Technology Fetish

Being Digital
That's what three Terabytes look like. A single character or number is typically stored using 8 bits, or just one byte. This sentence contains 42 bytes. One thousand bytes together is called a Kilobyte. Remember those 5 1/4" floppy disks? One of those held 512 Kilobytes. One thousand Kilobytes is one Megabyte. The bible is about 4.5 Megabytes, as is a decent quality 4-minute mp3. One thousand Megabytes - a billion bytes - is a Gigabyte. A CD is about 3/4 of a Gb while a DVD is nearly 5 Gb. One thousand Gigabytes make one Terabyte. Thus, one Terabyte is one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) bytes.

Three Terabytes is just enough to store everything significant I've ever seen or done digitally... for now. Of course, counting backup, that's six Terabytes. The big gray disks are 1 Tb each and together, they hold around 400 DVDs. The black disks are each 320 Gb. One contains all my personal data, one all my music, one all my non-DVD videos, and the fourth contains all my Websites.

Just for fun, one thousand Terabytes is a Petabyte, enough to store all research libraries in the United States! One thousand Petabytes is an Exabyte. A drive that big could hold all the printed material ever created by humans... and only be 20% full! One thousand Exabytes is one Zettabyte... that's one billion trillion bytes! Finally, one thousand Zettabytes is a Yottabyte, or one billion billion bytes. That's a yotta bytes! Did I just say that out loud?

To put that into perspective, there are approximately 3 billion genes in you, and you're make up of around 1,000 billion billion atoms. If we could miraculously somehow store everything about an atom in one Kilobyte of data, it would take 1,000 Yottabytes to store a human!

How many hard drives are that? Let me put it to you this way... if you stored all of this data on the Terabyte hard drives above, and you then stacked them end-to-end, it would take light 1,000 years to travel from the first to the last! (Light travels from the Sun to the Earth in 8 minutes, and it takes light 4 years to travel to the nearest star!)

Amazingly, if you would have done all that 10 years ago, it would have been 100 times longer! That's 1/3 the way to the center of the universe!

So, Scotty, beam me up... just not on a dialup modem! (That would take 11 trillion years! My clothes would be unimaginably out of fashion!)

Mobile Evolution

All my mobiles, first to current, from left to right. I loved my first cellphone... it was so tiny and so perfect for London. You could carry it everywhere and forget you had it (until it started vibrating!) It even had a color LCD. The middle one was my most powerful... four years ago and it's still more powerful than anything I can get around here. It was such a commanding cell phone, the one on the left came with free! Seriously, it was a $1,000 phone. Sigh... I miss having research funds. Returning to America, disgusted with the calling plans, I went simple, pay-as-you-go. For being a free phone, it was pretty cool. On the right is the current... so far, me likey, but I wish it came in pink! At least it's unlimited TV, radio, calling, texting, and surfing... finally, a sane calling plan!

Mobile Office
Everything you do from your desktop, you can do from the road! Here's how I merged my backgrounds in technology and Zen. Starting from the top and doing down the first column, we have

• cables to connect anything to everything
• tripod for video camera
• batteries,
  
• USB Bluetooth adapter
• camera battery charger
• DVD player power adapter
• USB HDTV + remote control

Down the next column are all the personal hard drives. I don't travel with all my DVDs because technology hasn't made them small enough yet. (And Blue-ray makes the prospect bleaker still!)

The blue gadget is an HDTV video camera and going from left to right,

• camera
• mouse
• web camera
• bluetooth headphones (for wireless listening)
• the mobile
• mp3 player
• SD adapters (so I can transfer data from any computer)

Above that is a projector, cables, laptop power adapter, and a universal adapter that charges all the other devices from a wall socket or a car lighter. Left of that is some extra laptop batteries, and a wireless hub (so I can create an encrypted network wherever I go). Under that is a DVD player and below that... speakers. Yes, I travel with a complete home entertainment system! Great for parties, too!

Just about everything I could think of doing on a computer, I could do with what you see. There's still some equipment not shown... a few wireless cameras (for use on the wireless network) and some toys that turn an ordinary whiteboard into a wireless whiteboard. If I were in an environment where I was giving or attending more talks, I'd bring that along too... it's pretty small and runs on batteries!

But that's it... and believe it or not, all that (plus a laptop!) fits into one carry-on briefcase with room for travel documents and magazines.

Phew! Anyone got a cigarette?