Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (23 page)

STEP II: LIFELOGGING

Now that you’ve focused on the potential for Total Recall to improve your life, have the tools of the trade, and have begun getting rid of all that paper and other junk, it’s time to start recording more of your life digitally. Time to get lifelogging.

I own several digital cameras because of trade-offs in features and size. If I could only have one, I’d pick a pocket-sized camera so that I would be more likely to carry it around with me. If not for my pocket camera, I’d have no shots of my ride in the cab of San Francisco Fire Department Aerial Truck T-13 (what a thrill!). If you don’t have your pocket camera with you, take a snapshot using your smartphone. The quality may be lower, but at least you’ll have some visual e-memory. The bottom line: Carry a camera and snap away.

I believe in taking video “cliplets”—little clips of five seconds or less. Five seconds is often all it takes to capture the ambience of a moment. No photo, no matter how good, can convey the movement like the five seconds of hula dancers I shot in Hawaii. A quick shot of my grandson saying hello is priceless. And sometimes I like to swing the camera around in a panorama in an attempt to capture the feel of a place I’m in. My camera and cell phone are fine for video cliplets, so I don’t bother with a video camera much. With longer videos, I have to be concerned about space on my PC. So most long videos remain in DVD form, but all my video cliplets get added to my e-memory.

Remember when people put pins in a map to show where they had traveled? You can do it digitally by collecting global positioning system (GPS) tracks. I’ve made trip records of walks, car rides, train rides, and airplane rides. The GPS comes with me into the wilderness and into the skies thirty thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean. You either need a cell phone with GPS records that you can export from it, or a stand-alone GPS unit that you can carry in your pocket.

If batteries are a hassle, and you use your car a lot, it may suffice to have a car charger and just leave the GPS in your car. This at least gives an approximation of where you are, based on where you drove to.

In addition to creating a record of your travels, a GPS is used to add location information to photos. As I’ll discuss later, manual labeling of photos can be a lot of work, so having time and location correct on every photo is critical. If you don’t have a GPS camera, then you need to ensure that the date and time on your camera are set correctly (actually, you should be sure of that anyhow—you will be really glad to have the right time on all your photos). Now, if you know from the GPS where you were at a certain time, and you know when a picture was taken, you can infer where the picture was taken. The location information can then be inserted into the picture file alongside the date and time. This is called geotagging or geolocating your photos. You can do this with Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, HoudahGeo, or many other programs available on the Web (your GPS device may come with such software).

An alternative to GPS is a memory card with built-in Wi-Fi networking for your camera. This allows you to wirelessly transmit your photos back to your computer or an online photo-sharing site. More important, the card can geolocate every photo—so long as there are Wi-Fi signals at your location.

For audio recording, I carry an Olympus WS-320 audio recorder (though changing batteries is a pain). In a pinch, I also record using the audio recording function in my cell phone. For recording meetings, I like to use OneNote and record directly into my PC. To save telephone conversations, Skype calls can be saved automatically. Recording from a cell phone or home phone is presently more complicated, and there are legal issues; I’d wait for that space to evolve a little more before you jump in.

HEALTH DATA

Health logging is going to rapidly improve in quality convenience in the next few years. Do everything you can to get involved in this potentially life-changing and life-saving trend. You are the only one with access to all of your health data, so take ownership of it and collect all that you can. Take advantage of new technology that helps you achieve quantitative health.

Start out by creating a simple document for medical information about you and any family members you want to keep track of. List all the immunizations, allergies, medications, and any important events, for example, when a surgery was performed. Whenever you get a simple test result—say, a blood pressure value—add it to the document. Aim to have all the key statistics about your health in one quick reference document.

A couple of years ago, I visited the Canyon Ranch wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts. After a host of blood tests, body scans, cardio stress tests, exercise evaluations, and even gene reports, I finished my stay with more medical and fitness information about myself than I could ever have imagined. The information that was most interesting was the fitness information. I’ve used this as a foundation to compare with fitness facts I record today.

I wear a Polar heart monitor strap whenever I work out. This allows me to capture heart information and compare it to what I’ve received at Canyon Ranch and subsequent tests with my cardiologists. My trainer has created a program tailored to help with my heart and with my core. (Supposedly we have balance issues as we age that I clearly observe.) After scanning this into my e-memory, I can now track my progress and it is easy for her to make changes to the training program electronically.

Dr. Christiane Northrup’s research has found that walking ten thousand steps a day helps your heart stay healthy. I now wear a pedometer, which downloads what I walk each day into my e-memory. Some days are better than others, but over the last year or so, I have actually averaged about ten thousand steps a day. Dr. Northrup would be as happy as my heart is.

You should determine the area of your health that is most important to you, and get a device that helps you quantify your status. For example, to track your fitness, you might get the BodyBugg arm strap that I mentioned in the health chapter. If you are concerned about your blood pressure, you should buy something like the Omron HEM-790IT blood pressure monitor, which will enable you to upload data to the Microsoft HealthVault.

I’ve already advised you to get rid of all your paper, so don’t get too upset when I tell you to acquire even more paper that you will need to scan. If you really want total control of your health information, first you need to obtain it, which, sadly, nearly always means paper. You will need to contact every doctor, specialist, dentist, hospital, or health facility that has a record of you. You will need to write or fax them to obtain a copy of these records; a phone call won’t suffice. Keep a list of all of them and check it off as you receive each record. Also, you will need to do the same to obtain your medical insurance “explanation of benefits” forms, if you don’t have them already. Although this aspect of Total Recall took the most time for me to accomplish, having these records and measurements at my fingertips has saved my life after my double bypass redux.

