We discuss our own individual histories of computing and how technology and computing have affected our lives, and the technology-tracks that our lives have taken over the past couple of decades.

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• Facebook found a problem in the way that it was authenticating applications.
• Any time you used an application a token was created that would allow the application to do it’s thing — including posting on your wall, accessing photos or whatever other permissions it requested.
• The tokens did not expire and were being “leaked” through normal operation on Facebook.
• Anyone who found a token would be able to use it to do the same things that you allowed the application to do — including posting on your wall, accessing photos or whatever other permissions it requested.

It is important to note that Facebook has said there is no evidence that this has been exploited — yet.

The problem has now been fixed, but all the old tokens could still be usable until September 2011. You can re-secure your account by simply changing your Facebook password. This will invalidate any of the existing tokens.

Information Week has an article with more detail.

Science & Technology Shows

Aussie Geek Podcast – Bloody Awesome Tech. Two Aussies (Dave and Cait) and a Canadian (that’s me!) put their unique slants on the technology news, applications sites and services each week (or so).

CommandN – Amber Macarthur and friends bring you a weekly dose of tech news.

Digital Planet (BBC) – The BBC’s weekly technology show looking at trends in tech and how they affect your daily life, hosted by Gareth Mitchell.

Discovery (BBC) – A weekly science documentary examining hot trends and profound topics in the world of science.

Knightcast – Tuning tech into your way of life, Knightwise offers a look at ways to make technology work for you, instead of the other way around.

Mac OS Ken – A daily dose of Mac (and iPhone) news delivered by the sarcastic, funny and insightful Ken Ray.

One Minute Tip (TP) – Byte-sized pieces of knowledge to help you be just a bit more productive with your everyday tech.

Podcasters’ Emporium (LPN) – James Williams and Dave Gray cover all the topics you need to know to become a better podcaster.

Quirks and Quarks (CBC) – Bob MacDonald’s weekly look at science and technology from the CBC mothership.  The show looks at new and emerging sciences and technologies, often with an eye towards how they affect our environment.

Run As Radio (PWOP) – Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes provide a weekly batch of insightful trends and topics for the IT pro.

Security Now (TWiT) – Steve Gibson’s weekly dose of security news and security-related topics is very insigtful  (even better if you skip over Leo Laporte’s TWiT ads).

Search Engine (TVO) – Jesse Brown’s brutally honest opinions and reviews of life in the Internet age.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe – Members of the New England Skeptical Society debunk the myths and frauds of the scientific age.

The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5 – A shorter companion podcast for the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.

Spark (CBC) – Focusing on the softer side of tech, trends and how these things work their way into our day-to-day lives.

Software Development Shows

Hanselminutes (PWOP) – Scott Hanselman’s weekly look at software and technology topics with his inside the MS machine take on things.

Herding Code – A group of “real-world” developers discussing topics and technology that affect code-slingers everywhere.

.NET Rocks! (PWOP) – .NET Rocks brings together the incomparable Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell who interview cool and interesting people in the Microsoft developer space.

Polymorphic Podcast – Craig Shoemaker’s periodic exploration of software and best practices for .NET developers was one of the first software podcasts I started listening to.

Stack Overflow – Jeff atwood and Joel Spolsky’s companion podcast to the Stack Overflow Q&A site project.  A weekly chat about the project, interesting Stack Overflow questions and other software topics.

Humour & Entertainment Shows

Mondays (PWOP) – Mondays is a comedy show from the crew at PWOP that’s released on a somewhat sporadic basis.  This one’s definitely NSFW — unless you have headphones. =)

Star Trek: Defiant – A fan-fiction podcast set a number of years after the events in Star Trek: Nemesis. Produced by the crew at Pendant Audio with a fairly talented voice crew.  It’s a good listen.

Two Schooners (LPN) – Dave Gray and James Williams get together again for a somewhat less serious show covering the weird and hilarious stories of the week over a schooner of their favourite brew.

