Category Archives: Technology

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Time Travel in a Plague

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Time travel has become an eye-rolling matter in our household. Since I first made the observation several years back that humans as a whole seem to be obsessed with time travel, it seems that at every turn there is yet another book or movie based on this concept. It’s almost like that is only trick in the storyteller’s toolbox these days. The first modern movie I personally remember that capitalized on this theme was the Back to the Future movie in 1985 that then spawned two sequels.

A quick web search of time travel books and movies reveals a huge and growing list. Do creatives just have to try their hand at some new twist on the time travel genre? I mean, I do get the fascination. How amazing would it be if there were some machine or natural device by which we could travel in time either back into the past or forward into the future? With all of the drama and intrigue of history, recent and ancient, it is tantalizing to think of dialing up a past date and location and wandering around asking modern questions and resolving mysteries. Then maybe, oh maybe, you could say or do something that might alter the course of history for the better.

Contemplating time travel – Scotland March 2019

How much money has Diana Gabaldon made with her Outlander books and TV series that are based not on time travel in a human machine but rather via mystical magical stones in Scotland? People love this stuff. I am convinced that part of the fascination is imagining how much we could accomplish in a previous era knowing what we know now. It is basically cheating. If I can know all of the questions and answers on the final exam before I take it, imagine how well I would do. Imagine how smart and powerful you would think I am. Except I’m not. I just cheated.

Even I with my time travel skepticism cannot avoid getting drawn in to the storyteller’s art as I try to make some change in the past that will improve the outcome of the future. Suspension of disbelief, indeed!

Of course, if you can time travel into the past, there is no reason that the same machine or magic should not be able to catapult you into the future. And so we spend some time there. We dial up a distant date and location and travel ahead to strange and wonderful goings-on. What is transportation like in 500 years? What about the food? Do we still have nation-states or are we one global people? For that matter, are we one Universal Empire? Oh, the possibilities!

It does strike me that one of the necessary features to all such time traveling is that we be able to return to the present. We want to tinker with the past in order to fix things so that we can get back here and finally live in a world and a life worth living. We want to visit the future but return to the present because we can’t bear to leave behind the people we care about and the culture we inhabit, regardless of how flawed it might be. We also want to bring back the technology of the future and make the world a better place. At least that is the more noble spin we would put on cheating.

If such a time machine or magical stones really existed, would you sign up to take the ride if you knew you could never return to right now? If it really were a one-way trip, would you do it? Most of us would never sign up for that. Why not?

That makes me wonder if right now is really so bad? Do we have some innate sense that we are supposed to be here now? We do travel to our pasts in memory. We even travel to far distant pasts via books and our imagination. We also travel to the future in our thoughts and via art. But we live here. Now.

Do you know how much money I could make if I knew the future? Even if I could only know one day in advance I would devise a strategy to capitalize on it. So would you. But we cannot. Despite the claims of diviners and charlatans, humans can only guess at the future based on past experience and assumptions. Sometimes those guesses come true and create the illusion of prescience. But alas, even the most skillful guesser is exposed at some point.

Is there any point to all of this? Right now we are in the midst of a frightening present. We are dealing with what future historians will likely call a plague. By every definition I have come across, COVID-19, the current Coronavirus, is a plague. We do not know how this is going to turn out. We can use modern epidemiological models to try to predict how many people will contract it and how many people will die because of it. We can try to predict how long it will take to “run its course” or how long until someone develops a vaccine. We can look to the past and make predictions based on how the Spanish Flu impacted the world, but in the end we are making predictions. This fills us with concern, uncertainty, and even fear. Our public officials, and every one of us world-wide, are being forced to make decisions without being able to see the future.

This is the way life always is. We all have a past we can draw on and learn from. We all have a future that is unknowable. But we live in the present. My resolve in this moment is to refrain from predicting the future while valuing the people in my life that matter most. I am reading and dreaming and reflecting like always. My spiritual understanding informs my ultimate cosmic hope and comfort, but this moment in time is a reminder that life is a gift best lived in the present.

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Scheming in Front of a White Board

An Analog Practice Connected to a Digital World

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Most of my work is done on a screen with a keyboard. It is terribly efficient, organized, and synced to the cloud.

It also gets somewhat routine, and I find it sometimes stifling my creativity.

Recently I stood in front a freshly cleaned white board with some markers. I began scheming, making marks, erasing, and making some more marks.

It was exhilarating.

Of course, in a nod to the digital world I took a photo of my masterpiece and emailed it to myself so I could take the next steps…on a screen and a keyboard.

