Monday, April 27, 2009

CET Pulls Analog Plug May 1st

I have been writing about the end of analog broadcasting for more then three years. The first deadline for conversion to 100% digital broadcasting came and went last February because Congress felt the country was not ready for the change. They set the final deadline for June, but allowed stations to terminate analog service earlier. On April 15th the KET network, covering all public TV stations in Kentucky, went all digital and on this coming Friday, May 1 at 12:01 AM, all local Public Stations - CET 48, ThinkTV 14 in Cincinnati and ThinkTV16 in Dayton - will go all digital.

So are you ready? As I have written so many times, if you are a cable subscriber or get your TV from a satellite provider, this is a non issue for you. If you have a new digital set and use an antenna (set-top rabbit ears or outdoor roof-top) you already are getting the digital signals. For those who want to keep using their trusty old 1985 Sony, you can use a DTV converter.

Here are a few updates to help you get ready:

You can still obtain up to 2 coupons per household from the Federal Government. Each coupon is worth $40 toward the purchase of a DTV converter. The converters are available in most electronics stores and cost about $60. So with the coupon you can buy one for about $20. To get a coupon call 808-388-2009 or go online to www.dtv2009.gov.

Locally Channel 64 is already broadcasting only in digital and the other commercial stations will cease analog broadcasting in mid June.

Most people will get good over-the-air reception with a set top UHF/VHF antenna. Some who live in valleys might need an outdoor antenna. Don’t automatically go for an amplified antenna since with digital broadcasting, too much signal can be as bad as too little.

All the local TV stations are already broadcasting at full power so what you get now is what you will get after all the analog stations go away. There is no reason to wait.

Don’t forget, when you wake up Friday morning public TV in the Cincinnati / Dayton area will be digital only.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Change Only Getting Faster

With your indulgence, I thought I might depart from my more traditional “nuts and bolts…what’s in it for you” remarks and share some observations about the impact of the changes in technology on our daily lives. Part of this is a reaction to some comments I get from readers. Many express a frustration on how quickly things are changing and how hard it is to keep up with even the simple things in life like watching TV. This got me to thinking and looking a bit more deeply into the topic.

Simply put, like it or not, our advanced technology has forced us and the rest of the world into a rate of change that is nothing short of exponential. We may not like it, we may not want it, but it is here and only going to get even more pronounced.

There are several examples. It took radio about 40 years to get to 50 million regular users. Television took just 14 years to reach this same level. The Internet went from 0 to 50 million users in just 4 years. In 1984 there were about 1000 devices connected to the Internet. In 2008 it is estimated that more than 1 billion devices were Internet based. This one must put a smile on Steve Jobs’ face: the iPod™ reached 50 million in just 2 years.Enough about sales of products and services. What does this mean for other parts of our society? While I should leave education to the pros at the Board of Education, I did come across some factoids that would surely keep me up at night if I was in a teacher's shoes. I read recently that one of the challenges facing educators is that they are charged with educating kids for jobs and careers that don’t yet exist using technology that has not yet been invented to solve problems that we haven’t yet identified.

Another education guru wrote that for college students in four year technical programs, 50% of what they learn as freshmen will be out of date by graduation.So what are we to do? Living in a society where 2 weeks of articles in the New York Times contains more information than a well educated 18th century scholar would know in a lifetime, can we ever hope to keep up?

Well, it seems to me that coupled with helping students and employees to embrace change, we need to make sure that they can think critically. There is a big difference between knowing the “innards” of a specific technology and knowing the appropriate application. The latter requires thinking skills beyond computational facility. This is not just a challenge to schools but workplace training as well. Just my observations…

Monday, April 20, 2009

Everyone is all a "Twitter!"

Spring is in the air, flowers and trees are blooming, the days are growing longer, but the “tweeting” may not be coming only from the birds.

