While my academic degrees are in theatre I’ve always been drawn to technology. I’m part of the generation of people who didn’t always have computers in their lives (although they existed). I didn’t interact with a computer until I was in about the second grade. The screens were a single color: green. There weren’t really “pictures” and the resolution was much worse than an 8-bit gaming system. This was a device meant for letters and numbers and some other things but largely uninteresting to me as a child.
Jump to the future: I’ve got more monitors and computers in my house than TV’s (in part because I don’t have a television). There are almost two computers per person. It is the tool I use for entertainment, business, education, creative work, communication, record keeping, listening, reading, writing and more. Right now I’m listening to music, scanning documents for backup, sending e-mail inquiries, tweeting, and managing a lengthy to-do list. Multi-tasking? No, more like “one-thing-at-a-timing” in rapid oscillation. Since this singular device is so important I want to stress the importance of backing up your data with frequency. This is particularly important for students.
When I was working on my master’s thesis I had a copy on my hard drive, in four separate e-mail accounts, two flash drives, a free web-based folder syncing service, and two external hard drives. Paranoid? Maybe. I’d learned the hard way with smaller research papers and school work over the years. If you’ve ever felt your heart skip a beat because your printer ran out of ink just before you had to turn it in you’ll understand a small part of the anguish of actually losing that research. Imagine losing that slide presentation, paper, bibliography list, or typed class notes. Now imagine losing all of that at once… forever. This loss is statistically inevitable and you should do your best to avoid it. This is a gentle reminder. Back up your work. Now.