Quicken Health is a database on your own computer that keeps track of the paper blizzard that is typical of a chronic condition or a major procedure. It holds all the letters, bills, and insurance documents—it tracks the money flow and who paid what, when. While such systems are substantially more detailed than financial transactions, they are more than a decade behind the financial industries in terms of their ability to handle health transactions in a humane way. This program was created by a frustrated Quicken employee who saw it as the only way to follow the paper.

With paper under control, you can move on to electronic information. Some physicians communicate via a proprietary e-mail system. You should keep copies of these conversations for your life bits. As more providers in your health-care network go digital, be sure to ask if you can download copies of reports, prescriptions, X-rays, or whatever they will let you have.

TAKE NOTES

Lifelogging will be increasingly automatic. However, right now there is no replacement for just recording a few phrases or sentences. Doing this is more comfortable in a work or educational setting, but whether it is a “note to self,” notes about a meeting, or an epigram you want to remember, make a note and give it a date and a place.

In meetings, I like to use OneNote. I can type, or I can use handwriting and draw things using my tablet computer. OneNote can record audio and will sync the audio to the notes I am taking. So, I can later click on a note and have the audio play from the point in time when I made the note. OneNote is also really great for copying passages out of Web pages and keeping a link back to the page you got it from.

For a quick typed note, there are several options. Sending yourself an e-mail works well. You can leave the e-mail in your in-box as a reminder, or put it in a folder of notes on different topics if that was your intent. I use Outlook, which has both notes and tasks; other productivity tools should have similar features. Tasks differ from notes by have properties such as due dates.

For spoken notes, I used to use the record audio note feature on my smartphone. These days, I prefer using reQall. With reQall, I dial a certain phone number, and am prompted, “What would you like to do?” I say, “Add,” and then, after a beep, say my note. That audio recording gets delivered to my e-mail as an audio attachment, and a transcription is made of what I said in the text of the e-mail. I find this especially handy when I’m driving: I just hit a speed dial button, talk to reQall, and then I know I will have the note in my in-box to deal with later. I used to forget more ideas than I remembered, but now it’s easy to save them. There’s more to reQall than I have space to cover here. It understands reminders and shopping lists. You can send it messages from instant messenger, and it can send you reminders in SMS text messages. It really is a fantastic tool for e-memory.

Evernote is another powerful e-memory tool. It covers a lot of ground, from clipping Web pages on the PC to audio recordings on its cell phone software. What I think is particularly interesting about it is how it does OCR when you take snapshots. It does a great job of detecting text in a picture, allowing you to take pictures of stuff from wine labels to whiteboards, and then searching for the text in them.

At a dinner party recently, a guest demonstrated his latest find: a digital pen called a Pulse Pen from Livescribe that both records the lecture and allows you to take notes that can be uploaded to your PC. I know when I sit through lectures, many times the speaker is faster than my pen. The Pulse pen solves this problem because if you miss a word, the pen captures it. The only negative is that it requires special paper.

Other electronic pens are made by IOgear, whose Mobile Digital Scribe pen doesn’t require special paper, but also doesn’t record the audio. It also requires an extra pager-size device to upload the information to your PC. The ZPen from Dane-Elec is like IOgear’s device and doubles as a one-gigabyte flash drive.

TELL STORIES

Advancing from raw media to stories doesn’t have to be as time consuming as it is for novelists and filmmakers. We are all storytellers, it is just that we can’t all be Shakespeare, or Toni Morrison, or Steven Spielberg.

Begin making dear-diary e-memories, just like you take notes. Send yourself an e-mail recounting the humorous quip your nephew just made. On your way home from the ball game, call reQall and talk about what happened. Point your camera at yourself and record a short video clip telling about someone you just met. Knowing that you keep an e-copy of everything also means that any stories you send to others become part of your story. So send more e-mails to family and friends telling stories.

Some cameras let you add audio comments to the pictures you take. Take advantage of the feature so that the picture comes with you telling the story behind it. Even if you don’t have such a camera, you can always add your voice later. Photo Story is a nice application that lets you create a voice-over story with pictures that zoom and pan, giving you that “history channel” feel. VizzVox is a Web-based application that lets you upload photos and talk about them. You can continue annotating each time you watch, adding more information, improving the voice record incrementally as you think of new things to say. Others can chime in if the event involves several people or family. In the end, VizzVox lets you save the story to your e-memory as a video.

Video is fantastic, but shooting it can take you out of an event, and it can be very time-consuming to edit. The good news is that editing has gotten much easier, thanks to programs like Microsoft’s Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie. Both are free applications that allow you to create very professional looking movies by just dragging and dropping photographs, video, music, and voice-overs.

Whenever you can afford the time to do a really complete video shoot and production, go for it. For the rest of the time, develop the discipline of shooting video cliplets of about ten seconds each. Then create stories of no more than ten minutes. These boundaries will not only keep the story more interesting for viewers, but will provide realistic targets so that you will actually create more video stories.

Another great way to tell a story is in a scrapbook. Gather photos along with images of stuff you have digitized (tickets, dried flowers, recipes, and so on) and add captions to tell your story. There are a host of Web sites that provide electronic layouts, instructions, and even classes on how to create your e-memory in the form of a scrapbook.

Time lines are wonderful for visualizing a series of events. I can see from research projects, including MyLifeBits, that some incredibly compelling time line software will be coming to market in the coming years. The present offerings aren’t too bad either. Try out
www.smartdraw.com
,
www.timelinemaker.com
, and other time line applications on the Web.

As you think about leaving your stories to future generations, don’t forget the digital equivalent of cemeteries and libraries. For a fee, Web sites like
www.legacy.com
and
www.forevernetwork. com
offer to store letters, essays, photos, videos, and stories to pass on to future generations. I like the way
famento.com
hosts a person or family’s content, because the format is a compelling timeline of photos and videos.