Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
Let's see. A year ago, I thought podcasts had finally grown lungs and climbed onto land. And yes, more people now listen to podcasts than did then?but if you're hovering near 50, take a poll at any random dinner party and see what percentage of your age cohorts have. How many listen regularly to one or more podcast (that means whenever a new episode comes out)? How many people actually subscribe to RSS or Apple iPod newsfeeds?
      With that handful of questions, you already know where I'm going: How much has our technology use changed from a year ago? Even my husband has made a podcast or two and then listened to them. (Yes, in case you were worried, that husband, the one that was almost my second ex-husband.) But still, the preponderance of older baby boomers has never even been curious about them. They assume podcasts, like YouTube videos, Facebook, and text messaging, are for law students and first-year associates. That's why I excluded them from my dinner party poll.
      For some time now, I've thought that it is precisely the aging boomers (loomers?) who would get the most out of podcasting?it could become our generation's Books on Tape. It's time to drop the word podcast anyway: The technology has now become simple enough to use that we don't have to think of it as technology, but more as Chinese lessons (www.chinesepod. com), Yiddish literature (www.radio.sbs.com.au/language. php?language=yiddish), Spanish lessons (www.spanishsense. com), or, for drivers or the hard-of-seeing, a summary of the New York Times's top headlines each weekday morning (www. nytimes.com/ref/multimedia/podcasts.html).
      The technology that has stuck and is used routinely by all but the oldest lawyer trouts is USB thumb drives?also known as key drives, flash drives, or those little keychain guys. These things now hold multiple gigabytes of data, so you can load on every file you think you'll need for that hearing in Eureka, including transcripts of the depositions of all 42 witnesses. The trouble is, you need to take multiple key drives: one stored in your pocket, another in your briefcase, another in the hotel's safe, and one in a colleague's pocket. This is in case some file on some drive fails and you need a backup drive. And each key drive needs to be copied from the original files on your network or hard drive?not from each other. If you can lock the drive by sliding a mini-slider or pressing a mini-button, do it. (Then no more data can be added or changed.)
      However, there is that other security angle too: These things fall out of pockets easily. At the very least, password-protect them, even though anyone who really wants to break your password will do so in a few minutes. So, I now advise?more like insist upon?using fingerprint scanning. Not very many people have the same whorls in the same places on their fingertips as you do. This, of course, raises the price somewhat-from maybe $15 for a 1GB drive to as much as $110 for a 1GB fingerprint-scanning thumb drive, also known as a biometric USB drive. (SanDisk, which makes some of the lowest-priced USB drives around, offers a 1GB USB bio drive for around $30, but most of the others cost $70 or more.)
      Even without renaming it, the concept (and usefulness) of thumb drives is intuitively graspable?you plug the drive into a USB port on your computer, and then drag your files onto it. (People often complain to me that when they plug in their thumb drives, nothing happens. My response: Go to Start, then My Computer, and run down the list of drives. You'll find it listed as a removable drive.)
      But thumb drives have many more uses. Take advantage of the fact that, if set up correctly, the thumb drive leaves no evidence of itself on any computer you plug it into (except temporarily adding itself to the list of drives for as long as it's connected). This means you can carry around the free Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition (sourceforge.net/projects/portablefirefox) for surfing the Web at work, even if IT won't let you install an alternative browser on the firm's computers. The same goes for many other portable or mobile programs. For a techie perspective on running apps off a thumb drive, check out Daily Cup of Tech (www.dailycupoftech.com/?page_id=48).
      You can also use a 2GB to 4GB drive as a portable MP3 and podcast player, as described at Lifehacker (lifehacker.com/ photogallery/lh-top-10%7c-usb-thumb-drive-tricks/1777851). Lifehacker is full of extremely useful or just plain interesting suggestions for many, many parts of your life-not all concern tech, either. For a less nerdy set of thumb drive uses and product recommendations, try Wikipedia; and for a how-to on using a flash drive for backup and disaster recovery, go to Randomn3ss (www.randomn3ss.com/2007/03/08/create-a-disaster-ready-backup-of-important-information-on-a-usb-drive).
     
     

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