Ed's Tech Tips

Problem: The Association is constantly in need of photos that represent the campus and it's diversity. The Association has thousands of high quality photos. Most of them are stored on CD-ROM's in binders and were taken by professional photographers. Unfortunately, looking for a photo can be tedious, therefore the photos languish in the binders and are seldom ever used again. 

Solution: This summer I purchased a small terabyte server to store our images (photos, PDF's, audio and video). That's right a terabyte. A thousand gigabytes or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.  As you can see from the photo it is fairly compact, but is a full fledged file server that supports a wide variety of features including RAID 5, browser based administration, upgrades, external USB ports, backup software, user permissions, data journaling, email alerts, media streaming, and much more. Learn more at Infrant Technologies web site where they offer a variety of similar storage devices for the home and business. We our server from NewEgg.com.

Having all of the images in one place available on the network is great, but it is still difficult to wade through all of those files. To complement the hardware, I purchased a digital assets management (DAM) program called iView MediaPro. This is an awesome tool for cataloging, annotating, searching and viewing images. In comes in both Mac and Windows versions and there is a free catalog reader that majority of the staff can use to search and locate images. We have hired a student to help import and annotate the thousand of images. 

For under a thousand dollars we now have a complete digital photo archive that will more easily allow us to reuse  thousands of photos that we have spent thousands of dollars to create.

I just purchased a new webcam for the office for video conference calls via Skype. The camera, the Logitech Oprbit MP, has a feature where it can track faces and track people.  The face tracking for an individual is rather uncanny and works very well. There is a fun option where you can use an avatar, such as, a shark or cartoon. Instead of me trying to describe it, go view the Logitech video effects demo page.

It has some difficulty tracking a group of people, however, the video and audio qaulity (it has a built-in echo cancelling mic) is excellent. Unfortunately, it does not work with Macs yet. However, there is an open source project called Macam that develops drivers for USB web cams for Macs and hopefully eventually a driver will be offered. Logitech does not help, because they do not disclose the necessary specifications required to develop the drivers and neither do they offer a Mac driver for the camera.

I was reviewing the Alumnae Information Services presentation for the Reunion Planning Workshop that I created last year with PowerPoint and was not feeling comfortable with it. Then I read an article that pointed out that many PowerPoint prentations are little more than teleprompter displays for the speakers and are not very helpful in the communication process. Then I came across Presentation Zen, a blog that empasis simplicity in designing presentations. There was an article that contrasted the styles of Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft. It was rather eye opening and I decided then and there to completely rework the presentation with the following goals in mind:

• The presentation by itself would be practically meaningless without the speaker
• No bullet points
  
• No ugly backgrounds
• Minimal if any transitions
• No animations 
• Slides would be more visual and enhance what the speaker was saying and not repeat what the speaker was saying
• One image per slide 
• Display no more than 5-7 words per slide
• Provide a detailed handout after the presentation

I was able to stick to most of my goals. I did use one slide with bullet points to summarize some possible future projects. I was not going to use any transitions, but I liked the Fall transition in Keynote that is simple and consistent. Hopefully, the audience will find this year's presentation more engaging, informative and entertaining.

The Washington Post published a timeline of hard drives over the past 50 years and shows how far storage technology has come along. For instance:

1956: IBM ships the first hard drive, the RAMAC 305,which holds 5MB of data at $10,000 a megabyte. It is as big as two refrigerators and uses 50 24-inch platters. (For the full story and interviews with key players, read  The Hard Drive Turns 50 .)

To put this in perspective, 5 MB is the average space occuppied by a single high quality MP3 song. 

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