mail@davemoral.es

A situation entirely of my making, I find myself backed into a corner, swamped under a visual data tsunami. Years of photo taking and videoing has left me with a mound of great content but not a great deal of organization to these memories. Over the years I have made good faith efforts to make sense of this madness, trying many tools, investing time, yet in the end always stopping short of the finish line. Likewise I’m fickle and change platforms and toolboxes for this project, necessitating restarting from scratch.

I’ve finally settled into a software tool I am (mostly) content with, Google Picasa, and have begun this process anew. More than a decade of capturing photos of my two sons, while simultaneously not always effectively pruning and post-processing these images have resulted in 30,000 photos. Recent years are in better shape, having been effectively geo-tagged and facial-tagged but years of legacy shots are in rough shape. I don’t want to estimate the total time I need to sink into pruning, geo-tagging, facial ID, post processing and meta tagging these images. I know it will be well worth it but it is incredibly intimidating.

To make matters worse I find myself with a shoebox full of miniDV tapes, captured between 2000 and 2006. I gave away to charity (perhaps within the last year) my last DV camcorder but that issue aside I have sixty+ hours of DV footage to transfer. These tapes have been (relatively) well cared for but are butting up against the lifespan of the media.

Some back of the napkin math:

• 60 hours of transfer time (miniDV transfers over Firewire in real-time to a computer)
• 60 hours of computing time to transcode (approximate)
• 201 GB of storage required (8 megabit per second date rate, 60 hours of content)

This goes atop the current 32GB of personal video I currently have archived and 48GB of photos (granted that will drop as I prune). All told I am immensely grateful for CrashPlan and their unlimited cloud storage to keep all this content safe.

If I can only make the time to get all this content transfered, edited and tagged I would be in great shape.

Much has been written and shared about Steve Jobs, his impact and his legacy, in the days since news of his death entered the collective conversation. His passing saddened me and I have been ruminating and reflecting upon his legacy ever since.

As with many, I first learned of his death via Twitter, as my feed exploded with platitudes, compliments, reflections and simple comments, coming across in a torrent. I am unable to count myself as one of the lucky few to have met the man personally. My closest contact with Steve came in a mass of many thousands, packed into the High Temple of Apple Keynote as Jobs delivered, with aplomb, the message of the day.

The occasion was the unveiling of the iPhone, January of 2007, at MacWorld San Francisco. Waiting in line with thousands of fellow migrants the excitement and anticipation was palpable. The spectacle of a Jobs Keynote lived up to legend. Clothed in his signature black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers Steve worked the crowd, his delivery and timing perfect. I have watched many pitchmen, many a executives make presentations. Steve was the best there was and the best the technology community has ever seen. Above all, Jobs was a man of passion, vision, poise and supreme confidence. He was speaking to the collective masses, believers in his vision for a technological future but all the while he was making a much broader pitch. Steve was transforming his company that morning. Twice before, in the preceding decade Apple lurched in new directions, first with a rebirth of consumer computing under the iMac and years later a new focus on personal content and media with the iPod. The iPhone pitch, it’s vision for a quantum leap in mobile communication and collaboration was equally important.

That morning, as Steve stood on stage, trumpeting the advantages of his new technological wonder, you shared his vision. You believed, as he did that everything that had come before was leading up to this. Every piece, every step along the way, building atop one another to some larger, master plan for the future. Flawed or perfect, correct or misguided Steve’s vision, for his company, for the industry, for society he believed to be the correct one.

Jobs’ second act at Apple is, unquestionably the greatest business comeback in American History. Steve, rightly, deserves the plaudits as an entrepreneur, industrialist and executive. Yet what separated Steve Jobs from many other leaders, and what makes him truly a special person is his overarching vision and force of will. As leader of Apple 2.0, Steve made missteps, errors in products and services however a unified, cohesive vision always outwardly guided his leadership. Vision, true confidence of where you want to move something, people, an industry, indeed a culture is far too rare in this world.

To this day, the brilliant advertising campaign, spawned by Jobs shortly after his return to Apple, Think Different, and its opening television ad moves me to near tears. Vision, passion, true belief in making tomorrow better than today need not be separated from business interests and the bottom line. Steve was a great man. He left the world better than he found it. His legacy upon technology and culture will persist. Steve thought differently and changed things…

Dropped by Best Buy this weekend and spent thirty minutes browsing the Pre-Thanksgiving store layout.

I was quite surprised by the high profile presence for Google TV. A large dedicated island was front and center in the home theater sector of the store, with stations for the Sony TV and Logitech Revue offerings. Overall I was massively underwhelmed by Google TV and its clear, in my estimation, this product is not ready for prime time.

The software and user interface was not optimized, laggy, and inelegant. Fundamentally It’s fail when your product and platform is dependent upon IR blasters. Product designers and engineers are trying to build a 21st century content delivery and consumption platform yet rest this atop (broken) 20th century technology.

Jason Calacanis, prominent web entrepreneur, lays out an interesting theory concerning Rupert Murdoch’s plan for a new paid-content model with his newspaper properties.

At it’s core it involves modifying site meta properties and instructing Google’s automated crawlers to skip over the WSJ, Fox News, etc.  I don’t fully agree with Jason’s analysis.  By blocking robots and Google search access to your content you shed massive amounts of pageviews.  What you gain in subscription revenue will be massively outweighed by a loss in mind share.  Out of sight, out of mind for the droves who currently visit the WSJ and other outlets, largely driven there by standard search.

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