Sometimes productivity and creative work is best done by old methods that get linked with modern advances.

If you have not recently schemed in front of a whiteboard or on a yellow legal pad, I highly recommend it.

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Technology Tip: Scannable for Evernote (iOS only)

Fighting Clutter

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We all use technology to improve our lives and to accomplish more. Periodically I will share technology that I find helpful.

Use Evernote's Scannable App to Go Paperless in a Snap

I want to start with a phone app that I use several times per week. Let’s put this in the category of clutter-buster. I constantly fight a battle with paper and clutter. This battle is waged in both my personal and business life. Evernote has been a staple of my life for several years now. If you do not use Evernote, that needs to be at the top of your list.

Once you are using Evernote and begin to realize all of the amazing ways it can help you organize your life, you will want to add to it all types of documents. Evernote’s mobile app does allow you to access your phone’s camera, but this has never worked very well for me.

Scannable solves that. I want to thank my wife’s, cousin, Chris Towle, for telling me about Scannable. It is a simple app that works beautifully. I use it to scan business cards, receipts, printed obituaries I want to keep , etc. The types of documents you can scan are unlimited. Once scanned, you can send the scanned documents in several ways:

  • Email
  • Evernote
  • Camera roll
  • Text message
  • Export
  • Export to Apple iCloud
  • Post to social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Scannable is available for Apple iOS only at this time. If you are an Android user, you can use Evernote’s native scanning capability. Perhaps you have found a better solution for Androisd? Use the comments below to tell us which scanning app you find the most helpful.

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What You Can Learn From My Hard Drive Crash

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On a recent Friday I turned on my three year old laptop as usual. Everything seemed normal, until it was not. http://mrg.bz/wE1bI2

In the old days we got what we called the Blue Screen of Death. A simple restart usually solved the problem, for a little while. I had not seen a blue screen in a while, but this time the blue screen was the Blue Screen of Your Hard Drive is Dead!

Being an old computer guy who bought my first PC back in 1983, I know that a hard drive is a hardware device. This means they can and do fail.

So, I purchased and installed a new hard drive right away. Fortunately, I had all of my data backed up to a cloud backup service. That is the good news. The bad news is that it took ten days of constant restoring to get all of my data back. During that time I experienced disruption to my work duties as a result of missing data.

I also had to re-install the operating system and all of my applications, not to mention tracking down the license keys for each of them. I also had to reconnect each program to its data source once those files were restored. The amount of time I have wasted on this during the previous week has been staggering.

What would you do right now if you computer’s hard drive crashed and died?

While this is fresh on my mind, let me share some things you can learn and implement from my misfortune. The main lesson is:

Back up your data. Since your hard drive can fail, your data is not safe residing only in that one physical location. “Your data” is not specific enough. Remember, we are talking about your precious family photos of children when small and loved ones who have passed on. “Your data” also includes financial records, family information, and important email conversations. This is information you really don’t want to lose just because your hard drive crashes. Imagine your predicament right now if your hard drive crashed and you lost all of that. If you do not currently have your data backed up, please do it right away. Do not delay. There are two basic ways to backup your data:

  • Online automatic cloud backup. The easiest and cheapest way is to backup the way I do with an online cloud backup service like Carbonite. They are not the only ones, but their service certainly saved me. All of the data you deem precious gets automatically backed up to the cloud without your worrying about it. When and if the time comes that you need to restore your backed up files, you can do it easily. As stated earlier, though, it does take some time. One of the great benefits of this type of backup is in the case of a fire or natural disaster where your computer is located. If your computer is physically destroyed or stolen, your data still lives and can be accessed.
  • Local backup. A local backup is a physical drive or other storage system at your premises where you backup or clone your data. You may wonder why you need a local backup if you already have a cloud backup? Well, my wasted week of work is the main reason. Imagine if, in addition to my cloud backup, I had maintained a clone of my hard drive. When the main hard drive failed, I could have simply swapped the cloned drive in for the failed drive. This would mean that I would not have needed to reinstall the operating system, any of the programs, find any license keys, or reconnect any data. It would have made my life much easier. The word of warning, again, is that I would not want to count only on this one local backup because it is vulnerable to fire, theft, or other natural disaster.

I know there are many different solutions available for both online and local backup. This is not just a Windows or Apple issue. Hard drives are physical objects that can and do fail regardless of manufacturer. Take it from me, your data is worth protecting, and your time is worth saving.

Let me know if you have had similar experiences and what backup strategies you employ. I am looking for “best practices.”