Business / News Shows

Campbell’s Comment (CKNW) – Michael Campbell’s daily business comment.

Get It Done Guy (QD Tips) – Sever Robins provides great productivity tips, business tips and general “how-to-cope-with-life-after-college” tips.

Modern Manners Guy (QD Tips) – The Modern Manners Guy’s advice on how not to inconvenience those around you.

Nutrition Diva (QD Tips) – Eat better, and learn about food myths that’ll keep you on the healthy track.

Reality Check (CKNW) – Bruce Allen’s pull-no-punches daily comment about social issues and pop culture.

Sports Comment (CKNW) – Neil McRae and others provide a comment on the sports world from a Vancouver perspective.

Grammar / Language Shows

Grammar Girl (QD Tips) – Mignon Fogarty’s weekly language show will help you tackle the tricky issues of trying to write successfully in the English language.

Kalye Speak – Learn tagalog as filipino’s actually speak it.  By far the most successful podcast of its kind.

Podictionary – Charles Hodgeson gives great background on the etymology of words that we use every day. The show is insightful, fun and concise.

It’s been fun putting this list together.  I’d love to hear your comments on these shows, or others that you listen to regularly.

The site is focused on the interaction between software developers which is truly how most of us learn the best — by working with, interacting with and drawing on the wisdom of other developers.

The site draws on a whole bunch of different elements that set it apart from other Q&A sites.  Creator Jeff Atwood describes Stack Overflow as a free Q&A site that’s built and maintained by the community of developers.

While the site was built to answer developers’ questions, it also has some stiff competition in the form of the Experts’ Exchange.  Most developers know about EE, and are annoyed by the fact that the site purports to charge money for access to the answers to development questions.  As it turns out, it’s all available for free, you just need to look around a bit harder to find stuff.

Stack Overflow has been built with transparency and ease of use in mind since its inception; the model is to get as many eyeballs on a question as needed to get a good answer.  Good questions and good answers are up-voted by the community — similar to the way Digg works, except it’s harder to game the system.  Up-votes provide reputation points which at lower levels unlock some of the site’s features.  The site also gives out badges for meeting certain goals on the site, based on the ability to get badges or special goals on Xbox live.

Jeff Atwood’s passion is around developing software from a more human perspective. Much of the design of the site for Stack Overflow, and the code behind it are based on driving positive behaviours within the developer community.  Instead of lots of hard-and-fast rules, there are easy ways to do good things, and more difficult ways to do things that shouldn’t be overdone.

As a side-note, Stack Overflow’s codebase is written in C# using the ASP.NET MVC framework, and has been in use since the very early CTP days of MVC.  It’s a great example of the power that can be brought to bear on the web with this toolset.

I love the site, it’s been a great resource for me for the past year or so, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a development dilemma that they need to solve.

The new feature provides a simple task list that can be activated using the labs menu.  To activate this, click on the green beaker at the top of the screen.

The task list in and of itself is basic, and provides a point that Google can use to extend its functionality in the future… features like integration with Google Calendar (yea, they left that out) and the ability to collaborate & share tasks through Gmail.

While this won’t likely satiate the desires of the Getting-Things-Done crowd, it’s a decent to-do list for keeping track of a non-complex list of items.  The most functional advantage that this has over desktop-based task solutions like Outlook is the ability for it to be accessed anywhere you can hit-up your Gmail.

Overall I’m a big fan of Google’s “Labs” concept. Pre-releasing new functionality in an opt-in manner is the hallmark of open-source and the web 2.0 community, and is a principle that the search giant seems to have embraced wholeheartedly.  Here’s hoping we see more useful features coming out of Mountain View.

If you’re interested in the offer, visit the CodeWeavers website to sign up.

If you want to read more about the background of this story, check out Michael Rose’s post on TUAW.

The long and the short of it: You have George W. Bush to thank (sorta) for your opportunity to buy free software.

It was great to see a few familiar faces like Rebecca and Raul.

