Remember the milk...

Like so many others in these electronic days of endless potential, I have scheduling issues. And like so many others, I have learned how to use wonderful digital tools such as google calendar or all the other electronic calendars available - synchronised over many different platforms. It seems like technology actually can make life easier, as it helps me keep track of the many complex committments of a modern life.

My husband has access to the google calendar. I then match my ITU calendar (which does not synch) to the google calendar when I make changes that influences my work-hours, since my colleagues and the administration use the ITU calendar to plan our mutual schedules. Occasionally, I even update my paper calendars (two, one diary, one overview), when I plan the term and I need some kind of visual idea of the term. Most of the time having google calendar in my pocket - i.e. on the phone - has simplified life immensely, even if it looks like I am double italian accounting - as they would say hereabouts.

It still doesn't meet my scheduling needs. A lot of my time restraints are ongoing, and flexible to a certain point. When I am working on an article, I need perhaps 40 hours of hard work, but I don't have to do those 40 hours from 8.00 - 16.00 on any particular dates, as long as it's done by its deadline. I often juggle several different deadlines, some long, some short, and prepare a series of lectures while writing one or two articles while being in several committees, a board or two, and have several firmly scheduled meetings. We all know what that's like, right?

What this means is that I need to remember the deadlines a long time in advance, just noting the date isn't enough. I also need to prioritize, and I need to sort according to type of task. While some calendars do parts of this - google, for instance - it doesn't tell me how much time I have already scheduled for a certain period, and it doesn't give me an overview of types of tasks. Also, the tasks end up like long, long bars at the top of the calendar, and given the many tasks I have running simultaneously, they end up hiding the calendar itself! I have been playing around with some other views on the google calendar, but while the calendar with its connection to the maps and the incredible locator function that comes with it is great (how many times have I been saved in Copenhagen by that combination?), the truth is - it's a great calendar but a bad to-do list.

That's where "remember the milk" comes in. It is a to-do site/software/app with the combination of many platforms increasingly important today. It integrates with Siri - the new apple wonder-app which is taking over the lives of apple users, and also with gmail through aggregating a to-do list next to the emails.

What "remember the milk" does not do is create a nice visual representation of my time restraints and affordances. It's still a list, even if I can sort these lists in a lot of different manners. Now I have spent the last 20 minutes trying to google a lovely diary/calendar design I saw not too long ago: Two circles - day and night - represented each 24 hours - the visual simplicity and speedy perception of a traditional clock face on paper.  It made me long for a very different solution, and interestingly, the technology is here - almost.

I have recently bought a livescribe pen and notebook, and play around with this almost magical technology. It combines my hand-written notes with my digital storage, adds sound and allows for the fluidity of recall based on my notes for meta-data. Now, combine my desire for a more comprehensive and fluid scheduling system with the combination of hand-written notes and cryptic data, and yes, I want a livescribe notebook calendar/diary with a circular representation of time, that can be synchronised across platforms as easily as I can make a note in the book.

The wonderful thing about new technology is that this fantastic fiction not really that far away. All that's needed is for a brilliant designer to hook up with an innovative programmer, and then somebody who can market it. I guess I'll dream on though.

Electronic writing

Lately I have been thinking a lot about hand-writing, note-taking and commenting, and I have been considering a couple of different options for how to integrate hand-writing, which is a vital act of organising thoughts for me, and technology.

When Hilde Corneliussen was here in the beginning of May, she brought with her an iPad and a very enthusiastic attitude about a certain application. One of these was GoodReader, an app that lets you annotate PDF's. Hilde described and demonstrated how she could pull up the iPad, open student papers and comment on them by writing with a pen on her screen/on the pdf. I have to admit, that led to instant gadget envy.

The other object I have coveted for a long time, I have just not gotten around to actually buying it. I want an eletronic pen, for instance LiveScribe's smartpen. In combination with a notebook this is a seriously powerful object when it comes to organising information from meetings, lectures, annotations to books, work in libraries, note-taking and interviews. I also have an idea that it may be quite useful to create my own version of the Chrononotebook.

The Chrononotebook is what prompted the current round of technology-lust. I struggle with scheduling, and tend to resort to pen and paper in order to feel that I have a hands-on approach. Then I put the paper away, log on, and forget all about it. The circular nature of the Chrononotebook would satisfy my need to understand the rythm og my days - weeks - months, and it's also sufficiently beautiful that I would enjoy the process of scheduling. However, when I am done, it's still on paper. What if I could then transfer the image to a screen?

And this takes me a step further. I have used pictures of models I have drawn by hand in lectures, when I haven't found good examples elsewhere, or I have made up my own. With the smartpens I could just draw the model, then transfer it to the computer and to the presentation.

Now, the question is: are there pads, iPad or others, that will give me that kind of flexibility? The pen is not as expensive as a digital pad, but it is also a lot more specialised in its use. However, if I am to buy an expensive electronic device which might bring me further into slavery to Apple (my iPod went missing, and it feels kind of liberating not to worry about how I get control of my own music), I want to be able to use it all the time, for everything!

Or, do I take the chance and buy a totally different, new product? I have been watching Notion Ink's Adam for a while now, and after I found RepliGo Reader I am thinking really hard about getting a notepad that uses/supports android and not the many iProducts. However, Notion Ink is distributed from India (that's both a pro and a con), and doesn't have a solid user base or anybody who can maintain them if something goes wrong. Am I that much of an early user that I dare buy the cutting edge of tablet technology?

