It’s a slice of a growing collection, a collection that encompasses the digitized memories of My Life. Thoughts, songs, clips, snapshots, links.

It’s a collection started in 1997 but by now containing items from long before that time; digitized photographs and video of my childhood and teen years, songs from back then, etc.

As time passed and the collection grew two main challenges emerged:

• how do I make sure these items make it to my children?
• where or how do they get the information about the items?

Getting Digital Assets to the Next Generation

Although seemingly the simplest problem to overcome, this has turned out the be the most laboursome and worrisome aspect of digitizing memories.

The problems are media and file format.

Media

To put it simply: all digital media is fleetingly temporary into the extreme.

by U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang

When you decide to keep your memories in digital format, and for many of us that decision is made by the consumer equipment we choose, you agree to keep your files “in the air” as if you’re a juggler.

I have DVD backups from 3-4 years ago which cannot be read. I have CDR’s which cannot be read. In a few cases even recent media cannot be read but on the very device which I created them with.

The only sure way to guarantee your files will be there come next year let alone the next generation is to keep them in a constant “alive” state.

My files, the Golden Copy, are stored on a hard disk which is mirrored to another hard disk.^[1]

Hard disks are cheap. Exchange the backup drive for a new one at least every 2 years; delegate the previous one to your current main drive or keep it as an additional copy.

As long as you have a somewhat manageable amount of data, use online backup as well. I prefer Carbonite, having been with them since 2006. I can download about 1 GB/hour: if push comes to shove I can restore my digital photo collection in 2-3 days.

At one point though there’s a tipping point either because your ISP would never let you download so much so fast or because downloading it would take the better part of a season…

You realize that you have so many digital memories since so long that you can’t afford not to consider serious disasters in which everything you consider as your current setup is destroyed: flooding, explosions, fire, theft, vandalism, etc. etc.

Once at that point you will want to start making copies/backups on an external drive which you’ll store in a safety deposit box at the bank or in a media fire proof safe at your own place.^[2]

The take-away is that at no time should you feel your information is solid and permanently stored. Instead, think of it as very ethereal.

File Formats

So far this is the one that bugs me the least. Time has actually done a lot to reduce worry for my famliy’s version of the digital dark age.

There are caveats though.

Most if not all of the files I use are not only current but long time standards: QuickTime, JPEG, PDF, HTML, and of course plain text. Other data of interest might be contained in email.^[3]

It’s my experience up till now that hugely popular file formats like this have tons of converter applications available. If down the line a format such as PDF would start to fade away you’ll have ample time to convert those documents to something else.

File Applications

A bigger problem.

As soon as we start to store information on the application level through integration with a database, we risk data loss through obsolescence of the application.

It’s not that the final storage place becomes obsolete but rather that it starts to demand that the next generation are geeks with intimate knowledge of how this application stored information where and how — and how to get that information out.

A good example is Evernote^[4] which when installed as a local application stores its data in a SQLite database. For geeks it’s trivial to 1) find this out, 2) realize you need a SQL browser of some sort, and finally 3) to find such a SQL browser without being ripped off and to effectively use it to export the information.

Are you absolutely sure your children will be such geeks?

It becomes necessary to export to a more standard file format or to prepare for it — and to possibly prepare such export paths and detailed information. More on that, detailed information, later on.

Sharing the Digital Memories

The difference between the digital asset and the digital memory is the one between data (the file) and meta-data (information about the file and what it contains or represents).

A good example to work with are photos.

Think back to your grand parents’ photo albums or, if you’re about my age, your parents’ albums. Under, on or at the back of photos information was scribbled about the photo: a date, event, maybe names of people in the photo.

by freeparking

And then maybe your mother or father would sit next to you and say “That’s from the time when grand-pa Joe was still hunting in Arizona and…”

Although the latter might happen with your digital files too, you shouldn’t count on it, shouldn’t build your collection on it.

But the former, the scribbled data, is simply not there: we don’t write or draw on our digital photos.

To carry information about what is portrayed, shown, described or sung over to the next generation we have to find and use ways to provide such meta-data.

“Truth In The File”

The best way to add meta-data is through the file and in the file itself.

Scott Dart, program manager for Microsoft Windows Live, referred to it as “truth in the file”. I like that description.

Most of my file names are in the format yyyy-mm-dd keyword keyword keyword.file-extension.^[5] This format not only allows for correct sorting in Windows in a sort of timeline flow but also helps ensure that the date stamp is carried over: file timestamps will change as backups are restored…

The above format can just as easily be applied to a photo (”2007-12-24 christmas eve.jpg”) as to a PDF (”2001-02-01 drawing audrey for ruud.pdf”), for example.