I also got to meet some of the folks who I’d only known online.  Duane, John, John & Andy.  Looking forward to meeting lots of other great people tomorrow.

I did forget one thing tonight: Business Cards.  However, I did manage to find a few spare sheets of my Avery business card blanks tonight.  I also discovered (somewhat to my surprise) that Google Docs supports Avery business card templates.

sample business card from google docs

The implementation isn’t quite as slick as MS-Word, but it will more than do in a pinch.  I managed to whip up this snazzy little number in a matter of minutes.  Now I feel more prepared for tomorrow.  Hopefully Dave doesn’t mind that I borrowed the show logo, I promise I’ll promote the show! 

Organize your Photos
This is a relatively time consuming task that I rarely take the time to do.  A “net-outage” is a great time to pour through the photos in your computer and group or rename the files.  If you use a photo organizing program like iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac, or Google’s very popular Picasa on Windows you can use these programs to do much of the tedious file management for you.

Blog Something
I find that one of my biggest impediments to getting a bunch of blogging done is my rather short attention span.  When I’m online researching a story for an article I tend to get lost surfing the Internet looking for new and exciting things.  Being offline for a few hours, or  even a couple of days, can provide you extra time to focus on getting that article written, or in some cases provide inspiration for a whole new article (or two).  I managed to a get a couple of good articles out of my unexpected “grey mode” period.

Write a Letter
We’ve all said it at one time or another, often when frustrated or annoyed, “I’m going to write a letter!”  Well, here’s your chance.  Bring up your favourite word processor, or text editor and bang out some phrases that are sure to convince your audience that you’re right (and that you should get a free case of coke the next time you shop there).  Letters to politicians or other elected officials are also great candidates.

Play a Game
Assuming you have games on your computer which aren’t of the MMO variety playing them can be a great way to kill some time.  A couple of games that I’ve purchased over the last couple of years are Escape Velocity: Nova (EV:Nova) and WingNuts 2.  Both of these games are sci-fi shooters, with EV:Nova extending the genre with trading and other somewhat less violent activities.  EV:Nova also supports a wide ranging plugin architecture that will allow you to download (prior to the network outage, of course) plugins from other players to extend the game or cheat the system.

So there you have it.  A few ways to get your geek on without access to the cloud.  So the next time you find yourself in a coffee shop and don’t feel like paying exorbitant fees to check your email.  Try out a cloud-free activity.  Hey you might even find yourself more productive!

I carried this on for about two months, twitter became less active for me, not much in the way of new friend requests and ultimately a complete drop-off of activity.

Yesterday I decided to unlock my profile again, and resort to the manual removal/blocking of Twitter spam.  Within a few hours I had a bunch of new requests and Twitter activity seems to be increasing more ever since.

So the question boils down to this: To protect, or not?  Do you protect your Twitter?

With a vulnerability so wide-reaching, security researchers decided it would be wise to keep the exact nature of the vulnerability something of a secret until the patches were ready.  They did however announce that a vulnerability had been found.

This announcement was all it took for security-savvy netizens (the ones who know just enough to be dangerous) to start speculating and researching the nature of the DNS defect.  The good thing?  They figured it out.  The bad thing?  They publicized it.

As a keen observer of the whole mess, security expert and blogger Chris Hoff decided to dedicate a poem to the DNS Debacle.  I’ve included a short excerpt:

A bunch of big egos
called Dan on a bluff
said his vuln was a copy
of 10 year old stuff

So Dan swore them on handshakes
and details were provided
and those same cocky claims
soon all but subsided

Go and check the poem out.  It’s extremely creative, and as far as I can tell factually accurate to the events that took place.  My hat’s off to Chris Hoff for providing the prose, now we’ll all cross our fingers and see how it goes… 

I saw a rather significant spike in traffic as millions of Gmail users checked out the blog, and a few hundred of them clicked through on the trackback which showed up as a result of the post.  Go figure.

