Monthly Archives: March 2009

Beefing up my home storage

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I’ll try not to be too nostalgic here, but I can’t help mentioning that my first PC, a 12-MHz 286 I bought in college, was equipped with a spacious 32-MB hard drive. I could fill that drive today with just a few photos from my Canon G9. In contrast, the iMac I have a home has a 750-GB drive. That’s a mere 23,000× increase in capacity.

I have a few hundred CDs at home, and I wanted to to make sure I had them available on my home network. Rather than encode them in a lossy format like MP3 or AAC, I decided to use Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. Using Apple Lossless produces only modest compression of about 50%, but it retains full audio fidelity. I only have a couple dozen DVDs, but thanks to Handbrake I can make digital copies of those too, and each weighs in at about 1.5 GB. In an era of cheap disk storage it seems like a good compromise.

The iMac disk eventually got full enough that I couldn’t back it up to my 500-GB external drive anymore. After keeping my eye on them for over a year, I decided to upgrade to a Drobo and loaded it up with three 1-TB hard drives. The result is a cool 1.8-TB of redundant storage.

Loading the Drobo

The most attractive aspect of the Drobo is that it’s practically infinitely expandable. As larger drives become available you simply pop out one of your existing drives and replace it with a larger one. The Drobo automatically arranges all of the data and spans to the new drive to maintain the redundancy. I didn’t need all four drives to get started, so I just put the 1-TB drives in three of the bays.

iMac with Drobo

I plugged the Drobo into the iMac using the Firewire 800 port for maximum copy speed. Even with the fast interface it took several hours to move a few hundred gigs of data to the Drobo.

AEBS and Drobo

The final step was moving the Drobo to my hall closet and plugging it in to the USB port on my Airport Extreme Basestation. This makes the Drobo available on my network so that any machine in the house can access the media or backup files to it. So far so good, but I have to admit that that the backup speed is only mediocre even over a Gig ethernet wired network. I suspect the so-so performance has a lot to do with the relatively slow USB 2.0 interface. It’s plenty fast to stream media for Boxee on the iMac though, and since I run the backups over night, the speed doesn’t really matter.

Stay tuned for a description of how I’m using my old MyBook external drive to store encrypted data off-site.

Mismanaging for the status quo

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Government agencies don’t generally have an innovative reputation. But NASA? Come one. If any government entity would be likely to embrace innovation and creative problem solving, certainly the organization that said this (prepare your J.F.K. impersonation) would encourage critical thinking.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The NASA of today is probably at least 100× larger than the agile agency that launched those Apollo missions back in the 60′s, and, according to an article published by NPR, their bureaucracy is employing a lot of “innovation-blocking behaviors.” Not satisfied with the status quo, a veteran astronaut created a satirical video intended to call out the problems he’d been seeing at the agency. Watch this video and see if any of it rings true for you.

OK, so no one’s going to win an Oscar for their performance in this video. Here are the innovation-blocking behaviors I noted while watching the video:

  • Blind adherence to existing procedures or specifications
  • Compartmentalization
  • Emphasis on employee roles in the organization rather than the quality of their ideas
  • Fear of challenging the status quo (and those who maintain it)
  • Too much reliance on the chain of command
  • Tendency to “shoot the messenger”
  • Premature acceptance of resource constraints
  • Overly complex processes
  • Too comfortable in “the comfort zone”
  • Valuing process over results
  • Too much emphasis on past experience

It’s easy to criticize without suggesting solutions, so I was impressed to see Part II posted 10 days ago.

I think you can summarize Part II pretty easily. Build innovation into your organization’s processes intentionally. When the innovation is “baked in” to the structure of an organization it sends a message to all employees that the organization is keenly interesting in what they have to say. And that is an crucial step in building an innovative culture.

On being a passionate beginner

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Bill Buxton’s recent BusinessWeek article How To Keep Innovating got me thinking again about art. More about that later. Buxton recommends worrying a lot less about mastering a particular skill and instead embracing your passions. Specifically, he recommends:

  • Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
  • You can be everything in your life—just not all at once.
  • When you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are—yet again—bad.
  • Life is too short to waste on bad teachers and inefficient learning.
  • Remember: You can learn from anyone.

I may be a mild-mannered technologist by day and, unfortunately for my family, many nights too, but an artist lurks beneath my geeky exterior. I own a few art pieces, and I’d love to have more. But what I’d really like to do is take a welding class and do some sculpture of my own. I have some pictures in my head, but I don’t have the skills to put them into physical form.

It’s a lot more comfortable to stick with what you know. Are we encouraging students to take academic risks, or has GPA pressure squeezed out some of their passion? How about teachers? Have we designed our appraisal systems to encourage teachers to try new techniques or learn new skills?

For all of the irrational exuberance that has come out of Silicon Valley over the years, I’ve always admired the way that the entrepreneurs there overcame the stigma of failure. I think that’s a big reason that the U.S. tech industry is so innovative. Of course, none of those entrepreneurs are accountable to local tax payers either. Finding a way to take the risks necessary to really innovate in the context of a public school system seems like a big challenge to me.

My blog: rebooted

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This isn’t one of those “I know I haven’t been blogging much lately, but I promise to do better from now on” kinds of posts, even though I haven’t been blogging much lately and I promise to do better from now on. Frankly, I’m not sure what this post is about other than to say that it’s been a long time coming.

My first blog post was on September 4th, 2003, which simply blows my mind. At that time I was fresh out of the classroom and only weeks into a new job in a new school district. My blog was originally conceived as a place to post tech integration ideas for the teachers in my new school district. The very next day I had a comment from someone I’d never met, and I was hooked. Like everyone else I went through periods of frequent postings and relative droughts, but the next three years were definitely my most productive as a blog author.

As my career has transitioned to a couple different administrative roles, my blogging has slowed to a trickle. I realize now that my blog never changed with me. I’ve been trying to write the same stuff as I did when I was coaching teachers to integrate technology, and it’s just not working. Time to reboot.

I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation and creativity lately, and I feel like blogging about that for a while. Maybe someone else will find it interesting too. I’ll probably mix in some personal technology stuff too. Stay tuned.