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Text or Morse – Who's Faster?

I came across a post from a friend of mine where he was talking about the speed at which some teens are able to construct text messages typing with just their thumbs. He was even more impressed because she was texting this fast on an iPhone. I’ve played around a bit with my friend’s iPhone and I can tell you, I can’t type nearly as quickly on the iPhone as I can on my good ‘ol PPC-6700 from Sprint.

Image Source: www.sxc.hu
Image Source: www.sxc.hu

In the post he shares a link to a clip from The Tonight Show where a morse coder and a texter went head-to-head to see who was the faster communicator.

I was also reminded this morning of another problem I have issues with that have come from both texting and instant messaging. The significant reduction in spelling accuracy and abbreviations. On the one hand, I can see the argument from people that state this is just a natural evolution of language and how it’s used in our society. I still think there’s something to be said for accurate and clear writing and communication.

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I Slept Through Class

Here’s an interesting website that may come in handy for a number of people about this time of year.  If you’re in college, you’ll probably understand that this website could come in pretty handy for you when trying to make sure you’re going to be absolutely prepared for your upcoming finals.

I Slept Through Class Homepage
I Slept Through Class Homepage

There’s a bit of a concern on my end about plagiarism, but it’s very slight. See I’ve never been one to really value or demand perfect attendance. This was especially the case in college where I had a few classes where attendance was a waste of time. Nothing discussed in class was ever on tests or required, all the content was only what was in the book.

The ISleptThroughClass website provides a social network for note sharing, class related documents access, an extended opportunity for networking among your classmates. Participants can also earn rewards for ongoing and reliable participation on the site.

The site was founded to meet an age-old challenge—students need notes from classes that they’ve missed because of athletic events, family emergencies, personal illness, or to supplement their own poorly taken notes. The site also allows students to review past study guides and helps students who struggle with classroom notes, have attention span issues, or don’t understand the concepts of a classroom lecture. The social networking aspect of the site provides the added benefits of group study sessions and real-time blogging.

There’s only one question left. Why in the world didn’t this thing exist when I was in college?

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The Question of Ongoing Long-term Storage

Doing a bit of space cleaning on my laptop this evening. Mainly due to my recent addition of some videos with my Flip Ultra, I realized that I had not removed all of my videos I recorded during our recent trip to Disney World this past December. I’m sure it’s no surprise to everyone reading this, but man! video files take up a lot of space.

Image Source: www.sxc.hu
Image Source: www.sxc.hu

The question started coming to my mind though of the best place to store these large, original video files? Is it better to get an external hard drive to store all of these files on? I can tell you if that’s the solution, then I’m going to probably need to go ahead and start looking at a terabyte drive or more.

I then started wondering if maybe burning them to DVD would be better? Lots of available media in my house for that and fairly cheap. Also somewhat easier to organize and access them as needed, at lease for actual archive purposes.

Perhaps the better question to ask is what media for long term storage is going to be the best bet not so much months or a year from now, but more years from now. Which method is going to be the more easily managed type of storage years from now when storage solutions could look very different.

I’m not sure if it’s a valid thought or not, but my other potential storage location was to just upload everything to a video sharing site. Who knows what the long-term validity of an online site will be though.

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