Quiz #64. My Data Does Matter
Tin foil for the BBQ or a Doxie scanner for a Coronavirus Stay-at-Home holiday? My not-so-much-of-a-holiday quiz for July 4th, 2020.
July 4th memories.
Picnics. Barbeque. Fireworks.
As I wrote this very early on a holiday morning, the first memory that popped into my head is from growing up on Long Island. My brother Richard had “water on the knee” as a small child. My family went to Eisenhower Park for the fireworks and we had to pull Richard around through the crowds in a wagon.
I don’t have a photo from that July 4th holiday and I don’t know why that one July 4th memory popped into my head this morning, but here’s a picture of Richard from that same time period.
It’s not July 4th, but here’s Richard and me at a Memorial Day Parade. He’s a lifelong firefighter and now a Fire Chief.
July 4, 2019. My daughter Betsy (right) with fellow teachers after running the 4-Miler in the Firecracker Run.
Here’s the starting line from that race in 2019. A lot has changed in one year.
In 2020, the annual July 4th race was virtual.
I’ve spent a lot of COVID time going down memory lane, working to preserve many memories in my tens of thousands of photos. If you’ve been reading this quiz, you know that I am a fanatic about preserving my photos. In Quiz #24. A Baby Aquarium, I discussed the importance of family photos--and even linked to Steve’s Guide to Family Photos where I explained my system for saving your photos in albums or folders, each marked by year and month (for example, “2020-06” for June’s photos).
If your photos are organized in a consistent way, you then need to store them--in those dated album--across multiple devices and cloud services. With your albums consistently set up by year and month, you can save and find your photos across your multiple storage systems. My data does matter.
As an aside, in Quiz #50. 63, I listed 63 observations, rules and mantras that I have used to get me through life. In #53 of those, I noted that one of my mantras is “My data doesn't matter.”
Privacy experts are rightly concerned about all the information that’s gathered about each of us every day--especially with so much of what we do recorded on iPhones that follow and track our every purchase and movement as we shop and navigate the world.
It's important to remember, however, that most companies actually don’t care about you, per se. They want your information so they can figure out how to predict what you--and the people like you--will want.
8 years ago in “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” Charles Duhigg told the story of how Target wanted to figure out in advance which of its shippers were going to have babies so they could market infant items and baby accessories to them from the very beginning. Target tracked purchases going back in time and figured out a matrix of products which, if purchased, were a true marker that a woman was pregnant. It worked with surprising accuracy.
My observation is that such predictions only work if we’re predictable. I like to thwart artificial intelligence by being stupid every now and then. I will search for or buy something that’s completely out of character for a 63-year-old white male. My goal is to throw off the algorithms.
Collect all the information you want on me, “My data doesn’t matter.’” You with me?
Try it. Search for something crazy. In life and especially on the internet, be unpredictable. It’s fun--and it keeps people, Google and any advertising trackers on their toes. “My data don’t matter.”
Back to preserving my photos where my data does matter.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I decided to renew my efforts to scan and digitize my own printed photos. Pre-digital, from 1982 to 2002, I have 40 photo albums, each numbered in chronological order, backed up with negatives which are also kept in separate albums, also in chronological order, all within archival safe pages. Each photo album has about 700 photos, approximately 28,000 photos in all.
When I was recovering from brain surgery 3 years ago, I started scanning the photos from those albums. I stopped after one album because, my brain a little muddled, I was making mental mistakes in how I labeled and filed the pictures.
When I picked up the project at the start of the pandemic, it wasn’t much better. Even with a clear head, I have a tendency to make things so complicated--imagine that--that keeping them organized within my elaborate system can be next to impossible--even for me.
As noted in Quiz #62. Football Fantasy, I will not be playing fantasy football in 2020. In the last decade, I’ve been a fanatic about fantasy football. Before that, I was a fanatic about fantasy baseball. Unlike football with weekly games, baseball games are played daily so fantasy baseball takes a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week commitment for 6 months. A friend from back then, Gary (RIP), noted that each of our fantasy baseball teams tended to do better when we went on vacation and took a break from day-by-day tinkering. Gary called it “The Edward Scissorhands Effect.” Making things too complicated is my life-long curse--or at least one of them--and that includes scanning and organizing my photos.
I use a Doxie scanner to scan the individual images. It’s about the size of a roll of tin foil. You stick a photo in one side of the scanner and in 10 seconds, the photo passes through the device, scanned into the Doxie’s memory as a jPeg.
My Doxie scanner—and no, we will not be using the tin foil for a July 4th BBQ today. (Sara’s reading; I’m writing.)
When I started scanning in March, I used the Doxie with my laptop. It’s a MacBook Pro and it was my first time using a non-Windows computer with the Dixie. I had real problems figuring out how to use the laptop with the Doxie scanner. The short version--and, trust me, this is the short version--is that when I’d scan a lot of images, the scanner would sometimes run low on power so I’d plug it into the MacBook for power. In addition--remember this is the short version--when I looked at the images after uploading them from the Doxie to the laptop, some of the images wouldn’t be at the right angle. The angle would be off so that what was seen in the scan was more like a trapezoid as opposed to the regular rectangle of the 4X6 image. Think of a rectangular placemat on a table, set off at an odd angle, not aligned with the edge of the straight-edged table.
