Go Go Google Glass – We Have Glass! (A Traveler’s Review)

Very nice Google Glass display, demonstrating all the colors of glass.

Very nice Google Glass display, demonstrating all the colors of glass.

A Recap

A bit over three months ago, I received an unexpected notification from Google, stating that

Hi, thanks for applying!  We’d like to invite you to join our #glassexplorers program.  We’ll be sending you a private message with more details in the coming weeks – keep an eye on our stream at Project Glass.”

I then waited patiently for an update from Google for a chance for me to get my Glass.  And I waited…..and I waited….and I waited…..and waited some more.  I saw Google send out notifications to last year’s Google I/O attendees who preordered one.  I then saw people, one by one, pop up on Google+ after that stating that they had finally been notified that they were to get their glass, and that they were on their way to get them (or had just gotten them).

I continued to wait rather impatiently, until one day I received a surprise notification from Google, which I can’t seem to find on my page anymore (+Google Glass, did you delete that post off of my page after the fact?), that basically said (paraphrased):

It’s time to pick up your Google Glass!  Please follow your special link to sign up and schedule your Glass appointment.

Woot!  However, there was only one problem – I had to pay to flow out and get it.  And from where I lived, it was about $500-$700 per person to fly out and get it.  So, at a cost of bringing another person with me to pick up Glass, it was going to cost me in the ballpark range of from $2,500 to $3,000 just to pick up something still in early Beta phase, unreleased to the public.  I had a month to decide, and boy did it take me all of that month to decide if I wanted to get Glass.  I went back and forth, wondering if I’d have time to use it to its full potential, and if it was worth buying just to play with and develop lightly against.  After a month, I finally decided:

Heck yes!  It is totally and completely worth it, to be one of 8,000 Explorers to have Glass, and have something that a huge population is clamoring over each other to see and play with.  I am a geek, and I would love to do this!

So I did!  I clicked my link, paid my money, scheduled my appointment, purchased plane tickets, drove to the airport, and began my trip to go pick up Glass!

The Trip There

I decided to fly into San Francisco to pick up my glass.  The airline tickets were the cheapest, I had some friends there who I wanted to see, and (most importantly), since I waited so long to sign up, it was the only place who had some openings left during the weekend for me to pick up my Glass, since I didn’t want to have to take vacation from work if I didn’t need to.

After arriving in San Francisco and making it down town to The Embarcadero district, I had the daunting task of figuring out where the heck to go.  Google gave me instructions as to which address to go to, but nothing about how to actually find their office once I got there.

I arrived at the address, looked up, and noticed that there were some Google Chrome stickers on the windows of a few offices up on around the fifth floor (where I was supposed to end up).  There was one problem, however – no elevators!  And I was getting close to my designated fitting time to get my glass.  I wasn’t going to have come all this way and spend so much money, only to miss my appointment because I couldn’t find a damned elevator!

After wandering for a few minutes, I finally found a security guard, who was kind enough to help me – someone who looked completely lost and helpless!  After telling him who I was, and what I was there for, he graciously let me through locked doors to the front desk where I needed to check in.  After checking in, I was shuttled upstairs to another checkin area, and finally ushered into a large room.  There, in the front of the room right as I entered the door, was a large wooden sign, telling me I was in the right place – GLASS.

The awesome display that greeted me when I walked into the building!

The awesome display that greeted me when I walked into the building!

Woot!

The Delivery

After initially arriving, I was once again questioned as to who I was, and that I was where I was supposed to be.  After authenticating for the third and finally time, I was directed to a waiting area, and was told that my guide would be coming out shortly, and to feel free to play with the display Glass at one of two display stations in the waiting room.  There was also a large table full of a bunch of hor d’oeuvres for me to choose from.  Unfortunately I wasn’t hungry, as I had just scarfed down an amazing sandwich from a place down the street.  Fairly close to the table of snack’ems, however, was a lovely refrigerator, full of water, and beer!  They even told me that there were a number of other drinks that I could request, if I was interested.

