Tech experts give ‘makeovers’
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, October 19, 2008
On TV makeover shows like “What Not To Wear” and “Tim Gunn’s Guide To Style,” we rarely meet someone who is completely hopeless.
Often, the fashion victims in need of help are otherwise happy, successful people with good friends and a happy family. But they always have one big blind spot: They can’t dress themselves in a way that doesn’t give those around them aches of embarrassment. Or maybe they never learned how to use a curling iron.
So it is with technology. As it continues to creep into every moment of our lives, it’s increasingly rare to find a complete tech novice. Someone who wouldn’t know the first thing about creating a Web site might be able to text message at 40 words per minute. The office manager who puts everyone to sleep with boring, broken PowerPoint presentations might be a “Guitar Hero: World Tour” superstar.
I’ve been covering the world of technology for more than a decade, and I still can’t create a decent Excel spreadsheet.
It’s nearly always these gaping holes in our tech know-how that waste the most time. It’s what drives us to place those hysterical, frustrated calls to tech support.
We found three Austinites who
use the tools of tech every day, but who have an area of knowledge missing they wanted to learn. We paired them up with experts who were able to walk them, gently, through the steps in learning how to share photos online, how to set up a new computer and how to keep up with the latest updates from a list of favorite Web sites.
It’s not a complete fashion makeover, perhaps, but a little more knowledge is always in style.
Los lonely photos
Last year, Veronica Evans bought a Kodak D710 digital camera, a Christmas present to herself.
The camera has a powerful optical zoom, which helps produce better photos from far away. It was perfect for shooting Evans’ favorite band, Los Lonely Boys, when they played a show at San Angelo’s Steel Penny Pub in February.
“If I go to other concerts, like ACL Fest or something on Auditorium Shores, if I get stuck in the back, I’ll get somewhat decent pictures,” said Evans, who works as a wafer fab technician at Spansion Inc.
The photos began to quickly add up. She was taking more than 200 photos at every concert she attended. She used software her camera and Hewlett-Packard printer came bundled with and taught herself how to back up her photos to CDs and to print out some of her pictures.
But she hadn’t found an effective way to edit the photos themselves and share them with family and friends.
Enter Carlos San Miguel, a professional photographer and tech-support worker at Austin’s Photodex Corp., which publishes software for creating slideshows.
San Miguel, who wears tan cowboy boots and teaches with a jokey, easygoing charm, met with Evans at Photodex’s conference room. Using a laptop, a projector and a CD of music and photos provided by Evans, he gave her a crash course on “ProShow Gold,” a piece of software that can edit slideshows and publish them online.
San Miguel, a fellow fan of Los Lonely Boys, helped synchronize the song “Heaven” to a set of photos from the San Angelo concert. Evans learned how to give her pictures life by panning across them, zooming in and out and using transition effects.
“There’s no right way to do it and no wrong way,” San Miguel explained as he helped her put photos in the right order. He also showed her how to edit photos: turning some photos black and white for effect, adding text or adjusting the brightness and contrast.
When the slideshow was finished, it was uploaded directly to Evans’ YouTube account, where it could be viewed as a video by others.
“Veronica picked it up very quickly,” San Miguel said. “She’s familiar with the photos, and she knew what she wanted to do.”
“I love it. I think it’s awesome,” Evans said of the final product. She plans to continue going to concerts and to use the software to keep posting her pictures on the Web.
Feed all about it
Austin Aaron used to be an emcee. You can tell because his personality seems as if it could fill a room far larger than the one where he’s about to learn how to use RSS. Tall, rangy and prone to sprinkle his conversation with the word “Brother” when referring to a fellow gentleman, Aaron is excitable and ready to learn.
He’s been transitioning into the real estate business. Though he has a blog and has thrown himself into social media sites such as Twitter.com, Aaron admits that he’s behind on Web technology and sometimes feels like a fraud when he tries to mix it up at high-tech happy hour events.
Not to worry: Diana Prechter, who runs an events Web site called Today in Austin, has agreed to help Austin. Prechter’s site provides extensive listings on arts and entertainment events, but also helps her evangelize the use of RSS feeds and online calendars.