My first computer was an IBM Advanced Technology. We bought it in 1986, and we wrote a master's thesis and a book on it. The price was outrageous compared to the prices of comparable technology today. It did however trigger at least two young men's interest in technology, it brought me to computer games, and we learned how to delete the DOS - and rebuild it. I have to admit I did not, at the time, imagine I'd ever face the problem I am enjoying now.

The main point of fascination is however the combination of handwriting and drawing and of digital storage and accessibility. That is the part that currently feels like magic to me.

Things I never thought I'd miss

On the list of things I never thought I was going to miss, Fronter is way up there. Volda University College started using it when it was new, experimental, horribly buggy and impossible to manouver in. Frustration abounded, with access, with the interface, with the demands on us for detailed administration and a much more computer-bound work structure. I hated it. Then I started to tolerate it. Then I discovered the occasional useful factor, such as not having to keep track of a stack of papers - I could just have the students submit to fronter, the system kept track and I could accept, comment and refuse, and the students got immediate feedback. There would be a history for me and the student to go back into (finally, after a couple of years fighting for the students to keep access to their earlier work), and it generally made for a much tidier way to cooperate and share, particularly when the students had to submit work to me.

I didn't even notice how easy that was, until I suddenly stood without this option.

I am now at ITU-Copenhagen, where some of the really interesting researchers on Internet technology and culture work. Of course we don't have an easy, simple, accessible net-based platform for students and teachers to cooperate on. That would have been too easy, wouldn't it? (Touch of academic traditional irony there: Organisation studies are disorganised, communication studies never communicate, art studies are in ugly, badly decorated buildings.)

This semester, I have 80 students to keep track of. I have to do it by hand. I never thought this would happen: I miss Fronter.

Cory Doctorow on Ipads and shared content

Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert.

Cory Doctorow points to the wonderful conenction between new technology and new content, in this careful explanation of why he doesn't want to buy an Ipad.

Touch me, la la la

I find myself sighing with pleasure, as I settle down with my new computer. I knew it would be nice looking, because if it was just half as elegant as on the pictures it would be a great upgrade, look wise. Inside it has twice as much of everything as the last machine, my much loved and much used 12" XPS, also from Dell.

I thought I would be reluctant to give the other machine away. After all, I had it set up just as I wanted, it could handle everything I threw at it, it was small and light and I had found the perfect sticker for it.



Can a machine be better, I thought, particularly after they quickly and efficiently exchanged the keyboard and mouse when the first one broke down from frequent use. "Do you mostly play with the left hand?" one technician asked, after they had seen how used up the machine was. I had to admit that yes, I play with the left hand on the keys, the right on the touchpad (yes, I play with the pad, no mouse for me unless I want RSI).

For a lot of different reasons, I invested in a monster machine for the home - a private computer for the first time in years. Here's a review of it, in Norwegian though. It's a totally oversized 17,1" lap-top which I would never have spent money on if I didn't have such a problem with my back and shoulders, to the point where I need to be able to have the machine on my lap when I work. As things are, that machine is just amazing!

I thought I was pretty much set by then. How could machines give me a new experience? High portability from the little Dell machine, extreme performance from the big Asus, and a hard working, decent desk-top in the office.

That was until I touched this one. First, yes that really is leather at the bottom there. It's smooth and begs to be touched - particularly contrasted by the steel. I find my fingers caressing the leather and wandering over the steel stripe to daringly approach the shiny black laquer finish of the upper part of the back of the screen. It feels like walking the edge, as I touch the place where brushed steel meets black laquer, in terror of leaving fingerprints, evidence of my dirty pawing.

But the tactile pleasures don't end on the outside. Last night, as I was busy raiding on the big machine, my husband, the "as long as it works" functionalist, picked up my new machine and settled down to see what all the fuss was about. He was tracing the details, exclaiming over the responsive touch pad, playing around with the control panel for sound and video where a mere touch to the back-lit signal is enough. And as his hands touched the keyboard he sighed, deeply content. I knew then that it wasn't just me. This machine is seductive, plain and simple.

I haven't REALLY tested it yet. No raids, no 12 hours of constant typing, no running of games, presentation programs and video projectors simultaneously. I may start hating it when it starts failing me at vitals moments like those. But at the moment, I find myself humming along with a-ha:

Touch me
How can it be
Believe me
The sun always shines on T.V

And I don't even like a-ha that much. Should I be worried?

Etiquette and netiquette

As new tools are available to us, we need to learn new ways to use them. It seems like cell-phones and text messages is the new "issue" in manners at the moment. The article in NY Times is a very good example of how we need to develop new ways to integrate the new technology in our lives.

At our table, texting is no problem. Not that it never happens, but if you receive and send a text message at the table with our family, you're expected to share the contents. It becomes part of the family conversation. Often the sent messages are communally authored, or the person may receive the response from somebody else than they wrote to. That's a pretty efficient way to limit the texting, whoever does it. Sometimes it's nice too. Discussing the most recent cute picture of my daughter's kitten or the urgent issues at work are both typical dinner-time conversation topics anyway.

So yeah, I am more in the Danah Boyd camp here, where technology is integrated in the rituals of everyday life, rather than one of those with tech-free zones and blackberry-free hours.