Everything is Connected to Everything

My family recently took a short vacation and as avid photographers (well at least I am) we took lots of pictures. I snapped a few with my camera phone during the trip and using its integration with Facebook uploaded them to a Facebook album. This was great for keeping my Facebook friends up to date on our vacation, but as my daughter pointed out, the quality from my camera phone is not that good (she might have been a bit more blunt in her version).

I also took pictures with my digital SLR but there is no direct integration, at least from my few years old Nikon camera. This wasn't really a big deal as I normally download the pictures from my Nikon to my home network and then fire up Google's Picasa which I use to organize and manage my pictures. Picasa has a nice feature that let's you publish your photos to the web. I then share the link to the web album with my family by posting the link to our family's Yammer site. I sometimes even go "old school" and email the link to people not part of our Yammer group.

After going through my normal process with this group of vacation photos, it felt incomplete as I wanted to share them with my Facebook friends as well. Not sure if any of my Facebook friends really cared one way or the other, but that didn't stop me from wanting to figure out how to do it :). Doing the camera phone upload to Facebook allowed me to tag my photos and easily add captions and receive comments (the good the bad and the occasionally funny).

I first thought of just posting the Picasa link in a Facebook post, but that didn't give me much of the Facebook features like tagging and comments. I then tried to use the Facebook internal photo upload application, but the process was slow and error prone (both in terms of finding the right pictures and uploading them) and was ready to give up and just leave them in Picasa when just for kicks I figured I would google the issue and see if someone had already asked and answered this question.

Did a search on "picasa facebook" and sure enough up popped a Facebook application that adds a Facebook sharing button to Picasa. Installing the application added a Facebook button to the Picasa application which gave me an easy way to select, edit and upload the pictures from Picasa to Facebook. This integration even captures the Picasa captions as Facebook captions making the job as simple as it gets.

The innovation in today's world has always amazed me, but now the integration between the innovations is starting to catch up putting us in a position to say that pretty much everything is connected to everything.

Have you hugged your data today?

Most of us have a lot of data stored on our PCs, Macs, Networks and in the cloud. This data includes the obvious things like spreadsheets and documents, but also includes music, pictures, financial files, web sites, blogs and so on.

Probably you no longer think about much of this data, but you would miss it if it were gone and in some cases the loss of this data could be very harmful to you and your business.

Given that we may have many GB of data backing it up can be a pain, so we just ignore the situation because hard disk failures won't happen to "us".

Of course the reality is not if a hard drive will fail, but when it will happen. Of course the answer is at the most inopportune time :)

The good news is there are so many simple and inexpensive (sometimes free) options for backups to not take advantage of them boarders on crazy.

My own strategy is simple to setup and then just does it thing. All I have to do is check on it from time to time and review the strategy a couple times per year.

• I have multiple PCs and Macs at my house and I try and keep as much data as possible off of their local hard drives. Instead I keep almost all of my data on a NAS box (Network Attached Storage). To ensure the NAS box doesn't become a single point of failure, my NAS box has 2 hard drives configured in a mirrored configuration. This means that data is written to both drives so the loss of a single drive means my data is still safe. I simply pop in a new drive and the NAS box rebuilds the mirror and I am back fully protected.
• Of course the power supply or the controller on the NAS box could fail taking the box down with all of my data intact, but unreachable. So to deal with this I have a second NAS box. One NAS box is on my second story and the other is in my data closet (we can talk about my data closet another time) in my basement. This pretty much assures that one of the NAS boxes is going to survive almost any event.
• To keep the data in synch between the two NAS boxes I employ Microsoft's free SynchToy 2.0 product. You setup the sources and targets between the two NAS boxes and schedule a time to run the synchronization each day. Since it is a Microsoft product, it must run on a Windows PC. There are of course many products that do this type of work, depending on your platform, preferences and budget, but SynchToy has been working well for me for many years, even as I have added Macs to my network. It knows to backup only changes, so each night's sync process is fairly quick.
  
• So short of my house "going away" (as we say in the BCP world) or "someone" removing both of my NAS boxes, my data is safe. Of course it really isn't, which is where off-site storage comes in. There are many off-site companies that store your data in the "cloud". My current choice is Dell's DataSafe product. The key for me is having a product that can back up mapped drives, since my data is not local on my PCs and many of the products will not back up mapped drives. They consider mapped drives part of their "corporate products" which adds considerable cost and complexity, which Dell's product allows me to avoid. The initial off-site backup can take some time, but once the initial process is complete, the daily backups are scheduled and backup only the changes to the folders you have marked for backup.

Is this strategy for everyone? Of course not, but it does protect my data with very little work from me, which allows me to hug my data everyday and not even realize it.

3rd Time is a Charm

Today's entry might be a stretch in terms of technology, but it still seems worth writing about and I will do my best to point out the technology aspects of it all.

My family has been on vacation the last three days and getting some rest was certainly one of the objectives of our trip. Unfortunately, each of the 3 nights we were away, our sleep was interrupted by a middle of the night fire alarm. Yep, that is right 3 nights in a row!