She’s made it her mission to help area businesses, city government and nonprofits enhance their Web sites with event information that can easily be imported into calendar software such as Apple’s iCal or Google Calendar. With RSS feeds, she teaches organizations to make Web sites that easily can be syndicated, or to import syndicated information from other sites to increase the flow of information both ways.
The meeting at Prechter’s South Austin home begins with a Web video called “RSS in Plain English” produced by tutorial Web site Common Craft. In the video, RSS is explained as a way to make Web sites deliver information quickly and easily to a reader instead of requiring the online reader to visit a bunch of individual Web sites looking for updated information.
Aaron visits about 25 Web sites a day, with topics ranging from entertainment to technology to real estate.
To start, Prechter introduces Aaron to Google Reader. Users of Google Reader can subscribe to feeds from their favorite Web sites and receive updates from those blogs or news sites as they are posted all in one place.
Prechter explains, “Then the next step from reading them in Google Reader is that there are ways to play with them and spin them out again.”
She shows Aaron how these Web feeds can be transmitted directly to a sidebar on his own Web site, incorporated into an e-mail newsletter or spun into a whole new Web site that aggregates the things that he’s reading online.
“This could be a lot more useful than I initially imagined,” Aaron says. “I could make this into focused content and e-mail it out to my real estate contacts.”
Prechter then shows Aaron how to make his own RSS feeds using a service called Feedburner and urges him to be creative in figuring out how to best use readily accessible information.
“Feeds are like somebody opened up a pipe and water is just gushing out,” Prechter explains.
By the end of the session, Aaron’s brain wheels are turning. He’s thinking about creating a public calendar that links to his blog, sharing with his readers upcoming events that have been imported using RSS.
And best of all — a lot of the work is simple enough to be done on a mobile phone, like the iPhone that Aaron is currently using.
The big switch
Whitney Pagel wasn’t serious about switching from a Windows PC to a Mac until her H-P laptop died two months ago, taking her music, photos and veterinary school documents with it.
The files, luckily, were recovered. She found a specialist who was able to save her data. But as she began her career as a vet in Pflugerville, friends were suggesting she look into buying an Apple computer.
“I’d heard lots of great things about Macs,” Pagel said. “I had friends who had them, and they were all urging me to get one.”
Pagel set up a free one-hour personal shopping appointment at the Apple retail store at t
he Domain. She found out which Mac was best suited to her needs (a basic MacBook, as it turned out) and later went to two free workshops: one called “Getting Started” and another that dealt with the Mac’s operating system, OS X Leopard.
Having always used Windows, Pagel wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be swimming too far in uncharted waters. “My biggest concern was just that I wouldn’t know enough about the computer to utilize its full ability. There’ll be all this untapped potential I wasn’t using because it was so different from what I was used to,” she said.
When she made the leap, she leaped into the deep end: She purchased the MacBook, a three-year “Applecare” protection plan, a one-year “One-to-One” set of training sessions, an external hard drive and her first iPod, a 16-gigabyte turquoise Nano.
Last weekend, she had her first “One-to-One” session. The training course, which costs $99, gives the buyer access to an Apple Genius instructor once a week for a year. The course comes with a set of booklets with topics such as “Moviemaking,” “Podcasting,” “Building Your Own Web Site” and “Simple to Switch.”
In Pagel’s first One-to-One with an instructor named Keith Manlove, she transferred her recovered files to the new computer and set up her new external drive to automatically back up her data. She set up her iPod, learned to navigate OS X Leopard, picked up some keyboard shortcuts and set herself up on iTunes to download songs later.
One-to-One instructors don’t work on the computers themselves: They answer questions and explain how to do things but leave all the action to the student.
Pagel wasn’t able to resolve a problem she was having at home with her roommate’s wireless Internet router but came away impressed otherwise.
“I don’t consider myself a technologically advanced person,” she said. “I’ve always learned things better, especially with electronics, when someone shows me.”
She was motivated to go home and start exploring her computer and getting her songs organized in iTunes. She thought ahead to some questions she had about Safari, the Mac Web browser. “I got a lot done in that first hour,” she said. “Imagine how much stuff I can learn in 51 of those.”
If it were a reality TV show, the makeover would be well on its way to the big reveal.
“It gave me a feeling I made the right choice,” Pagel said. “I don’t have to be afraid anymore that I switched.”
ogallaga@statesman.com; 445-3672