I wasn’t.  I just wanted a glorious beer in the fridge!  Thus began my saga of trying Glass, with an amazing beer in my hand!

Snacks at the Google Glass event.

Snacks at the Google Glass event.

Quenched of my thirst, I began trying out various colors of Glass that they had out on display.  I had previously ordered the Charcoal color there.  But, now that I had a chance to try them all on, the decision became much tougher.  I kept going back and forth between the Charcoal and the Shale colors, and dabbled a bit with the Tangerine.  One of the Glass Guides who was there directed me to the Shale, but eventually I ended up deciding to go with the Charcoal.  I wanted something subtle that didn’t stick out too much, as I wanted to be a bit less noticeable walking around with Glass.  After making my decision and choosing Charcoal, the initial guide who was with me left, and told me to wait until another guide came out with my Glass.  This one would help me to do the fitting, and answer any questions about Glass.

After much deliberation, I finally decided to go with Charcoal!

After much deliberation, I finally decided to go with Charcoal!

Not more than a minute or two after she left, the next guide arrived, complete with my Glass!  This is it, I thought.  I’m finally getting glass!

The fitting started easily enough.  The guide graciously opened up the box for me (damn tape!).  She had a better ability than my short fingernails to carefully open up the tape on the box so that it didn’t damage the box.  Once the tape was off, she graciously handed it to me so that I could have the honors of opening the box and opening Glass.  After pulling the box off and opening it up and pulling the sticky paper back, there it was – my Glass!

Display of the office where I got Glass.

Display of the office where I got Glass.

The Fitting

The first step in our process was to make sure that the Glass fit right across my head.  Everyone’s heads are different, and so it’s initially molded to fit the average person’s noggin.  Fortunately in my case, it was just a bit too wide.  When I messed with the touchpad on the side of Glass, it would slightly bounce up and down on my face.  In order to correct this, the titanium frame needed to be slightly adjusted to better fit my face.  I gave my Glass to the guide, who then proceeded to fold it into the shape of an X.  HOLY CRAP!

She assured me that it was just fine.  All one needed to do in order to reshape the frame was to bend it into a bit more of an extreme position compared to where it currently was, and hold it there for about 30 seconds.  This would force the frame to reshape itself into the new shape, and that there was no damage done to it.  (*PHEW!*)

I put it back on my noggin and once again played with the touchpad.  This time it worked like a champ, and there was no movement detected at all.  With that checked off the list, it meant that we were good to go!

I was told to press the power button, and let it boot up.  I hit the power button, and about 5 seconds later, was greeted with a glorious “GLASS” display on my glass, right in front of my eye.  AWESOME!  Once Glass was booted up, my guide took me through the process of configuring Glass to work with my Android Phone (an older Galaxy Nexus – I can’t wait to upgrade!).  She then had me log into my account on her Chrome Pixel, and set up WiFi and other miscellaneous access that way (Side note – the Pixel is nice, but I love my 13″ Retina MacBook Pro so much more.  But that’s an entirely different blog post in itself!)

Once we were all set up, synced with my phone via bluetooth, connected to the Google office’s WiFi, and set up with my account, we were good to go!  (Another side note – I am nervous to see my Verizon cellphone bill at the end of the month.  I’m grandfathered on the unlimited data plan, which means I won’t see an absurd data charge.  However, this also means I don’t have tethering for free.  It’ll be interesting to see if Verizon sees the tethering traffic between my phone and Glass and tries to charge me for tethering, or if they just see the data traffic for the MyGlass app.  We’ll see!)

The view from the balcony at the Google Glass event.

The view from the balcony at the Google Glass event.

Another view from the balcony at the Google Glass event.

Another view from the balcony at the Google Glass event.

