The Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card.

Before I get to the nitty gritty, I have to brag about how cheap my eye-fi card was. I went to Circuit City on Valentine's Day '09 and they were all but wiped out. The store was so empty that a stranger came up to me and just gave me a gift card because she couldn't find anything for herself. I was kind enough to accept her offer and so I was +$24. The Eye-fi card was discounted 50% bringing it down to $50. So I ended up with an Eye-fi card at the cost of about $28 after tax!

Setup of the Eye-Fi is fairly simple. Upon inserting the card into the USB port using the adapter that comes with the package the card is automatically recognized and the installation process is completed quickly since the install files come preloaded on the card. Since Eye-fi is a wireless SD card, when I first saw that they included an adapter I thought it somewhat contradictory. Although funny at first, for the card to properly connect to wireless, one has to use the adapter to set it up first, so it's not really that strange. The user must have the card, a camera (which powers the card), and a wi-fi router in order for the card to work properly.



Once installed, my first impression of the Eye-Fi was one of restriction. The card works through an internet application called the Eye-Fi Manager which proves to be a sort of middleman. The reasons this is implemented are to promote the Hotspot Access Service (H.A.S.) at $15 a year, which allows the user access to more than 10,000 hotspots in the U.S., to allow the user to automatically upload photos to the a wide selection of photo-hosting sites and to keep things more secure.



The problem with uploading directly to photo-hosting sites is that not every photo I take is a masterpiece. It also eats away at a weekly limit quickly on Flickr. It is still an interesting feature that would be really nice with a subscription to the H.A.S. if you're on vacation and a lot of your friends and family want to see how the vacation is going with little lag time before the photos are posted.



The biggest reason I wanted this card is for time lapse photography. I want to transfer files directly to a laptop that's in range while shooting in remote locations. Since the card requires access to the internet in order for it to work, that feature isn't an immediately obvious option.

I have found a couple work-arounds to this major flaw of the card. Photojojo tells about how it could be possible to upload wirelessly to a laptop by connecting a wifi router to the laptop, whether there is internet or not. The other method as detailed by Dave Hansen would be to host a stand-alone server of which seems to prove difficult to do. I have yet to test either method but I think the latter would tailor to my needs. I will post an update when I test out these different methods.

The Map of Your Life.

They say that smell triggers the memory the best of any stimulation. I can think of a few memorable smells, but nothing reminds me more of very specific memories than sorting receipts. I remember the period in time, the group of friends I was hanging around at the time, so many different memories and emotions are brought up when sorting receipts. Like the time a friend and I went to the mall (a big thing to do when you live two hours away from the closest one) and were so crazy about Metal Gear Solid 2 that we each picked up a Solid Snake action figure from Software Etc... That's right Software Etc. not Gamestop. There was also the time that another friend and I went to Norde's Games and each bought a box of Magic the Gathering cards and took them back to his place and just tore through them, reading cards, rummaging through each other's spoils, being a bit disappointed by the condition of the brand new cards because a third of them were misaligned to the point to where you could nearly see the name of the next card on some of them.

With every bag of miscellaneous old receipts come the check stubs as well. I was able to piece together a comprehensive history of my grossly underpaid days at Pizza Hut. I was able to easily map my employment history through looking at my check stubs, even though I still don't know what happened to the ones from my days at Blockbuster. I even found my very first pay check, which totaled eight dollars and seventy cents. $8.70! For a person just starting out in the work force, that's a huge blow to the morale, having worked a week before receiving the paycheck, I remember muttering to the person next to me that I should just quit if the pay is gonna be like that. Then there are the random bits of memories that make their way into the bag as well. Such as a part of a label from an art piece that was submitted to the club I used to be a part of, a scribble on this receipt, a calculation on another, a warning of violation a friend I worked with wrote against me in jest that threatened to have my hands severed off as punishment.

To sort through receipts is really a sort of map of what a person's life is like. I will usually pick a receipt up off of the ground just to see what a person bought. They're never profound purchases though; gum, a bag of combos, a soft drink... I suppose that, in itself, shows something about the people who throw their receipts on the ground. The discarded receipts show me that they're horrible people for littering the ground and that they only throw down the small stuff. I'll probably never see a receipt for a 46" LCD Television lying on the ground. Maybe they feel that they're doing a service to the curious folks like me by doing it. I could live without it.

Seeing this history in a bag shows me how frivolous I seem to have been with my money. What if I hadn't bought that speaker system for my car that my neighbor helped me install or that collection of Magic the Gathering cards that I played regularly with a group of friends in college? Maybe I would be richer, but I wouldn't have all the memories.