Last February there were about two hours where I thought I accidentally deleted every single picture of my daughter Lucy since she was born back in May. I can’t even really explained what happened, but I was trying to back my iPhoto up to our external hard drive. This used to be a much easier task than it is now, but I clicked a few things, realized it looked like all the photos from the hard drive were being brought back onto my laptop and stopped that process. See, the whole reason I needed to back things up was because I was way low on memory. Cancelling that action made it look like every single picture taken in 2011 or possibly even earlier had been deleted. Not trashed, because I could have pulled them out, but vanished.

I felt like I was going to throw up. I freaked out, looking everywhere I could think to find the images and came up with nothing. I even emailed a friend from college I haven’t spoken to in forever to see if he could help. I felt like a tool for doing that, but I needed to find these pictures. I searched around online to find a few possible things that could help me out and then, I’m not sure why, I decided to right click on the iPhoto library icon. That’s when I saw that it has an option in the drop down menu that says “Show Package Contents.” If you select that, then you can see the files organized by year and month with all your pictures in them. This is how things used to be organized before an update or new operating system or something. Maybe they did it like that so you couldn’t accidentally delete photos, but it literally drove me insane for two hours.

Those were very honestly two of the worst hours of my life. I’ve felt so sad or mad that I’m actually sick to my stomach, but it has never lasted that long. The whole thing started while Lu was taking a nap, but she woke up and that made it even harder. I can not tell you how glad I am that I figured out what happened, but I’m still not completely comfortable. I know external hard drives can be tricky at best. I want to get an external DVD burner (my built in one doesn’t work anymore for some reason) to make physical copies and maybe get some kind of cloud back-up system to be extra sure. I used to laugh at people who would do all that, but now I’ve actually got important things I want to keep.

By the way, the next time I opened iPhoto after that? Everything was back to normal like nothing ever happened. Times like this make me wish I had been even more interested in computers and really got to understand how the work. It’s a bit unsettling trusting so much of my life to something I can’t really fix.

In one of the very first posts I ever wrote about my experiences as a dad, I talked about the Kinect/Xbox interactivity and how it’s good, but could be better. I still have the same problems I had before with the crappy Netflix motion stuff. You still don’t have access to your actual queue and flipping through them is clunky at best. But I’m still pretty much in love with the voice command stuff. I use my Netflix quite a bit, though not nearly as much as I did before Lucy came into our lives.

The ability to just say “Netlflix Pause” or “Netflix Stop” and have it actually do that exact thing is amazing. It totally reminds me of the future I saw in sci-fi cartoons and movies as a kid and still marvel that this is real life. The problem, though, is that not everything in my life is voice activated. I want to tell the sink to start or the bath to run or even the Xbox to turn off. Instead, I’ve got to use my hands. I’m not saying this out of laziness, but thanks to a lack of spare hands. Though, to be fair, I’d probably still use these things after Lucy grows up because it’s just too damn cool!

I would also like for my laptop to have better voice-activated commands. I’ve got a MacBook from a year or two back and overall it’s a great little workhorse computer that’s put up with me well. The other day I tried setting up the voice commands and it was just baffling. I don’t need commands for every single thing the computer can do, just the things I need. “iTunes Pause,” “Photoshop Shrink Image Size,” that kind of stuff. I had it running for about an hour which wasn’t really enough time, but it just wasn’t working out for me so I turned it off. Maybe someday it’ll work better.

It must be difficult creating voice recognition technology and programs, but aside from teleportation and flying cars, I think really solid voice recognition software is the technological advancement I most want to see. In addition to all this “talking to my appliances” thing, I’d also like a talk-and-type program that really nails it. I know there’s a few for Macs, but they’re expensive and I don’t want to drop that kind of coin without having some hands on (or rather off) experience with them. In the meantime, would it kill TV makers to allow me to turn the tube on and off just by talking? Methinks not.

Originally published on UnitedMonkee.com on May 16th, 2011

The Kinect for Xbox 360 isn’t the kind of thing I would have bought for myself. But, my lovely wife liked the idea of it and we wound up getting it for Christmas. We played and enjoyed the game that came with it and Dance Central, but the pregnancy kind of deterred her from playing. I could write that it’s not the kind of game I would play on my own, but to be honest, there were a few days where I’d shake my booty before she got home and I had to start making dinner. It’s actually a pretty good way to work up a sweat. Anyway, I was most interested in seeing how the Kinect would change the way I use the Xbox overall. While I do play my fair share of video games–usually at night after everyone’s gone to sleep–I mostly use the ‘Box as an entertainment center to play Netflix Instant movies and shows. Initially, there was no Netflix capability for the Kinect which was kind of disappointing because I had visions of flipping through my queue like something out of Minority Report. Recently, Netflix got updated and can now be used with the Kinect, but it’s far from perfect. Now that my hands and arms are quite literally full with our darling daughter, I was hoping to be able to wave my hand, take control of the Instant menu, flip through my queue and find something I wanted to watch. Instead, the Kinect-enable Netflix menu shows me things it thinks I want to see and, unless I’m just completely clueless, does not give you access to your actual queue which is annoying. And even if it did, flipping through the list isn’t nearly as smooth as I would like. You’ve got to hold your hand up on an arrow and wait for it to move on to the next four or five selections. Someone get Steven Spielberg on a redesign! But, it’s not all bad. The Kinect allows for voice commands, which I didn’t even know were available. The missus and I were watching Veronica Mars, one of us said something and we saw a tiny microphone graphic show up on the TV. That’s when I remembered reading somewhere about voice commands. All you’ve got to do is say “Xbox” and then any number of commands and it does what you want. Blammo! Now this is excellent. While I can’t flip through my queue using my dulcet tones, I can tell my Xbox to pause, play, fast forward and whathaveyou, which is incredibly helpful when holding a sleeping baby. The only risk is talking so loudly that you wake the kid up, but thankfully Lucy doesn’t seem to mind. So, while the Netflix/Kinect combination isn’t quite as good as I would like, it has offered me hands free control of my Netflix account to some extent. I’d like there to be more, either through voice activation or hand waving. Even so, it’s a pretty good trade off for having my TV look like Johnny Number 5’s fatter cousin.