Crud.  Now what?  I have my MacBook with me which is where this post is originating, but I don’t have a PCMCIA slot in the MacBook to accommodate the AirCard.  I will probably be able to pick up a wi-fi hotspot from one of the neighbours, but that’s going to involve getting in the car and parking, rather suspiciously, on the street outside someone’s house to get access to the internets.  Am I that desperate?  Can I truly not live for three days without my Internets??

I’m sad to report that the answer is yes.  My name is Keith, and I’m a Webaholic.  And it’s not just me, both my wife and I felt a mild sense of panic when we realized that our access to the Internet was going to be seriously curtailed this weekend, if not eliminated altogether.

1. I was going to work on some Flickr reorganization.
2. She was going to watch the olympics via CBC.ca’s on-line Olympic coverage.
3. I was going to use my VPN to connect up to work and get a few things straightened out for a couple of projects I’m working on.
4. She was going to connect to the iTunes store and download the new iPod Touch software and play around with some applications.
5. I was going to work on a revised version of the blog template (yes, the same revision I blogged about months ago).
6. I was going to get the next post in my Hardy for the Home series written (and use SSH into the server back home to do it).

Suffice to say the plans have been revised somewhat.  We were both quite happy to do other things, we brought books to read, we walked on the beach, we spent some tourist time in a nearby village shopping in the local mom & pop shops.  It was just a shift from what we had originally planned.  Despite the fact that we traveled out of the Lower Mainland for nearly 6 hours to get where we are, we had still intended a rather Internet-focused long weekend.  I managed to find a HotSpot (read: parked on the side of an unlit road stealing unsecured wi-fi) to check email, but the connection was a bit too unreliable to try using WordPress.

Well there’s my story of net addiction.  What’s yours?

Photo Credit: Nataliej on Flickr

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.

The post does not provide any real detail as to the source of the problem, only an acknowledgment and an apology for the inconvenience.

The outage provided people with extra free time on their hands to try out their artistic abilities in describing the problem.  This was my favourite of the GMail Fail Whales:

Image Credit: Todd Garland of HubSpot, this copy from YoavShapira’s photostream.

So yea, apparently email is critical to most people’s regular day.  Whoda thunk it?

It’s definitely worth a look, and the new UI is much more like other Yahoo! properties like Flickr suggesting that Yahoo! corporate has had some influence in the redesign.

Some of the changes to both the UI and the feature set make Delicious much more usable.  This will definitely bring me back from FoxMarks.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved FoxMarks of late, but the web interface is iffy at best, and does cause some problems mainly because of the nature of the Java Applet.  (All I ask is to be able to copy & paste!!!)

So go check out Delicious, check me out on Delicious, and tag your best finds with “for:kdmurray” to send them my way (or “aussiegeeks” for the show).

On windows, Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar will display the Favicons along with the text for the items in your bookmarks toolbar.  Something I’ve always done to conserve space in that toolbar is to blank-out the titles and rely solely on the icons to identify the bookmark I want.

The trouble?  The Mac version of Firefox doesn’t display the favicons in the toolbar.  Suffice to say that this has been more than a tad annoying, but until tonight I’ve simply put up with it.

Thankfully I found a short & sweet article that Gina wrote over on LifeHacker which led me to both a Firefox Plugin and a website to get me back my icons.

The steps to get the icons back are short and sweet.

1. Download the plugin Stylish
2. Do the obligatory Firefox restart
3. Visit UserStyles.org and download this style for Stylish
4. Done!!

It was really that simple, and now I’ve got my icons on my Mac.  Though they are spaced apart much further than on Windows, it’s a damn sight better than not having them at all.

Go download it!  I’ll wait….

There now… doesn’t that feel better?

Many of the extensions have already been upgraded to work with the new version, and others are sure to follow soon.  I’ll keep an eye on things and try to let you know when PortableApps releases Firefox3.

Also, if you download today (or by 10:00am PT tomorrow), you can be among those participating in Mozilla’s Guinness World-Record attempt.

