Winding down

With a bit of a whimper. Chaos in Info Technology project: great topic (folksonomies), ambivalence about platform. Tumblr - what was so seductive about Tumblr? Why would you try to do a class project in it? Time waster #1.

Zoho Notebook - any reason why you're just not working for me? You seemed so promising, until your fonts just sat and laughed. And why can I only see a tiny portion of working screen? Disappointment #2.

TinyGrab - I really liked you, and felt sorry you were hacked into this month. But it was a real distraction when I downloaded you, started an account, innocently entered my command to screen capture - and nothing happened. I wish you all the best, really. But you're frustration #3.

SlideRocket - so you're the one I ended up with. No offense, but slide presentations are kind of slick (slick-and-maybe-shallow, I mean). But hey, hot interface you've got there!

Definitely tech(ish) these past couple of weeks, and not tech(y).

Presenting slides!

If I think about it, slide presentations are pretty old-fashioned, even if created online with the capability of fancy invites, transitions, remote viewing, and whatnot. You've still got basic rectangles (slide-shaped, in fact), moving in a neat path that may as well be originating from a slide carousel. I better appreciate what Prezi is trying to do - that webby, non-linear stuff. Only I can't do Prezi on my PC.

That's a preface to my first (!) traditional slide presentation, online or otherwise. Zoho Show is part of a big suite of cloud applications, and worked without a hitch. I imagine corporations and students doing projects will keep the old slide format alive for quite a while longer.

Antique hardware

Not antique, exactly, but I'm definitely not one of the 47% of American adults using a mobile device to get news and information. I'm using a desktop, it's 6 years old, and has an old-fashioned monitor which is big everywhere except where needed, meaning backwards and not screenwise. As previously noted, it freezes whenever I go into Prezi (although as a friend kindly enlightened me, this is due to its processor "speed," not the paltry memory). Now that I'm reading online so much for classes, it would be nice to enter the 21st century and get a small laptop, so I'm not stuck in the corner of my bedroom.

Just holding out for more netbooks with the new processors to appear, although the HP Pavilion dm1z is very tempting already...

The pre-digital world, boxed

I try not to over-indulge my nostalgia, but sometimes it's warranted. Looking for records to help fill out my IDT application (my library school GPA from 25 years ago...?), I opened an old box of papers for the first time in many years. No luck with the school records, but the things there were a window into a different universe: dozens of long letters, postcards from vacations, notebooks with scribbles from job and apartment searches, notes passed in high school, college papers typed on onionskin (complete with pencilled-in corrections), and on and on.

In one class we're reading parts of the book Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (David M. Levy), which has some intensely personal chapters on the paper document. I'd thought he was being a bit romantic, but am now feeling exactly the same.  There has been something lost from the age of familiar handwriting, sometimes squeezed into the confines of a carefully-chosen card, its physicality shockingly alive after so many years.