Busy July

Well July was an interesting month for the Kulp's. I attended a church music conference in central PA, visited relatives in Pittsburgh, and spent a week in Mexico (Cancun). I plan on writing a little bit on each of these things soon. I took over 700 pictures between the trips and some of them are even good! I'll be posting some this week. I did no email during any of the travel, so it was a pretty disconnected month. I did have some work days in-between trips though so I didn't get too far behind.

It's very liberating not being connected. It's so hard (for me at least) to feel really in control of all of my "stuff." I used a wealth of computer tools on a desktop and laptop (and sometimes public and other private computers as well). I haven't yet found the perfect way to organize things. I don't know that the ideal solution is out there. I think people are working on it though, and mobile convergence is certainly part of it. Mobile phones, PDA's, and virtualized computers are the path to take, but organization and synchronization just aren't there yet. I should be able to easily check my three email accounts, missed Skype calls, and missed IM messages in one place. Ideally I slide some key into any computer and I have access to at least some of my stuff. Many people don't like centralized repositories for personal info, but I think it's a great partial solution. A USB drive with certain personal stuff and settings could allow a computer to adapt itself to me, provide access to data on the drive, and link to a personal repository. Considering that Yahoo offers online briefcase, calendar, contacts, photos, notepad -- even mail! (Google, please add more of these...) -- this type of service is already partly available. It would require OS changes to really go all the way though too. More on this at a later date.

Another hot point for me is online presence. I've read posts from MS folks addressing the need to truly manage this. It's not enough to say I'm available or not in my IM client. Too many apps pop up modal dialogs, too many events interfere with what I'm doing. I should be able to work without being interrupted by new emails, IM's, virus definition update messages, Windows Update messages, etc. A system-level presence respected by all apps would be great. We've probably all seen the productivity studies that say how many minutes it takes to recover from an interruption (sorry, I can't remember off the top of my head!). Computers are so powerful because they are so flexible and dynamic, but the downside is that everything is too ad-hoc and paradigm shift between tasks is too extreme. No wonder older people aren't comfortable using them. Many elderly people end up getting adept at certain apps that they need to use, but are still overall confused. A parallel would be cars. Most people know only how to drive, refill gas, and call a mechanic. Many people can change their own oil, but beyond that, people don't know or care how it all works. Computers still require too much knowledge of how it all works. Geeks often lament that the unclean masses are even allowed to use a computer if they don't know how to install virus checkers and avoid malware, but, come on. Why should most people know or care. The fault is with the OS and app developers (and the forces behind them). We need to do much better.

In general, there needs to be a lot more transparency as to how the system is working internally. If something doesn't save properly when I tell it to, I probably don't care. As long as it saves eventually and I don't lose anything I'm fine. I shouldn't need to know how the hard drive is organized. My OS goes somewhere, my apps go somewhere else (neither of which should concern me), and my data and settings go someplace else (the part I care about!). That personal stuff needs to be ridiculously easy to backup. If the computer goes south, only the OS and apps should even be considered to be a problem. Hopefully with virtualized systems of the near-future (including VMWare, Virtual PC, and new processors from AMD and Intel), systems will be more easily recoverable. We can really divide personal data into the following:

• Application settings (favorites, color schemes, user options)
• Saved states (game saves, app sessions, reminders/appointments/email/etc.)
• Documents (spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks)
• Media (music, videos, images)
• Assorted detritus (virtualized PC images, setup/install files, batch files)

Application settings and saved states are pretty closely intertwined. Neither are directly seen by the user. Their absence is very obvious to that user, but they aren't considered entities to view, share, and keep track of. They need to be kept as compact as possible and all apps need to be consistent in placing them in the proper system location.

Documents should be online (that is, on an internet server) or offline on a USB drive. This makes them easily portable, and quite possibly safer. It wouldn't hurt to keep them local though, as long as the OS makes it trivial to sync with that USB drive constantly so the files can be in both places with no risk.

Media makes no sense on the local computer. MP3 and portable video devices are a good step. Given enough memory they can hold everything. Plugged into the computer they can provide easy access from anywhere, and hopefully all of it can be played from the device. Media can also be offloaded to network drives (which need to be much more mainstream in the future. I want a router/switch/VoIP/storage device in the next year or so. Oh yeah, and it should be under $100 with me providing my own hard drive.

Assorted detritus poses the biggest problem. These can be very large, and are often difficult to track of. MSN and Google Desktop Search do a great job of media and documents, but this other stuff is difficult to index (Setup.exe anyone?) and therefore hard to search for. With a big enough external drive stuff can be stored there instead, or thrown onto backup media right away, but personally I haven't found a great solution to this part of it yet. The "average" home and office user doesn't really need this functionality though.

Wow. That was a much bigger post than I imagined it would be. I know that there are solutions for some of the above, but finding several utilities to install is time-consuming, not always friendly together, and often out of reach of most users. The OS needs to be updated, and standards need to be created and followed. I have more thoughts on this process, but I'll save that for a future post.