In contrast to the file name, the second layer of file-level meta-data is not immediately visible. This is data that can be embedded in the file.

Examples of file formats which can contain usable meta-data are MP3’s (ID3 tags; think of artist/title information), JPEG’s (IPTC and XMP data for captions, descriptions etc. but also EXIF data provided by the camera itself), PDF’s (keywords, title, description, etc.) and MOV’s (description, comment, etc.).

As this information is not immediately visible and only accessible at the application level it’s again necessary to prepare detailed information about the existence of the meta-data and how to access it and use it.

Your Digital Will

This is where your digital will comes in.

A digital will contains all information the people you would leave behind will need to finalize any account activity and access and use any kind of information you purposely want to leave behind for them.

Let’s only look at the type of information that’s relevant to what we’re talking about; digital memories.

What should you detail?

You should explain that there is a digital collection, that there are digital memories. As this post has done, you too should instruct the next person on how to keep that collection intact and alive.

Thanks for the memories

You have to detail how to access it. Where are the photos? Where are the videos? Where are the scanned documents?

Suggest applications to access these files. Possibly prepare a folder with the installers of such applications ready for them.

Explain about the meta-data and how to access and use it.

List the applications you have used to build this archive of digital memories. Detail what you did with those applications and why. If you’ve ever ran into a problem with those applications or the files they work on and were able to fix or work around it, detail that here.

Best Practices & Tips

Make things as simple as possible.

Store all your digital memory files together in one folder (with subfolders if you want). It’s simpler to backup, simpler to instruct about (”take this folder and that’s it”). Using My Pictures, My Videos and My Whatnot starts to scatter things around in a folder (My Documents) which will soon enough fill up with files and folders unrelated to your digital memories.

Be wary of applications that “eat” your data/files. File recovery software is one thing; getting files out of some sort of proprietary file format or database is a whole different ball game, one nobody should want to play.

The above pertains to web services as well. Unless you use them as a sort of backup or “also” storage, don’t rely on them. Most people who were online in 1997 can name a whole lists of (online) brands that seemed to never ever go away which simply don’t exist anymore today.^[6]

If you do want to use an additional layer, an additional application, use one that works with your files in a non-destructive manner. Personal Brain is a good example: files dropped in it are stored as regular files in regular folders: if the application ever fails it’s somewhat trivial to search through the folders on the disk and access your files.^[7]

Two is better than one: I don’t rely on one image application to handle our photo collection, for example. I use both Adobe Photoshop Elements and Picasa.

1. I think of it as a poor man’s RAID. Use shadowing software such as NTI Shadow or sync software like GoodSync
2. Sentry Group has dedicated data protection safes with hard disk inside a safe and what not. Costly but as time progresses and more and more people have this problem, I expect more solutions to come on the market.
3. mbox and PST although I plan to do a huge export to EML and/or txt
4. I use Evernote quite regularly to add some diary-type information. The application will be part of my digital will. Personal Brain is better as it stores notes as standalone HTML files but here too one can’t rely on the next generation “getting” the application.
5. You can’t fully rely on these long file names however. I have a number of files from the early years which at one point had short DOS 8.1 file names due to a problem with the CDR backup
6. see for example the shutdown of Google Notebook or Yahoo Photo
7. see also One Brain to Rule Them All: Creating a MegaBrain

Another great feature is built-in persistent searches. You can add searches the Tweets of which will appear in their own column.

A “drawback” — one is never satisfied — is that TweetDeck enforces a 10 column maximum. You’ll quickly run out of columns to add, having to delete a previous search to start to monitor a new topic.

Bundle Searches

Searches in TweetDeck are powered by search.twitter.com (the previous Summize).

The default operator applied is AND: evernote chrome.

But Twitter search recognizes the OR operator: economy OR coffee.

This gives you the ability to combine or collapse a number of searches into one and the same column, giving you “virtual unlimited columns” in TweetDeck.

Good candidates are searches which during most 48 hour periods, the timeframe TweetDeck considers, produce limited results. For example, I combine the streams for knowledge management and mindmapping.

Topics can be more thoroughly covered this way as well. Hot is The Economy at the moment but simply searching economy gives you a restricted view. economy OR recession OR “wall street” OR “credit crunch” is much wider, covers more ground.

Evernote3 has only made life easier, simpler, with syncing in the cloud. It’s the goodness of never having to chose between storing stuff on this computer, that computer, on your Flash drive or in the cloud: it’s and, not or. And Evernote does the transparent heavy lifting of all that synced goodness.