At first, I gave “John’s Music” very little thought, I was listening to a podcast at the moment and wasn’t interested in investigating.  However soon after, when the show ended, my curiosity got the better of me and I went for a peek.  The music itself wasn’t all that amazing, but upon closer inspection I noticed something else.  I realized that I now knew far more about John than I thought I would and just from looking at iTunes.

Based on primarily his playlist names, and to a lesser degree the content, I was able to deduce:

• John’s last name
• John’s wife’s name
• John has two daughters
• John’s daughters’ names
• John owns an iPhone
• John’s wife owns an iPhone
• John is from the US
• John’s daughter (presumably the eldest) has an iPod Shuffle
• John is highly spiritual and a Christian

Those are some pretty crazy personal details… and they were all there for the taking right out of a publicly shared iTunes folder.

How do I Un-Share?

It’s actually ridiculously easy…

First, go to your iTunes Preference Panel…

Second, unselect the “Share my library on my local network” checkbox.

Now I realize that this may seem a drastic step for those who only ever use their iTunes at home.  But if you travel, or make use of open public wi-fi hotspots (or poached ones) your iTunes library could be giving away personal information without you even knowing it.  It also illistrates the point that not all Apple products ship in a “secure” mode as often touted.  It’s not out-of-the-box functionality, but it isn’t difficult to poach files out of someone’s iTunes folder if they’re DRM free…

The day started off in the hotel room poaching free wi-fii off a local hospital.  It’s damn decent of them to offer a wi-fi hotspot free to patients and their families (and geeks who are willing to sit at an odd angle near the hotel window).  I was completing a draft of an email that I was planning to send to the mayors of Burnaby and Vancouver on the topic of municipally supported wi-fi.  The email got written up, I checked the twitter feeds (fired off a tweet or two I think) and then headed to my first destination.

I hopped on the “T” as they call it in Boston and took the Green line all into the heart of the city and Government Center.  This is the central government complex and one end of the area served by Boston’s open wi-fi pilot that they’re conducting with ISP Galaxy Internet.  I headed across the street to the Faneuil marketplace and parked myself on a bench.  I wasn’t gonna hang around very long because it was bloody cold and windy, but I stuck it out long enough to fire off the email and quickly blog the experience.  As much as I was enjoying the free signal and 5-bar signal strength (over 90%) it was time for me to g as there were three more stops on this tour and it was already approaching 11:00am.

I re-boarded the “T” and headed out towards Cambridge.  My first stop was the MIT museum.  I got off the train and walked through the streets of Cambridge past several campus buildings.  The architecture on some was quite unique, and there were a great deal fewer old buildings in and around the area.  Much of it appeared to be mid-20th century construction or newer.  The walk from the “T” station to the museum was longer than I had anticipated but provided me a look at a side of Cambridge I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to see.

When I arrived at the museum the first thing that struck me was the austere, spartan look of the main floor.  It was very functionally laid out, with lots of “white space”.  The most interesting exhibit on the main floor was that of the CityCar.  This is a project being proposed by MIT professors and graduate students to create a pool of electrically powered cars for use in urban settings, much the same way bicycle pools exist in major European cities today.

On the upper floor was an extensive robotics exhibit and though much of the material was dated (mid-late 1990s) it gave great insight into the directions of artificial intelligence research and robotics.  I got a chance to see the original “Kismet” robot which was neat after having seen so many Discovery channel programs about it.  There was also some DNA and genetics research on display, and through I read and was able to understand the words, much of the significance escaped me this time around.

