Life in the digital world

I’m in­clud­ing this in the blog archive on my web site be­cause it’s a good cap­ture of what sort of tech was nor­mal in 2008 and what wasn’t yet. And with how I was strug­gling to ex­plain at work what I meant by get­ting more di­git­al.

[I wrote this last Sat­urday morn­ing… fi­nally post­ing it late Tues­day night be­fore it gets too stale.]

I talk a lot about a No­vartis pro­duct­ive di­git­al work en­vir­on­ment - what that means, what we are do­ing, and what we need to do to get to where we have one. I’ve real­ized lately that I need to bet­ter ex­plain my view of how com­puters can be used. I find that I’m as­sum­ing a way of liv­ing and work­ing that many oth­er people don’t share.

For me: com­puters, mo­bile devices, in­form­a­tion archives, and the In­ter­net are an es­sen­tial part of nor­mal life. They add tre­mend­ous value by keep­ing me in con­tact with my fam­ily no mat­ter where I am, help­ing us or­gan­ize our lives to fo­cus on what we care about, and be­ing tools to man­age in­form­a­tion and en­ter­tain­ment.

That sounds really dull. So to that end and to help show what I mean, I’m go­ing to give ex­amples in this blog of how I use com­puters every day. I took notes this week, just to see. It was a pretty typ­ic­al week. Here are a few things from those notes:

  • Last Sunday, my wife and I re­worked part of our garden. After haul­ing rocks and dirt around out­side for a while, we sketched the lay­out in a design pro­gram, we checked prices of rocks and ma­ter­i­als on-line, and we e-mailed the plan to the guy help­ing us with land­scap­ing.
  • My kids and I went bik­ing in Minute­man Park. I took pic­tures of them strug­gling up a hill on their bikes, then emailed a pic­ture home to my wife, who then sent it to the grand­par­ents in Cali­for­nia. We’re go­ing to get them di­git­al pic­ture frames for Christ­mas to make that easi­er.
  • I kept my iPhone in GPS track­ing mode dur­ing the bike ride to log where we were (so my wife could see it on Google maps) and to see how far the kids could bike be­fore they got tired.
  • On the drive back, I used my iPhone to check on the status of my dry-clean­ing (done!), ordered a pizza over the web (yum!), and looked over the on-line er­rands list that my wife and I share to see if I should pick up any­thing at the drug store (yes… done).
  • On Sunday night, I needed to get some work done, so I went down to the loc­al cof­fee shop for sev­er­al hours. I find it easi­er to fo­cus there than at home. On the work-PC por­tion of my com­puter, I brought up the VPN, synced up Lo­tus (sigh), and star­ted work­ing on slides.
  • On the non-work side of my com­puter, I fired up Pan­dora to drive new tunes in­to my head­phones, I brought up my IM cli­ents to check on a few friends and say good­night to the kids, and I up­dated my on-line cal­en­dar with the up­com­ing even­ing events and trips that my wife needs to be aware of.
  • Dur­ing the week, I:
    • Caught up on news every morn­ing dur­ing break­fast - us­ing tabbed web browsers and RSS ag­greg­at­ors to scan dozens of news sites, blogs, and spe­cial­ized web sites. I like to be cur­rent on glob­al news, loc­al Mas­sachu­setts news, Swiss news, bi­otech, fin­an­cial mar­kets, weath­er, daily com­ics, tech­no­logy re­views, sci­entif­ic pro­gress and geek so­cial trends.
    • Used the in­ter­net hun­dreds of times for - well, everything. Bank­ing, amazon or­ders, eBay auc­tions, build­ing Ma­gic decks, loc­at­ing flor­ists, check­ing up on friends, …
    • Ad­ded notes to our home wiki with in­struc­tions for my wife on how to use the new scan­ner to store magazine art­icles in our home know­ledge re­pos­it­ory.
    • Pri­or­it­ized my work day and even­ing time us­ing web and phone-based lists (which are synced) which I’d con­struc­ted on Sunday night.
    • Tweaked my pod­cast stream so that my com­mute this week would be about ad­vances in bioin­form­at­ics rather than the cur­rent polit­ic­al noise.
    • Kept in reg­u­lar touch through­out each day with my wife about plans & thoughts via an on-line shared space that we’ve been us­ing to­geth­er for, lit­er­ally, the last 15 years. Yes, that’s from be­fore the web.
    • Ripped a dozen DVDs and CDs in­to my iTunes archive, plan­ning to watch one of the movies on the next trip.
    • Video-con­fer­enced home on one of my late nights to check in on the kids.
    • De­bugged my fath­er-in-law’s mac in Cali­for­nia by do­ing re­mote screen shar­ing.
    • Tracked my morn­ing runs on a wrist GPS unit, and up­loaded ex­er­cise info to my com­puters and a web site that helps man­age run­ning routes and fit­ness pro­gress. (It has not been a good year for get­ting in shape, un­for­tu­nately.)
    • Looked up old Lego in­struc­tion scans for my son and his friends to use for one of their pro­jects and checked my lego data­base to find some of the parts for them.
    • Up­dated my on-line ad­ven­tures blog with pic­tures from my most re­cent kayak trip.
    • Used a di­git­al mi­cro­scope with the kids to ana­lyze samples that they picked up out­side, even­tu­ally stor­ing the pic­tures in our archive, an­not­at­ing them, and mak­ing them the new wall­pa­per for my son’s com­puter.
    • A few more fam­ily ex­amples: The kids use their com­puters and the net to keep in touch with friends, play­ing games on­line or on their DSs with kids in New Jer­sey and Illinois.
    • On Fri­day night, the fam­ily gathered for our movie-and-pop­corn even­ing to watch a movie about spelling bees, which we were stream­ing in HD from our movie serv­er.
    • Dur­ing the movie, my wife and I looked up words, act­or back­ground info, and the movie se­quel on-line, shar­ing some of the info with the kids. I up­dated my journ­al and some of our fam­ily al­bums with some of the com­ments the kids made, so that I can re­mem­ber them fondly later when the kids are older and have de­cided I’m a loser.
    • Later, my wife and I sat down to dis­cuss early va­ca­tion plan­ning for next year. We picked a few weeks as likely times, which are now re­flec­ted on my google cal­en­dar, mac cal­en­dar, and iPhone cal­en­dar (which all sync with each oth­er). We made wiki pages for the va­ca­tions so we have place to col­lect notes and thoughts as we be­gin to pre­pare for the va­ca­tion.
  • This morn­ing I’m work­ing on a ro­bot arm that will push the “on” but­ton on our trash com­pact­or so I don’t have to walk down to the base­ment to do it. I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how to con­nect this in­to the house x.10 net­work so I can ini­ti­ate it from a web ser­vice. I’m work­ing on this blog post be­cause I’ m hav­ing trouble get­ting the gear ra­tio right so that the but­ton is pushed re­li­ably, so I’m tak­ing a break.
  • At some point I’m go­ing to pull all of that to­geth­er (along with home power info, fur­nace & A/C set­tings, status of ex­tern­al lights, pin­ball ma­chine high scores, and such) in­to a house di­git­al dash­board, but that’s not a top pri­or­ity yet.
  • This af­ter­noon we’re go­ing to make jack-o-lan­terns and then go on an­oth­er bike ride. Noth­ing tech about that… but we may look up some ideas for pump­kin carving, we’ll def­in­itely take pic­tures and share them, and I’ll prob­ably have a few ideas about work that I’ll leave a voice note to my­self to pro­cess later.