My guide took me onto their balcony outside their office, overlooking a number of piers, and a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge.  Once outside, I was walked through the steps of taking a picture, taking a video, making a phone call, and sharing pictures.  I was able to do a few quick Google searches, and overall just getting a grasp of Glass itself.  Once the guide felt that I had a comfortable grasp of Glass, she let me go on my way!  8 hours of flight time there, an hour of driving into San Francisco, and only a 30 minute fitting session, and I was let loose into the world with it.

And boy, did I not know what to do with it!

Author’s note – When I started this post, I had every intention of actually going in depth into the hardware and usability of Glass itself.  Unfortunately, the fitting and travel took long enough, that I think it best if I break it apart into two separate posts.  Stay tuned for a new post in the next couple days, giving a much more detailed experience about Glass!  In the meantime, however, I’ve included a few pictures and video from the event, to give you a sneak peak of the quality of the pictures and video that can be taken from Glass.  Enjoy!

Picture of the Google Glass display, through Google Glass.

Picture of the Google Glass display, through Google Glass.

 

Picture of the Google office, through Google Glass.

Picture of the Google office, through Google Glass.

– admin

Goin’ Paperless! Enjoying the ScanSnap S1300i.

Preface

Now, before you start calling me a tree-hugging hippie, let me preface by saying that I’ve fought the paperless bandwagon for as long as I could!   I constantly got annoyed by the requests by all my companies I do business with to go paperless, and I was extremely frustrated when it came to the point that I either converted to paperless, or faced a $5.00 a month additional charge by them to send me the statements in the mail.  I wanted paper statements!  I wanted something tangible that I could see, touch, and file.  I wasn’t comfortable without a stack of cellphone bills in my filing cabinet (that I would probably never look at again, mind you).  I felt that if it wasn’t there, then it wouldn’t be there in the future when I needed it.  Never mind the fact that in the case of a house fire, all of my paper filing would be gone, and I would be without any sort of documents.

Fast forward a few years down the road, and my office quickly became a massive disaster. Boxes after boxes of papers lay around, waiting for me to properly sort, organize, and file into the filing cabinet.  These papers dated back 3 or more years, doing nothing but cluttering up my office with their presence.  Furthermore, after those boxes filled up with papers, the papers themselves continued to fill up the office, slowly making their way into random piles, strewn about here and there, covering my desk, the floor, the folding table, bookshelf, and other assorted areas.  I tried various methods to stay on top of the massive, endless amount of papers, including purchasing color-coded filing labels, developing a storage system, reorganizing, etc.  However, each various method felt like nothing more than another attempt to fail at the same thing.  I just could not stay on top of the papers, and my office was quickly becoming nothing more than a collection of paper waste.  There wasn’t even a spot for me to sit any longer!

Eventually, it came to the point that “enough was enough”, I needed to do something about the papers.

The Solution – The ScanSnap!

I did some research.  I then did more research.  I then thought about it, and did more research.  All the while, the paperwork continued to pile, and the space continued to dwindle.  Then one day, I hopped on Amazon, and said “that’s it!”  I had had enough, and it was time to finally purchase a scanner, and begin to go completely paperless.  After an extensive amount of research, I finally rested on this – a newly upgrade, ScanSnap S1300i scanner:

http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-S1300i-ScanSnap-Sheet-Fed-Document/dp/B008HBFADQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348534209&sr=8-1&keywords=scansnap+1300i

Once it arrived (yay, Amazon Prime!), I quickly set it to get it in place and get it going just as fast as I could.  I was sick and tired of the paperwork, and it was time to be done with it.

The Setup

The first thing I noticed when I got the scanner in the mail was that the box was quite small.  I opened it up, and noticed the following in the packaging:

  • The Scanner (duh)
  • A USB cable
  • A power adapter
  • Another USB cable, with a nifty power plug on one end
  • Various assorted instructions / warranty cards / installation CD

After popping in the CD, the software quickly installed, and I was on my way.  It’s interesting to note at this point the secondary USB cable that came with the box.  While the scanner obviously can run of the power adapter, the secondary USB cable can also serve to power the scanner through a secondary USB port on the connected computer.  Nice!  I probably won’t ever use this feature, as I don’t plan on taking the computer with me in a portable situation.  However, it is a nice touch, and a nice additional feature if your environment will lend you that necessity to do so.

