la­tions.
Get set, these phones are gonna be every­where.

Okay every­one… we’re well into the 21st Cen­tury. It’s time to fig­ure out how to store all that dig­i­tal media.
For most of you, this cur­rently means dig­i­tal pho­tos, but dig­i­tal media means all sorts of stuff, includ­ing audio, video and doc­u­ments. Let’s dis­cuss how to han­dle all this stuff.
Back in the day (the 20th Cen­tury), peo­ple would stuff their photo neg­a­tives into shoe­boxes and stuff the boxes into a closet. Slides– often in carousels– would live in the closet, too. Those ‘Super-8′ movies would also be stuffed in there, per­haps with a pro­jec­tor and screen. Doc­u­ments would live some­where else, usu­ally in a fil­ing cab­i­net or desk drawer. Music was stored else­where, usu­ally with the record player or stereo. Finally, video tapes or (gasp) laser discs would be kept near the TV or player.
In short, things were kept all over, and rarely orga­nized.
Now, with all this stuff con­verg­ing to the PC, it is crit­i­cal to keep it orga­nized. I per­son­ally have about 40,000 images using 280 GB of disk space. This amount of mate­r­ial must be orga­nized.
Thank­fully, the orga­ni­za­tion is sim­ple.
First, you must break out of the Win­dows ‘My Doc­u­ments’ or ‘My Pho­tos’ struc­ture.
On your hard disk, cre­ate a folder to hold your data. I’m a geek, so I named my folder ‘Data.’ You can call it ‘Per­sonal’ or even ‘Sally’ if you’re feel­ing friendly. The name doesn’t mat­ter, but the loca­tion does. It needs to be out­side of the ‘My Doc­u­ments’ struc­ture (so every­body who uses the com­puter can get to it) and easy to find.
Inside of the data folder, I have more fold­ers, each folder being named for a year, like this:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

Within each Year folder, I have more sub­fold­ers which rep­re­sent the dates and events that pic­tures were taken, like this:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
           +- 2009-04-05 Kindergarten play
           +- 2009-06-17 Yosemite Trip
           +- 2009-08-21 Disneyland
           +- 2009-09-03 Cousins Party
           +- 2009-11-26 Thanksgiving
           +- 2009-12-25 Christmas
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

You place your pho­tos and videos into these dated fold­ers. I actu­ally have an addi­tional level, since I have mul­ti­ple cam­eras. Under each dated folder, I have another folder for each cam­era involved, like so:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
           +- 2009-04-05 Kindergarten play
           +- 2009-06-17 Yosemite Trip
               +- Canon XSi
               +- Canon SD880
               +- Casio ZX-55
               +- Apple iPhone
               +- Processed
           +- 2009-08-21 Disneyland
           +- 2009-09-03 Cousins Party
           +- 2009-11-26 Thanksgiving
           +- 2009-12-25 Christmas
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

The final break­down may seem unneeded, but it helps keep things orga­nized. My cam­eras do auto­matic file nam­ing, and occa­sion­ally there are name col­li­sions (where the file names from dif­fer­ent cam­eras match). Keep­ing the pho­tos seper­ate pre­vents over­writ­ing pic­tures.
You’ll also noticed the ‘Processed’ folder. This is where I keep pho­tos that have been altered in some way– thus I always have the orig­i­nal.
Hope this helps every­body. This struc­ture keeps my pic­tures orga­nized, allows me to find things very quickly, and makes back­ups easy to do.