This is a scanned image of Annie, heading off to college in 2000. This is how it appears within the Doxie images before it’s been adjusted to fix the orientation to make it a rectangle aligned with the 4X6 original.
After I scanned the roughly 700 images from that one album, I uploaded them from the Doxie to the MacBook and took a look at them. About 1 in 4 were trapezoids--so I went through the photo album again, page by page, rescanning the photos that had come out as trapezoids. Sadly, I was unaware that when I’d plugged the Doxie into the MacBook (as I had done so it would not run out of power), the Doxie stopped working as a scanner. I did not find this out until I’d gone through the album and did a second scan of the roughly 175 images that had first scanned as trapezoids. None of those second scans were recorded and saved by the Doxie.
I did various tests to try to figure out what was wrong before I realized--by going to Google--that the Doxie would not scan if it was connected to the MacBook. I then went through the album a third time, page by page, scanning those 175 images which had come out as trapezoids. Some of these were still screwed up and I shelved the project.
When I took some time away from work in June, I committed to somehow finishing scanning all the images from this one photo album. It was only then that I realized that there is a function within the Doxie app on the MacBook where you can re-orient the trapezoid images, adjusting and then saving them as proper rectangles. The week away from work ended with that one album scanned--and I am now onto the next one. I try to scan a few pages each day.
I have all my photos (and videos) on a hard drive--and in June that hard drive also started acting up. In part, it may be because I started using the hard drive with the MacBook, not realizing that it needed to be “ejected” using software on the computer instead of just pulling out the USB cord (and dongle) from the MacBook.
In June, I took the hard drive to my local computer store. It was a socially distant experience--the opposite of a contactless pickup. I called ahead, put the hard drive in a plastic bag and then put it at their door. I walked back on the sidewalk, texted that I was there and they came out and picked it up. They held the device for 2 weeks and attempted to download the data from the hard drive. It kept downloading--but very slowly and never all the way. After 2 weeks, they recommend I go to a hard drive recovery business. Another socially distant experience. The hard drive is still there, but Larry--the area’s hard drive guru--was optimistic he will be able to get most of my data off of it. If not, the data, more than 500 GB, is backed up in a cloud service called Carbonite and I have downloaded it to my desktop.
I spoke to Larry the data guru about what to do next. Would he recommend another brand of hard drive? Could this happen again in a few years? His answers were illuminating, troubling and profound. He said his years in the data recovery business had taught him that nothing is perfect. No backup is foolproof and even the best brands and hard drives get corrupted, lost or destroyed. His advice: back things up on multiple hard drives instead of one. Also, he added, don’t just rely on the cloud--or one cloud. They can fail too. Use multiple clouds.
So what’s Edward Scissorhands to do?
I’m now going to get smaller hard drives--so that everything is not backed up on one hard drive. I’ll use one hard drive for videos, another for my printed photos and another for scans and slides from my father and grandfather. I’ll then make an extra copy or two of each of those smaller hard drives. Doing that means I’ll need to lock in what goes onto each hard drive now--and set up new hard drives for material that gets saved from this point forward, Of course, I’ll need to back all that up on multiple clouds, Carbobine, iCloud and Shutterfly.
Wish me luck—and thanks for reading.
My data does matter—and so does yours.
Note Well
I like adding photos to each quiz. Today’s “What did NOT happen?” question is centered about old photos. If I post the photos here, you will know what did not happen. So, to see the photos listed in the question below, you need to look at Answer #64. My Data Does Matter.
What did NOT happen?
A. When I told my daughter Annie that I had just scanned photos from her Senior prom, she asked me to text her a group picture I had taken of a sort-of-friend who Annie had just found out had gone on to become an author on the New York Times best-seller list. I found the group photo and texted it to her in 5 minutes;
B. On a video conference call this week, I got word that veteran newsman Hugh Downs had died. I went into Shutterfly on my phone and pulled up a photo of me with Downs. RIP;
C. My college friend Bill emailed me this week. He’s in Rome and wanted to know if I remembered the name of the hotel we had stayed in back in 2003 when our families had gone on a joint trip to Rome. I did not remember the name of the hotel, but I went to Shutterfly and found the image of 3 of our kids standing in front of the hotel sign. I sent it to Bill within 5 minutes of getting his email;
D. I’ve also been scanning old prints from my father which included images of his brother, my uncle Ed. I emailed them to my cousins and heard back from one who wanted to know if anyone had any background on our grandfather who’d painted watercolors. I had just found a photo of him at an art show in the 1950’s and sent it to the family;
E. In going through old scans, I found a picture of my sister Susan from her Christening in 1955. I shared it with Sue’s friend Dana who included it in a 65th birthday montage she made for Sue in May. Sue had not remembered ever seeing that image.
Want the answer (and want to see the pictures)?
Answer #64. My Data Does Matter.
If you’re a subscriber, the answer will be sent to you as a separate email when the question is published.
Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #65. Dog Days.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #63. “Says Steve.”
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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