Evernote can store images (and yes, index and search text in those images…) and PDF files (which, again, it can index and search too). So I didn’t take out my notetaker walllet to copy down the addition to the opening times of the nearby swimming pool; I snapped a photo with the low-res CMOS camera built-in to most cellphones today and emailed it to my Evernote account.

Likewise my copy of Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done has been drag-and-dropped into Evernote and is thus available to me anywhere at any time.

Nice.

However, as it goes with these kind of improvements, they make you long for more. That longing rises quickly when you attempt to drag a non-image, non-PDF into Evernote.

Can’t be done.

Adobe Acrobat to the Rescue

Having been on the fence whether to continue to use a patchwork of alternative solutions or buy Adobe Acrobat, I interpreted the recently-ish release of Acrobat 9.0 as a sign that I should buy a copy.

Ever since I’ve been playing around with the program, liking my new software toy very much — thank you — and turning just about anything into PDF’s. Our Husky now scurries away when he sees me approach.

One of the things I came across is the ability to create a PDF Portfolio. A PDF Portfilio is a PDF-ish file that can contain other files: images, Word files, Excel, video, etc. etc. …

You see where this is going to go, right?

Create a PDF Portfolio

Except for the reader-only version, obviously, any edition of Adobe Acrobat 9.0 can create PDF Portfolio’s.

Open your copy and go for Create -> Assemble a PDF Portfolio.

Grab a file and drag-and-drop it to the PDF Portfolio screen.

If you want you click on the file name to change that. Or click under the file name to add a description to that file.

You can switch to the esthetically more pleasing list view too. Adobe Acrobat Pro and Pro Extended can also apply templates to how these PDF Portfolio’s look and behave. Brian S. Friedlander’s Assistive Technology has a good entry on creating PDF Portfolio’s in Adobe Acrobat Pro (Extended).

The created PDF Portfolio, containing your files, can be dropped into Evernote and will be synced with and through the cloud.

Even when (if?) Evernote adds native file sharing, using PDF Portfolio’s in a very elegant way to move and share files which should be kept together.

My favorite capture tool since 2005-ish has been Evernote. Highlight, CTRL + C, CTRL + ALT + V to create a new pasted note from anywhere within Windows.

But back then Evernote was a local installation application only. Bugged me as I switch between my desktop and a laptop provided by Canada’s SEO company.

Enter Gmail [hat tip: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center].

Gmail Capture Process

• Get the Google toolbar.
• Highlight info on a page, click Send To, choose Gmail.

  

• In the subject line I use a pipe followed by keywords/tags.

  

  

  Those keywords allow you to do “tag” searches by doing a subject search in Gmail.

…to Evernote Workflow

To send information into my Gmail database I, of course, use a special + email address as in Gmail you can do youremail+anything@.

In Gmail I’ve setup a filter which will label any email to this specific address with DB, short for database (why not database in full? simple, in a search it is faster to restrict to label:db or l:db than using the word “database” spelled out in full….).

The address is also filtered to automatically forward to my special Evernote email address. Minutes after the note arrives in Gmail it’s available in Evernote too.

Once every 1-3 days I go into my “InBox” notebook in Evernote and go through the incoming notes. This is a fast, short job. Give it one “real” Evernote tag, usually. Very high level too. Then drag it into one of the handful of notebooks I keep (again very high level. Any complete web page capture goes into Web Archive, for example).

Done.

The Benefits

1. Future proof: Evernote might disappear, email won’t
2. Automatic backup
3. Both available from anywhere with Gmail being just a tad better available even
4. Keywords (”tags”) in the subject/title of the note allow for subject searches in Gmail and intitle searches in Evernote
5. Searches in both Evernote and Gmail are fast while each has its own strengths
6. Since a little while Evernote has removed the inline Goto Source to a tiny button, making note export with URL a royal pain. Gmail includes the source link.

   

The only time I clip directly into Evernote is when images/graphics are of importance to me: Gmail stores a link to the images, not the images themselves. And yes, in that case I often email the note to Gmail :)

“We haven’t been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. [...] She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness [...]

[...] the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 [...]

With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns.
– Sarah Palin’s Myth of America , Time

Whether you live in the USA or not — I don’t — you’ll recognize these themes, these ideas, as they’re true for most developed countries: small town simplicity, small town life, small town morality is a) gone and b) was never really here to begin with. In its place there’s a bunch of people happening to live between the same borders but with desires, ideas and values so widely apart that coming to a new cultural agreement we never had anyway will never ever happen. Ever.