Since it first was introduced in 2006, “Twitter,” a free social networking and micro-blogging service, has gained fans and noteriety worldwide. The list of those who post on Twitter seems to grow exponetially each month. Many of our elected officials regulary Tweet or should I say their staffs Tweet for them. You can follow the daily routine of our President and the First Lady on Twitter. Each of them tweets about what is happening in the White House. Well again, I imagine both have minions doing the writing and posting and they may not tell us everything that goes on in the Oval Office.

If you look closely at the first paragraph of this column, you will note that it has exactly 140 characters (letters and spaces included). This is the maximum length of a single Tweet or message that you can post on Twitter. If you are going to be successful using Twitter you need to write concisely.

The messages you write as a Sender are displayed on your Twitter Home Page and are delivered to other users who have subscribed to read them. These readers are called Followers. As a Sender you can share your comments with anyone who has a Twitter account or you can restrict your messages to only your friends, colleagues or family.

The messages can be distributed and read in a variety of ways. You can use a regular computer and an Internet connection, a portable device like a “Blackberry” or any mobile phone with text message capability. While Twitter is free, some of the message retieval may not be. Be sure to check with your mobile phone carrier before you have Twitter configured to send the Tweets to your phone. If you follow only a few of the more prolific users, you can get hundreds of messages in a single day. At 10 cents per message you may be tweeting a different song at the end of the month.

You can get a Twitter account by going to www.twitter.com and signing up. It is free and once you sign up you can search from millions of subscribers and choose which ones you want to follow. It is not only individuals using Twitter. Companies, organizations, TV and radio stations all use Twitter to stay in touch with employees, members, viewers and listeners.

Twitter is not for everyone. Some find the steady stream of information, from the ridiculous to the sublime, like drinking from a fire hydrant. Too much stuff. Others find Twitter a great way to stay in touch with friends and family separated by geography or hectic schedules. It is worth a look.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Keeping Important Stuff For Future Generations

You may have seen on the local news recently that the Cincinnati Museum Center is installing a new Time Capsule. Celebrating their anniversary recently, the Time Capsules that were installed when the iconic Union Terminal was built in 1931, were opened and contents displayed to the public. I found it fascinating what items the new capsule would contain. The local newspaper reported that it would contain “newspapers, letters from local dignitaries, local sports memorabilia and pieces of popular culture, such as boxes for the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPod and the packaging for the DVD of the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Note, the packaging for the DVD was included not the DVD itself.

This got me to think about the challenges that we face as we try to keep up with the exploding volume of information and preserve it for generations to come. In 320 BC scholars at the Library of Alexandria were collecting written information and preserving it. It is interesting to note that if you were to find a papyrus sheet, the media of choice from that era, the information contained on that sheet could still be read. Jumping ahead 2000 plus years…you most likely have media in your home today acquired less than 20 years ago that you can no longer access. Do you still have a “record” player or an 8 Track Tape Deck? I bet you have some MS-Dos computer programs or games.

The problems facing regular folks like you and me pale in comparison to the professional archivists at the Library of Congress or National Archives. It is one thing to want to preserve a picture of little Suzie’s first grade class stage production of the “Velveteen Rabbit.” It is another thing to be charged with keeping records and information of science, medicine and geopolitical commerce.

An unintended consequence of the digital age is the lack of permanence of our “products” and information. Today methods of storage, retrieval and presentation change in a matter months rather than in the centuries or even millennia which has been the case for most of mankind’s existence on earth. A good example that I mentioned last year in this column is the disappearance of the VHS machine. Many of us still have a library of home movies recorded on VHS. A trip to the electronics store will demonstrate that players for VHS machines are as hard to find as dial telephones. Even today’s CD and DVD formats are changing. The DVD of yesterday is the Blu-Ray™ of today. There is great debate over the physical longevity of the CD and DVD discs. Will they suffer from degradation like audio and videotape? With this happen in a decade, 50 years, a century?

A long term solution has not yet been developed. An interim approach is to continuously move the content from one media to the newer one. The good news is that once a document, picture or video is digitized, unlike in the analog world, the copy is indeed a clone with no degradation.

For sure the problem is not going away soon. Stay tuned and don’t throw away that shoe box full of family photographs even if they are stored on your computer.