Posts Tagged ‘data’

Music by the ‘Click of Death’

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

If you’ve used a computer long enough, chances are good that you’ve heard it:

The click of death.

It happens (inevitably) when your hard drive physically fails to read some data, signaling its soon-to-arrive death.

More specifically, the drive arm swings quickly back and forth across the data plates/disks because it can’t read data, creating a clicking sound that can prompt a tech nerd to nearly experience a myocardial infarction. I’ve heard the dreadful sound twice in my days on Earth, and each time it sent me running to a computer store to buy a new hard disk.

So anyway, I’m in the market to rebuild my desktop (running out of space, my data backup plan is crummy, I like a techy challenge, etc.). While I’m brushing up on RAID configurations, the latest hard drives, backup/recovery solutions, etc. when I stumble across this: (more…)

Social media time machine: The post-panel post

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

SWINY’s “Social Media in the Next Decade” was oodles of fun to present at, and I’m super grateful for my slot on the stage. In particular I want to thank Robin Lloyd, David Levine, Ann Marie Cunningham and the others I have failed to mention who helped put this together.

Fellow panelists David Dobbs and Nancy Shute taught me a boatload, not to mention the great questions asked by the audience. Overall, I thought it was an engaging exploration of where the hell this social media thing might be headed, both for the science writing community and in general.

Back-patting aside, below are the goods as I promised: my presentation and data. (more…)