It’s a view of our society that leaves you and many others like you feeling cut off from the rest of the country, your country. Usually just a little bit, just before you harden yourself again and become realistic in a global economy type of way.

By having our idea, our desire, posed as an anachronism we’re being denied not only the target of our desire but the desire itself. The same mechanism prevents anything from having to change or be improved upon, prevents a Vision, a Goal, because, remember, there’s nothing to work towards to. We’re all just a bunch of scattered random sets of values.

And that’s a shame because this desire for some kind of richer life through simplicity, honesty and righteousness, this desire to go back to what we know once was, seems to me to be a major unifying factor.

A Small Town Desire

Small town patterns and desires are part of our everyday life.

We may live in a megacity like New York, a universe in its own right, yet we move in small, predictable ways, usually moving no more than 10 km (about 6 miles) max.

Big city, small town.

6%, and growing, of the USA’s households live in gated communities. We’re not talking rich, powerful and exclusive here either. Renters are 2 1/2 times more likely than buyers to be living in a gated community. Nor is it a white affair: Hispanics are more likely to live in a gated community than blacks or whites.

And what is it they’re looking for there? Apart from a sense of security they’re looking for a sense of togetherness, a place where “everybody knows your name”.

A Small Town Life

If you don’t have a physical place to belong, one where everybody knows your name, we still have the Internet where small communities of a handful of people interacting socially are now Big Word Labeled “social networks”.

Sounds good but what they are is Cheers, a town meeting, it’s “hidyho, neighbor!“.

Updating your status on Facebook is not just convenient; it’s wanting people to know you and what you’re doing.

That’s small town in a big way.

Between The Ears

Small Town USA is a desire, and by and large a destination, between our ears.

It’s a desire for scalability and scale itself. A desire to be connected, interconnected, recognized and acknowledged. To see not just cars pass by but life.

I think that this desire is so broadly shared its fulfillment could be a goal, an ideology in itself. Should be. To use our diversity as a culture, a species, as an excuse to not fulfill our dreams because we might disagree about the ways we fulfill them would be a waste. An error. Our shared desire is the very homogeneity we’re looking for.

Intention Drives Actions

Normally we intent to do something with something at a specific time and place. Thus we find ourselves in the supermarket with the intention to buy groceries.

Removing intention from the equation is frustrating.

Loss of intention makes your actions meaningless and impossible.

Ever stood up to go to the kitchen only to find yourself thinking; “Why am I here?” That’s loss of intention for you right there…

Intention Deficit Kills Information Joy

If you don’t have a clear intention for each piece of information you expose yourself to soon that information will become a source of distraction and frustration.

You open your feedreader, see “1000+ unread” and think; oh no. Clicking “mark all as read” you sigh, clench your muscles and think “I failed again but this time I’ll stay current and up to date — this time I’ll read it all, all the time”.

From Intent to Read to Intention for Reading

The clearer your intention, the better you feel. “I follow this feed to stay up to date on the news in my industry” sounds like a clear intention but soon you’ll find yourself stressed at somehow staying “up to date”.

Why?

Because the question is; why do want to stay up to date? Answering that question for yourself gives you a chance to bring things back to your real life; “I follow this feed to stay up to date in order to learn about code exploits as soon as possible so I can protect the company server”.

If you find yourself storing information or URL’s ask yourself: what do I intent to do with this?

The fact that it is remotely interesting isn’t enough. You have to know for yourself “I save this article because I’m planning to write about the body-space awareness of termites”.

More elsewhere:

• Horizons of Focus
• Covey’s idea of Roles (would love to include a link but alas, can’t find a good write-up on it! Know one?)

Do you think clear intention helps — or do you maybe think all this talk about information processing and knowledge work is way overdone?

It’s there, ready to go when you want to enjoy it.

This Saturday morning, for example, I passed in bed with some heavenly espresso (Italian stovetop method, yes) and tons of great, funny, interesting, emotional, informing articles. It’s like having a huge pile of recent magazines.

Be Your Own News Filter

As you browse through your collection of feeds and feed items you’ll come across a lot of tasty stuff. Just as with reading a magazine, it’s perfectly OK to skip forward to what caught your interest, to sample and article or to earmark another for later reading.

In Google Reader the Starred Items works perfectly for this. [S]tar that post, [S]tar that item you think sounds like a good read, [S]tar for later on.

This routine is like being your own news filter. Not only do you have your hand selected subscriptions waiting for you; you have your hand selected “most interesting” articles preselected.