On the first night the hotel did a good job communicating what was going on and what their guests should do as they struggled to make their way down the narrow stairway. The fact that the floor doors opened into the stairway blocking people's path until the traffic was merged, is a different story. We managed to make it down about half of the floors before the hotel PA announced an all-clear. After waiting a while for an elevator empty enough for my family, we made it back to our room.

On the second night, the alarms went off, but the hotel staff was not nearly as on the ball, but people started to evacuate even without the hotel telling folks what to do. We once again made our way down some of the stairs, but this time the all-clear seem to come from the folks on the stairway vs. the hotel itself.

The third night when the alarm went off, we were all in disbelief that it could actually happen three nights in a row and there was much more hesitancy to start the evacuation. Eventually, the evacuation did start (with prodding from the hotel), but we didn't get too far down the stairs before the all-clear came from crowd on the stairs.

Following a few hours of post-fire alarm sleep, I headed to the hotel's lobby to see if anyone could tell me what was going on. Was this some sort of test that was not going well? Was the warm weather somehow triggering false alarms, was there a real issue causing heat or smoke somewhere in the hotel?

Of course it was none of those reasons. Instead, our sleep and our vacation was being plagued by a "practical joker" who somehow thought it "funny" to pull a fire alarm in the middle of the night.

The hotel offered us a free breakfast and a late check-out (but only because we asked for an explanation, not in any sort of blanket manner), which didn't really make up for the interruptions.

Bringing this whole discussion back to technology let's look at our practical joker. How could anyone think they could pull a fire alarm in a commercial building and not get the act caught on video. I thought this type of stunt went the way of crank phone calls with the advent of caller-ID.

One also has to ask why it took 3 times for the hotel to finally catch the perpetrator. The perpetrator was thrown of the hotel and turned over to the police, but still why did it take so long to shut down this joker?

In addition to the hotel taking so long to catch the person, I also have to question the communication processes of the hotel in dealing with its guests. While everyone at the hotel was aware of the situation and empathetic to those who brought it up, they did nothing to pro-actively deal with the situation during or after the false alarms.

I am sure they were hoping that most people would just deal with it and maybe the number of guests who were impacted all three nights was low, but in today's connected world they need to do a much better job of communicating or their guests will do the communicating for them via the various social networking outlets.

I am not going to name the hotel or the city, but I am not so sure others will be so generous. So the message here is to make sure you communicate, communicate, communicate so you control the message because while this practical joker got away with it twice before getting caught, your business might not be so charmed.

Keeping yourself plugged in

Yesterday I talked about using your iGoogle home page to keep yourself plugged into the information flows you are interested in.

Today we stay on the topic of being plugged in, but we switch over to the physical kind of being plugged in. Previously I have pointed out that you should be using smart UPS devices to make your business more green, but this plugged in message is all about making your life easier when you are on the road. In this case the Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB charger is one of those simple things that once you are aware of it will be something you won't leave home without again.

Too many hotel and conference rooms don't have enough outlets for all the things that need plugged in (at least until the concept of wireless power becomes a reality). This little device allows one outlet to handle 3 standard plugs, plus power up 2 USB devices.

On top of that the folks at Belkin were nice enough to make the plug rotatable so it can plug into whatever type of outlet you are faced with.

If you want to to better deal with your next outlet challenge I would strongly recommend you pick up your own Belkin device and throw it in your brief case for your next trip.

Make your home page work for you

I know many of you have customized home pages on Google, Yahoo or elsewhere. Some of you even "roll you own". In many cases I am guessing you have taken the defaults or did a bit of work on your page, but have you really tried to make the page work for you?

I have been spending some time on my iGoogle page to make it really be a valuable home page and portal to the information I want to keep up on and it has really started to take shape.

Let me share some of the things I have on my home page:

• Newspaper feeds from the Chicago Tribune, NY Times, WSJ, my local suburban newspapers, my home town newspaper, my wife's home town newspaper and the college newspaper from the college I went to.
• Magazine feeds from Time, Newsweek and Business Week
• Local Weather and Stocks I follow
• News services feeds from CNN, MSNBC and Reuters
• Feeds from our local schools
• Sports feeds on all of my favorite teams plus the main sports sources like ESPN and SI
• A full page on all of the technology feeds I follow including Mashable, SDTimes, WS & Technology and many others.
• Twitter Feeds from my company and several other sources I also follow on Twitter

I could go on, but the point is that bringing up my iGoogle page and skimming through all of the feeds I am easily able to keep up with what is important to me, plus being able to drill down and get the details as needed.

I have a similar strategy on my personal Twitter account, which allows me to catch up via either iGoogle or Twitter depending on what is easier and available on the device I have handy.

You can also have a similar strategy with Facebook, but the sources are not quite as numerous (yet), or you can use your favorite RSS reader.

The bottom line is no one need to be dependent on their local or national news or wait for delivery or their newspapers of choice, as the information is available 7 x 24 x 365.

This blog is available at http://technologyplumbing.blogspot.com, via RSS, Kindle, Facebook as well as Twitter to make it easy to follow no matter what your tool of choice is.