Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [76]
Address books, calendars, and reminders
If your address book has cross-outs five layers deep, or you have a calendar hanging in your kitchen with birthdays, anniversaries, other important dates, and appointments, or your to-do list consists of sticky labels papering your office walls, you need to go digital and it’s not as hard as you think.
Start with your address book. You can choose from a host of already available applications. Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, and various freeware programs have contact, calendaring, and time management systems that connect to corporate mail servers or public mail services like AOL, Google, or Hotmail. Apple’s OS X has integrated calendar and address book applications. Many of these applications can synchronize with the information in your cell phone or PDA, so that device can remain updated too.
If you are using a cloud-based system for your contacts, calendar, or reminders, I strongly recommend using a client such as Outlook so that your e-memory has a copy of everything that’s in the cloud. This will protect you from a service that may lose your stuff (perhaps by going out of business). It also gives you a copy when your Internet connection goes down.
Many of your contacts are born digital. For example, you receive a call on your cell phone with a number you and your cell phone don’t recognize. Once you take the call, your cell phone asks if you want to store the number as a new contact. This is easily done and when you sync your phone to your computer, your computer now has the new number in your address book.
IBM has a program called Pensieve (named after a stone receptacle for storing memories, à la Harry Potter) to manage business contacts. After you use your cell phone to snap the photo of a person you meet along with his or her business card, you enter the information into your computer. The program syncs that data with the date, time, and information in your calendar for when you met that person. When you search for someone, you enter one bit of data and up comes photo, name, phone number, fax, company info, and so on.
Nokia is taking this idea one step further, allowing their cell phones that have GPS and a compass to become full memory aids by using images taken from the cell phone. Anything you see, a person, place, or thing, is snapped as a picture and tagged with location. This new phone will be preloaded with tags for places and things in a set of cities, allowing travelers to easily become accustomed to their new environments.
I can’t say enough about the importance of the calendar to mark life’s minor and major time-posts that are likely to be useful for recall. Use your calendar not just to schedule upcoming events, but also as a diary, putting entries in even after the event so that your calendar is a complete record. Every birthday, celebration, dinner, and meeting should be noted.
Pictures
If you have lots of pictures, slides, or negatives, send them to a service. The drugstore Walgreens scanned over two thousand negatives for a friend in less than twenty-four hours. In 2008, Scan-MyPhotos. com would scan a thousand photos for fifty dollars. The more you have, the steeper the discount.
Unless you are a serious photographer, beware the “photo scanner.” I’ve checked out “high-end” photo scanners, hoping they would help me scan faster, only to learn that “high-end” in a photo scanner often means doing fancy smudge and scratch removal and actually requires more of my time to manage the process. The lower-end scanners I’ve tried have been better at feeding through batches of photos, but unfortunately, they have also