First Impressions

Once everything was set up, I was ready to scan!  Every where I looked in my office, I saw paper after paper, pile after pile, and box after box, of various dead tree bits that needed to turn their lives into a digital format.  I quickly grabbed one box, and began the scanning process.

I found a stack of papers that I felt belonged together, each of various sizes.  After arranging them in an order from larger to smaller (full size documents in the front, smaller card-sized documents in the middle, and receipts in the back – to help with the scanning rollers), I stuck it in the scanner and hit the big glowing blue button.  Immediately the scanner sprang to life, sucked all the paper through one page at a time, spit it out the other end, and finished the job before I knew it!

It’s important to point out why this scanner is so friggin’ awesome.  Obviously for the most part, a scanner is a scanner.  What makes it extremely powerful is the corresponding hardware that goes along with the scanner.  In this case, it couldn’t be more true.  Besides the scanner having dual scanning heads (so that it can scan both sides of the page at the same time), the corresponding software does the following, automatically:

  • Automatic duplex detection
  • Automatic color detection
  • Automatic page size detection
  • Automatic page rotation
  • Automatic keyword detection
  • Automatic highlighting tagging
  • Automatic OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

That’s right.  No longer do you need to continuously mark the scanner for a specific size, type, orientation, or format of the paper you’re scanning it with.  Instead, the scanner does everything fully automatic (if you’ve configured it to do so), and you no longer have to do that.  Just grab a stack of papers, put it in the scanner, hit the button, and you’re off!  Obviously, if the process takes too much extra unnecessary effort, I’m more likely to drop the process entirely, and regress back to a state of not doing anything with the papers, and quickly return to where I was before purchasing the scanner.  So, the fact that the scanner can do everything in an extremely quick, efficient manner is important to me.

The Software

I’ve touched on the software a bit already, but there’s so much more to it than just the automatic scanning part of it itself.  Depending on the package purchased, the ScanSnap might come with a slightly different list of software with it.  The version I purchased, however, comes with the following:

  • ScanSnap Organizer
  • ScanSnap CardMinder
  • Abbey FineReader for ScanSnap
  • Others(?)

I haven’t payed too much attention to the software that came with mine, outside of those listed below.  The most critical of all the software, in my opinion, is the ScanSnap Organizer, and the corresponding FineReader.  The FineReader is the piece of software that will automatically perform the OCR on the files that are scanned with the ScanSnap.  Note that it WILL NOT allow you to perform OCR on any PDFs that were not created with ScanSnap.  While the normal FineReader software can do, the version that came with the scanner will not.  I assume this has to do with a license restriction put in place in the software bundled with the scanner.

In my workflow, the coup de grâce, in my opinion, is the ScanSnap Organizer.  There are a number of alternative software packages that do similar functionality as the Organizer.  However, in my case I wasn’t looking to spend any additional money than what I spent after purchasing the scanner.  So, ScanSnap Organizer it is!

At its core, ScanSnap Organizer is nothing more than a simple document managing system, that simply puts all the files in a folder, gives them preview icons that show what the document consists of, and calls it good.  And that is exactly what I wanted!  I didn’t trust various other software, such as the one coupled with the NeatDesk system, which kept all PDFs in a proprietary database, which required the user to access through the software.  The great thing about ScanSnap Organizer, is that it simply references with Windows (or Mac) folder structure, and overlays it with a bit more detail, using a hidden “.organizer” folder.  Don’t feel like going through the Organizer software?  Simply navigate to the ScanSnap folder that you have configured, which contains all of your PDFs within it, and you’re good to go!  Not being locked into a proprietary software design is huge to me.  I don’t want to be locked out of all of my files a few years down the road.