For the curi­ous who are won­der­ing what the sys­tem and in­fra­struc­ture it is that sup­ports all of this:

  • A single file sys­tem shared to all home com­puters, hold­ing fam­ily info gathered over the last 20 years. It has me­dia (pic­tures, movies, etc), PD­Fs for the know­ledge store, dec­ades of email archives, com­puter im­ages, oodles of soft­ware, data­base stores, and everything else.
  • A col­lec­tion of web tools to help us share: Google cal­en­dar, Zenbe lists, Zoho wi­kis, a private blog site, our own in­ter­net do­main, Mo­bile Me, a MUD, and many oth­ers… My wife and I both have Mac­Book Pros. Laptops are crit­ic­al - we carry them around a lot, and take them many places. The kids are on Dells run­ning XP, but I’m con­vert­ing them to Mac minis this month be­cause I’m tired of spy­ware, break­ing/buzz­ing hard­ware, and crashes.
  • iPhones (2), iPods (6? 7?), and Nin­tendo DSs (5).
  • A ded­ic­ated mu­sic/pic­ture/movie serv­er with enough CPU and screen to do ser­i­ous di­git­al edit­ing. It also runs the home web serv­ers and wi­kis.
  • A fire­wall that al­lows me to con­nect back home from on the road and
    that mod­er­ates out­go­ing con­nec­tions from the kids com­puters.
  • Two in­tern­al wire­less net­works - a se­cure one, and a pub­lic one for guests.
  • Roughly 10TB of stor­age in the house. The main file sys­tem is on a 4TB RAID.
  • A ro­bust backup sys­tem, in­clud­ing a full off-site backup that we keep in a safety de­pos­it box.

I don’t think this is any­thing un­usu­al.

I know lots of people who work and live in sim­il­ar ways. I know a few who are geeki­er. The point is not that we use gad­gets, but that we have a di­git­al in­form­a­tion ar­chi­tec­ture and com­mu­nic­a­tion sys­tem that greatly aug­ments our busy, full lives.

This was on one of the weeks when I didn’t go on travel. When I’m on the road, I’m in touch with the kids and fam­ily through many of the same mech­an­isms men­tioned above. They help make the travel more bear­able for all of us.

So: when I use phrases like “di­git­al life”, “pro­duct­ive com­put­ing eco­sys­tem”, “laptops are brain aug­ment­a­tion devices”, and so on - this is at the core of what I’m talk­ing about.