After MIT’s museum, I re-boarded the “T” and headed for Harvard Square.  Once I arrived, the only thing I could contemplate was lunch, it was nearly 2:00pm after all,  On the recommendation of Miss604 via the Twtittersphere I was able to find a great place for a pint and a quick meal.  I stopped in at John Harvard’s Brew House.  The atmosphere was a bit dead in the lull between lunchtime and happy hour, but I was able to get my geek on by getting some writing done on the Technological Dependence post, and it was in fact my lack of a paper map and an attempt to Google-search my way to directions (instead of asking for directions or a map) which inspired that post.  (Sidenote: I did eventually FAIL with the digital maps and find my way to one of the paper variety.)  The food was pretty good.  I followed the aforementioned recommendation and tried out the Meatloaf (in sandwich form at lunchtime) and with it a pint of the Sam Adams Nut-brown ale (they were out of the porter).  I don’t know if there’s enough for a Ho Yummy.com review but it was certainly a decent pub lunch.

After lunch was the final stop for the afternoon, a trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Peabody Museum.  This was geekery of a different kind.  I’ve always been a fan of history, and this gave me a chance to explore some great exhibits on geology, archaeology and to a lesser degree, palaeontology.  There wasn’t a whole lot to differentiate this museum from other similar ones I’ve visited in the past.  In fact it was relatively small when compared to the Field museum in Chicago or even the Royal BC Museum in Victoria; however for a school museum it was very well maintained and they allowed flash photography.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day.  I took a few dozen shots, some of which I’ve featured here, the rest of which are in the Flickr set for the trip.  If you’re ever in Boston, take a day trip out to Cambridge and check out the sights.  They’re wonderful cities, full of history, and a great place for a little geeky adventure.

Image Credit: carolclarinet on Flickr

Download FF3Rc1 today!

Image Credit: nitot on Flickr

As these devices have made their way into our lives, the concept of convergence has helped them stick.  Two hundred years ago, the only way to communicate with someone was either in person, or by post.  Then came the invention of the telegraph.  This would allow someone to send a text-message to someone in another city by way of an electrical current.  Really, this was the predecessor to email, fax and text messaging.

Seventy years later, Alexander Graham Bell was busy working on a device to help his wife hear, and in the process managed to invent the telephone.  Imagine, being able to have a conversation with someone across the country much the way you would if they were sitting in the next room.  Before long these technologies began to make their way into every home in the Western world.  You could contact anyone, at home or at their place of business and speak to them directly.  The information age was upon us.

By the time I made my way on the scene in the early 1980s phones were commonplace, analog phones were beginning to give way to faster and higher-capacity digital phone systems.  With these came the advent of the modem — a device solely designed to translate analog telephone signals into digital signals for processing by a computer.  The age of the Internet was beginning.

This brings me to the 1990s and the start of my serious involvement with technology.  I was fascinated by the ability of computers to connect and talk to each other pretty early on.  Being able to exchange files with my friends via the local BBS was quite amazing to me at first, but soon became a primary method of communication (even if it did take an hour to download a file over ZMODEM on my 2400 baud modem!) for passing geekery, photos and games back and forth with a few friends who “got it” early on.

As technology continued to improve, so did my Internet experience.  We soon upgraded to a 56k modem which allowed us to download more than 20 times faster.  I could download the new 1.2MB Wolfenstein Demo (which wasn’t really new) in only several minutes.  But this really was only beginning, because a few short years later came ADSL.  This may have been the beginning of my technological dependence.

As things were progressing on the home Internet side of things, things were also progressing with my own personal communications.  By the mid-1990s (sometime between 56k and ADSL) I managed to convince my parents to buy me a cell phone.  A communications device of my very own.  We had tried to convince our parents to get us a second phone line, just for the kids.  Something they begrudgingly did as the Internet became more popular because, well, they couldn’t get or make a phone call after we came home in the evening.  But back to the cell phone, my first phone was what I liked to call the Motorola “Brick”.  I don’t know the exact model for it.  This phone lasted me for about three years and quickly became my constant companion.   This may also have been the beginning of my technological dependence.

