My TEDxASB Talk

I never care if I am filmed so long as I never have to watch it. These TED talks are tougher to do than one might think, but here is mine from TEDxASB last month:

I was in the company of some genuinely outstanding thinkers/presenters at TEDxASB. I was humbled to be in their company.

• Scott McLeod <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yA6oTU1emM>
• Scott Klososky <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkpLfkUHNr0>
• Helen Barrett <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckcSegrwjkA>
• Bruce Dixon <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFG6O3hgT7w>

The tech staff at the American School of Bombay did a terrific job.

Where do you keep your valuables?

From "Google Now Covers All Apps With Advanced Backup," PC World, March 4, 2010.

Google recently extended what it describes as highly advanced and sophisticated data backup and recovery to all components of its Apps communication and collaboration suite.

The level of protection, both in terms of the amount of data preserved and of service restoration time, is typically only affordable to very large companies and cloud computing vendors, according to Google.
At the core is real-time, synchronous replication in multiple servers and data centers of every morsel of data entered into or modified in any of the Apps components, like Gmail, the Docs office suite, Sites and Calendar.

"Anytime you change any data in Apps, whether writing a sentence in a document or changing a cell in a spreadsheet, in the background we go and write that data to multiple servers within one data center and also in other data centers," said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.

...

Some large companies have invested in synchronous replication of the sort Google is able to do, but at a cost that is prohibitive to most enterprises and smaller businesses. Google is able to provide this disaster recovery protection for free because it operates many data centers around the world that are connected via high-speed links, Sheth said.

What level of automated backup can we reasonably be expected to provide in K-12 schools? None that seems practical. And unless you know some secret formula that I do not, getting most staff to make manual back-ups is impossible. ("No, two copies of a file on the same device does not constitute a back up.")

I've written before about where one ought to keep things of value. For physical objects, one can keep them at home in a sock drawer, in a safe in the closet or in a bank vault downtown. I think most of us would agree that keeping all your diamonds and pearls in a safe deposit box with large, mean-looking armed individuals just outside the door it feels much safer.

So where does one keep one's digital valuables - at home on your computer hard drive, on a server on the district WAN, or in the cloud where large, mean-looking geeks who know a lot about computer security stand virtual guard?

Yet, I hear district level IT people express concern about the "security" of information kept in the cloud. Could this be a territorial issue more than a technical one?

BTW, my colleague Jen Hegna at Byron has a terrific presentation on Slideshare about the whys and hows of why her district went with GoogleApps. Take a look here.

With apologies to Shelley

This lovely little parody came as a response to my entry yesterday on impermanance. Bob (no last name or e-mail address) has a gift...

Techymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two shiny and powerless laptops
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered USB lies, whose cap,
And cracked plug, and sneer of old folders,
Tell that its user well those documents read
Which don’t survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that used them, and the CPU that fed;
And on the side these words appear:
“My name is Techymandias, king of info:
Look upon my storage, you Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing inside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal tech wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Bob

Image source