In addition to being a document organizer for all the PDFs, ScanSnap Organizer also contains some various additional advanced PDF editing tools.  These include deleting and reorganizing pages within a PDF, rotating / deskewing pages, cropping, etc.  It can also organize by keyword, find highlighted keywords, and distribute by keyword.

Lastly, the Organizer / scanner allows scanning to numerous third-party programs, including, but not limited to:

  • Outlook
  • Microsoft Office (Powerpoint, Word, Excel)
  • Dropbox
  • Evernote
  • Google Docs
  • Salesforce
  • Mobile
  • Any other program you can configure!

The ScanSnap scanner, and the associated software, allow you to do pretty much anything you want to with your digital documents.  In my case, I primarily wanted the ability to convert all my physical documents into digital, and organize them into a folder structure similar to how they would have been in my filing cabinet.  But the options and possibilities to do more advanced things with the documents expand far beyond my simple requirements.

The Results

After spending an hour or two a night for the past few weeks, I have managed to scan, file, and organize over 2,000 pages worth of documents.  They are all now contained within a single master folder (or cabinet), with various associated folders underneath of it.  I’m far from complete in scanning all of the remaining documents that still reside inside of my file cabinet.  However, all of the boxed and loose paperwork lying around my office is now gone, and in its place is nothing but space, and room for me to actually enjoy my office once again.  With barely 100MB or so of converted files on my PC, I have plenty of room to scan, and destroy thousands, if not millions more documents, with little concern about space any longer.  In my case, one Banker’s Box worth of documents used close to 100MB worth of storage space.  Assuming the minute size of a 32GB micro-SD card, I could effectively take 320 Banker’s Boxes, and consolidate it down into a size smaller than a penny.  How awesome is that!

Conclusion

As far as I’ve come in the past few weeks, I still have an incredibly long way to go, before I can fully consider myself paperless.  I still must fully develop, and stick to, a workflow plan that will effectively take any paper documents I receive, and convert them into an organized digital counterpart, and still be able to access the documents as quickly and efficiently as I need, without allowing the papers to once again pile up and overrun the office space.  Furthermore, I also need to go through many of my physical mailing statements that I receive, and see about converting them to digital, and going with a paperless distribution with them instead.  Unfortunately, many times the paperless format isn’t actually distributed, but rather put online for access, and only for a limited time.  So, rather than being able to be lazy for a year and let documents accumulate, I need to be proactive in making sure to regularly download and archive all my digital statements.  Otherwise, if I don’t stay on top of it, I could easily lose those digital documents into the abyss of dev/null, never to be seen or archived.

Oh, and there’s the obvious statement of “backup, backup, backup!”.  In the case of physical documents, one only really needs to be aware of fire and theft – both of which are fairly uncommon.  But in the digital world, one needs to be must more aware of harddrive and other equipment failure, and protect against such failures with duplication, redundancy, and versioning, to make sure that the documents don’t get accidentally lost or deleted.  But that’s a completely different topic for another time!

ScanSnap S1300i Scanner
Simplicitywww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.com
The scanner is as simple as it can get. Fairly easy install, plus extremely easy usage makes it a great printer.
Hardwarewww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.com
The hardware on the printer is great! Very little jamming, collapses into a very small footprint, and expands to easily hold a stack of legal-sized documents.
Softwarewww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.com
The included software is impressive. Can easily do almost everything you want it to. I have to knock off a star though for the OCR not working on non-ScanSnap documents.
Durabilitywww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.com
Solid little device. Includes ability to replace consumables (pick roller, pad) for minimal cost.
Pricewww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.com
A bit pricey. You get a ton for your money. But it is a bit harder to drop almost $300.00 on a scanner.
Overallwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.comwww.dyerware.com
Overall, this is a great scanner. Numerous features, combined with incredibly easy to use interface, makes it a very versatile, powerful device.

– admin