You bring up a problem that frankly, I’ve never thought of. I’m not sure what the answer would be. I published a magazine back in the early days of electronic publishing, and then my monitor, my keyboard, my printer, and everything else around was covered with yellow sticky notes and my desk was covered with floppy discs. Because floppies were so unreliable, I tended to move everything off onto the server (almost 1 gigabyte – over $4000 worth) hard drive farm that was backed up to tape several times a day.

As I think about this problem, I think I would probably move all the data on the my hard drive, wipe the thumb drives, perhaps load an electronic business card and maybe a template for emergency medical information, and then hand them out like business cards or perhaps gifts.

Probably the central point that I wanted to make in this entry is that a thumb drive can be used to store your emergency information in a form that emergency departments are increasingly aware of.

Earlier in the week, as a matter of fact, I was talking to an ER nurse and queried her about her knowledge of thumb drives. She said that they had recently had a seminar on the subject. It raised awareness of the drives and the data they may contain.

Coincidentally, I had taken one of my smaller obsolete thumb drives and set up an emergency information form that she could fill in with her favorite editor. I gave it to her, told her to fill in all the information, and put it on her key ring. She thought it a grand idea.

Thanks for writing,

John

PS: Arthritis has finally gotten to my fingers to the point that typing is painful and difficult. I recently installed Dragon Naturally Speaking software. I spent the last week training it to my voice and this is about the second or third memo that I’ve “written” with it. Other than acronyms, I’ve had to make almost no corrections or changes. As soon as I learn the command language, I’ll even be able to handle them.

If you type as much as I do, and I’m sure you do, you ought to give this package a look. It’s a Godsend for my fingers. Of course, if you work in a cube farm, people will think you very strange to be talking to yourself :-)

As a magazine editor, I get a lot of press releases and articles submitted on thumb drives and they are all over my desk with no way to figure out what is on each one.

Do they make racks or boxes for them like they do for CDs and did for floppy disks? Is there a way to label them as to contents with more than just one line?

I’ve wrapped mine in Post-It notes with “December backup” or “Microsoft Press Kit” scribbled on it, but they are still all over my desk, and sometimes the wrapper falls off.

Any suggestions?

Love, Jeanne
Editor
Zeus Technology Magazine