"If information overload was the issue you’d walk into a library and die. The first time you surf the web, you blow up."

Now as we don’t have people dying or suffering a mental meltdown caused by information "overload", clearly we don’t mean "overload".

What we’re trying to say is; "Look, there’s too much information here to digest". To which my answer is; so?

If someone is clutching his stomach complaining about "food overload" caused by there being too much food to digest, you’d ask "but why in the world do you try to eat it all at the same time?!"

Take Television

Information abundance isn’t new. Just think about the thousands of television programs, the hundreds of hours you could spend in front of the tube. Hard news, breaking news, reportages, documentaries…

Hear anyone complain?

Between 1993-2002 television program supply in Finland (PDF) increased by 73%; 23 additional TV program hours per day. Yet television viewing time over that same period increased by only 40 minutes a day.

And no-one is collapsing under TV, entertainment or information overload.

Why?

Don’t Try To Finish

Nobody in his right mind will try to finish watching all programs on all channels.

Likewise no-one around you is attempting to read all newspaper article in all newspapers. Or sitting in a library speed-reading all books.

And you yourself, when you sat down and connected to the World Wide Web, were just "surfing the web"; you weren’t actually trying to reach the "last page" and finish, were you?

The same holds true for your RSS feeds. Yes, there’re 1000+ unread items. Great! Even if everyone would stop publishing today, you would still have a ton of great reads ahead.

Because face it, you don’t need to "catch up" with all those unread items. Stand up! Surf! Welcome to the information wave.

An efficient way to get data into the system, apart from typing it or using the Send To button or GmailThis bookmarklet, is a combination of Google Reader and FeedBurner.

Whenever I come across something in Google Reader that I might want to use as reference material later on, I don’t star it (S) but Share It (SHIFT + S).

I have a FeedBurner feed setup for the feed of those Shared Items and have configured that feed to have an email version available as well.

Subscribe to that email version and voila, once a day the full texts of my shared items arrives in my Gmail, gets labeled DB (database) and removed from view.

In karate there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness: “mind like water”.
– David Allen, Getting Things Done

I find web applications, scripts, fascinating. Like water their natural state is stateless. And like water they have no memory at all.

Every time you interact with a web application is its first time ever. Every single time is its first and only time.

That is because most web applications are stateless. You start them, they gather whichever files they need, do their thing … and then forget all about it. All. Everything’s gone.

Imagine that: when you clicked on the link for this page scripts on the backend read configuration files, learned where and how to connect to a database, made that connection, retrieved this article, figured out how this page should look and what information should go on it – and now, by the time you’re reading this, it has forgotten all about it! The next time someone wants to see this article the script has to go through the same steps because it honestly has no clue, no memory, of what it just has done.

Apply that to your desktop applications for a moment! You click the icon of your favorite application. *Click*. It loads. It loads itself, configuration information, user settings, additional files it uses. Finally, there it is…

Now you click one of its buttons – and it would have to start all over again? No way! Your computer remembers all its “stuff” in memory.

But with web applications the answer is “way!!”.

Why again? Because a web application, because PHP, is stateless.

How then does a web application remember “stuff”? How does it remember its configuration? Its user settings?

Simple: the programmer, the developer, has to make sure that all relevant information is stored and make sure that all relevant information is read back in when the script is called upon. He also has to make sure this happens fast.
Which is where the folly of doing things the “clever” way come in.

The Long Way

It’s a long way.
It’s a long, long, long way there,
I’m gonna keep on tryin’
– The Little River Band, It’s a long way

When you retrieve information from files because you have to remember that information you will want to – nay, need to — use that information in and through variables of some type or another.

Storing that information in a scheme, for example in XML through patConfiguration, may seem like a neat trick but what do you gain?

The script loads. It loads the class to parse the configuration file. It loads the configuration file itself. It parses the configuration file – and stores the information in variables. If you want you can cache the file so it doesn’t need to be parsed again.

This, my friend, is not a state of perfect readiness. This doesn’t achieve the high velocity impact we want our web application to have.

It doesn’t help that an additional class has to be compiled each time the script runs. It doesn’t help that a non-native format has to be translated into something PHP understands.

What does help is squashing the urge to reinvent the wheel. Go with the flow and use PHP’s own built-in functions instead. Built-in, that means; pre-compiled, highly optimized. Fast. Effective. parse_ini_file, for example.

Not enough options, not enough depth? Combine it with array_merge or array_merge_recursive.

There are many ways to be clever, very clever indeed, in PHP but The Long Way hardly ever is.

Make your code flow and follow the natural, intuitive path of least resistance.