My colleague Nicole Engler, who works with our Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and its communications, is a great Mayo Clinic employee and a true believer in the power of social media. She’s involved in the leadership of a young professionals group in Rochester that invited me to do a presentation on social media and be part of a panel last July, and it was a tremendous event.
But it was nothing like her blessed event last Thursday. You can see the story below, embedded from her appearance Sunday morning on Today:
We will all miss Nicole during the next few months as she’s home with Austin, but it’s typical of her work that she would find a way to get national media attention even as she’s going on maternity leave.
Marlow and Fran Cowan, the elderly couple from Ankeny, Iowa whose piano duet at Mayo Clinic has gone “viral” in the last year (to the tune of more than 6.6 million views to date on YouTube), were the subjects last night of an extended feature on KARE TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune also has a nice article about the Cowans in this morning’s edition.
I had the wonderful opportunity yesterday to help arrange a return visit concert for Marlow and Fran Cowan to the Landow Atrium in the Gonda building on our Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester. You likely remember them as the couple whose piano duet became a YouTube sensation last year, and led to their appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Below is a playlist from our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, which concludes with their reprise of the number that led to world-wide attention for this couple. He just turned 91 last week, and she’ll be 85 in July. We should all be so spunky, at whatever age we are.
This evening as I traveled to Winona for the #WSUPRSSA presentation on social media, I got to meet my youngest daughters and swap vehicles with them, so they would have reliable college transportation. Here’s the video I shot when they saw it for the first time. Having video also enables Lisa to get in on the fun, even though she wasn’t able to be there.
This also gives me a chance to show the WSUPRSSA group how easy it is to write a blog post.
I have been ever since the mid ’80s, when my brother-in-law, Lane, and I both had Apple IIe computers with 128K floppy disks, and he blew me away by getting a 5 megabyte hard drive to store data for his farm bookkeeping program.
The cost: $1,800. And it seemed unfathomable he would ever fill it.
Moore’s Law (from a paper Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published in 1965) suggests that computing power (or data storage) that can be purchased for a given price doubles every 18 months.
In this post, based on my recently acquired custom of Black Friday hard drive shopping, I want to prove Moore’s Law for you.
I usually get up early on the Friday after Thanksgiving to take advantage of the electronics sales, and one place I typically go is Staples. Two years ago, I bought a 500 gigabyte hard drive there for about $70 (after rebate.) That was 100,o00 times the storage Lane bought in 1986 for about $3,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Last year, I bought a 600 gigabyte drive, again for about $70. Especially with my use of the Flip video camera, my “need” for storage has increased.
This year, I bought a terabyte drive (1,000 gigabytes) for $70. So in essence I got 200,000 times the storage Lane bought 23 years ago, for less than 2 percent of the price.
Granted, this was a door-buster sale. But even at full price for one of these drives, it’s mind-boggling.
And actually, I didn’t just get one drive; I bought two. In addition to the terabyte drive, I got another 500 GB drive that is powered by the USB connection. That makes it extremely lightweight, so I can carry it with me at all times in my laptop bag. As you can see in the photo below, it’s not much bigger than a classic iPod.
500 GB Hard Drive with iPod
And just to put it in further perspective, here are the two drives I bought on Black Friday, with a total of 1.5 terabytes for $140:
375 Hours of Flip HD Video Storage
But here’s the main takeaway/action point from this post, and how it applies to you:
Mark your calendar now for 11/26/2010 at 6 a.m. If Moore’s Law holds (as it has for 44 years), you should be able to get a 1.5 terabyte hard drive at Staples for about $70.
With HD video consuming about 4 GB per hour, you can never have too much hard drive space.