When I speak of my technological dependence, I do so in the context of activities that I used to be able to do unassisted, but which now seem to require some sort of technological intervention.  Let me provide an example.  When I go to a large event, or even a shopping mall with friends or my family, often times we’ll split up and explore individual activities.  If one of us has forgotten their cell phone, or has managed to run out of batteries this tends to propose a rather large problem: how will we meet up later if I can’t call Jimmy on his cell phone?  In these instances I’m reminded that I haven’t always had a cell phone, and at some point in the past nobody did.  How did they manage to co-ordinate their activities?  Pre-arrange a meeting time with friends?  Wow.  What a concept.

In other cases the technological dependence has taken the shape of changes in the fundamental ways that we conduct certain activities.  For this example, I’ll employ an experience from a recent trip to the airport.  When checking in at the airport the airlines now have a vastly reduced number of check-in agents.  Why?  Because all they need to do now is check your bags and place a sticker on them.  Your boarding pass?  You deal with that at a computer terminal before you queue up.  Not handy with computers?  Well, you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself.  The process is entirely computerized.  Add to this that all the security equipment is powered by computers and you’ve got a pretty technology dependent industry.  Never mind a power failure.  If there were to be a major failure in an airport’s computer network (border router failure, cable cut) it would put the entire airport out of commission until it was fixed.

In still other cases our dependence shows in our inability to follow the guidelines that technology gurus have been spouting for years.  The one that comes foremost to my mind is that of “Backup! Backup! Backup!”  The majority of people who use computers on a daily basis don’t back up their data regularly, if at all.  I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion, and have been remarkably fortunate with relatively few disastrous events though I’m far from immune to the data-loss syndrome.  Our lack of ability to simply copy and paste data into another location is astounding.  As with most things in life it’s the people who’ve had the most dire failures who tend to be the advocates for helping people to avoid future catastrophes, so considering their wealth of knowledge, why don’t we listen?

Now despite my deliberately negative slant on the first two examples of technological dependence, the news isn’t all bad.  Technological dependence is simply and indication of how society has developed technologies which are so useful that they’ve permeated the daily lives of billions of people around the globe.  What we need to do as a collective in the years and decades to come is to develop methods to keep the technology we use sustainable and mitigate failures of the technology so that only the most disastrous events could ever disrupt the service.  Some of these solutions will be high-tech solutions that will require investment in infrastructure or new product development.

For the airport example, and admittedly this is something that is probably already done to some degree, ensure that there are multiple points where a network connects to the outside world.  By ensuring that network infrastructure is made redundant and is kept as physically separate as possible, the airport can continue to operate with little or no time spent with systems being offline.  The same would apply for connections to the power grid.  Though simple in concept, a solution like this is relatively complex compared to those for some of the other problems I presented.

The backup problem represents trying to a fundamental behaviour in people: we’re lazy.  The only backup solutions that tend to work very effectively are those which are automated and which we don’t have to think about unless disaster strikes and we need to recover our data.  To solve this problem there are a few possibilities.  Backup services which with only a few clicks of the mouse we can connect to and have them store our data.  Easy enough for most people, and as long as you’re happy with your information sitting on some company’s servers this is a viable solution.  The second (and admittedly more complex solution) is to back up everything to an external hard drive and store that in another location.  This requires planning, forethought and at the very least a spare drawer in the desk in your office to store the drive offsite.  This also requires more up-front investment than the previous example, but doesn’t have any ongoing monthly charges.  In both cases the backup can be relatively automated and off your mind.

Let’s not forget about that pesky dead cellphone problem either.  There is one really easy solution for this one too.  Plan ahead.  Try it sometime, all the cool kids are doing it.  By agreeing on a predetermined time and place to meet up, you can avoid those nasty “Where’s Jimmy??” scenarios and save on precious cellphone minutes to boot!  Now if anyone raises their hand and says that “but I use my cell phone to tell time?  I can’t check the time if I don’t have my phone!” — I have two solutions for you, ask someone or build a sundial.  Oh wait; you probably need the internet access from your phone to get the sundial instructions off Google… scratch that.  The second solution is to bring your iPod.

Photo Credits: marcin wichary, lady madonna, rebelniko, alexmuse, kevin