One of the problems of, ah, maturing, is that you recognize your own contradictions. I’m good at the “vision thing” but not as good with building and maintaining. That’s not to say that I haven’t planned, implemented and maintained complex technology systems but I’m satisfied with the big picture and leaving the other stuff in more capable hands.

This is where my conflict about the digital future of Haiti surfaces again. I see clearly that the immediate need of feeding, sheltering, providing medical attention and protecting the people of Haiti is paramount and needs to be done now. But I can’t help looking down the road and around the bend to what’s there or, at least, what should be there. The question I raised in Haiti’s Digital Future was who makes the decisions?

At the recent Greener Gadgets conference, I distilled the question a little further to the members of the Green Living Begins at Home panel. How would you rebuild Haiti? Jay McLellan, President and CEO of Home Automation, Inc (HAI), took a deep breath and asked, “Do we have all day?” He then went on to say that the key is the infrastructure. “Make sure you have electrical, water and communications,” he continued. He felt that designing the infrastructure for renewal and sustainability was an obvious necessity. He also told me in an interview later that the system has to be modular so that it could scale up to make neighborhoods, villages and regions self sustaining if knocked off the main grid.

“It’s an obvious place for solar,” added Kimberly Lancaster, of Green Life Smart Life. “That energy alone can power everything from refrigeration to cooling” she said. Lancaster said she would also be looking for the basic resources of water and energy and the durability of materials used in the rebuilding.

”Sarah Krasley, Manager of Sustainability at Autodesk, spotlighted missing link we, in the developed nations, continue to make when offering aid and comfort. “I think that a key is to invite the people of Haiti into the conversation around design. Find out what they need and what wasn’t working before. It’s very simple, but I think that would make a huge impact.”

Everyone on the panel nodded in agreement.

One of the first lessons I learned about planning or upgrading a system was to do a needs assessment. Why do we often forget, when doing long term good works, to follow that simple rule?

Just a remainder of how it still looks as of March 4, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Matthew Bigg

I enjoy writing about electronic  accessories. It started because I had to carve a niche for myself while fighting for ink against the likes of John Markoff. I started writing what I called “tire stories”. These were stories that weren’t sexy or provocative but solid enough to get in the paper.  What are tires, after all, but a couple inches of inflated rubber? But consider how important that thin layer rubber and compressed air becomes when it blows out at 65 mph? Your life and the life of your passengers come down to you not spending a few hundred dollars for steel belted radial.

Hyperbole aside, a lot of our digital life can go blooey because of something seemingly minor. Here are some personal horror stories because I didn’t pay attention to my “digital tires”.

During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, I helped coördinate coverage for The New York Times. The amount of electronic gear I took with me to get around the anticipated infrastructure collapse is still mind-boggling to me these many years later. I took walkie-talkies and a portable repeater to extend the range to 50 miles and a dozen cell phones during a time when nationwide plans barely existed. I carried extra laptops for those reporters, who left from home and didn’t come by the office to pick one up. This was also in the days when not every reporter at the paper was issued a laptop. This was where my tires blew. I left the AC adapters back in New York.

I once co-authored a book, Computers in the Classroom. The reason no one ever read it was because of a power surge that fried my computer and every bit and byte on it. Of course, I had no backup.

I started using a PDA back when the Palm Pilot still existed. I still have a functioning Palm TX. I don’t take it with me very often these days but I did take it to a seminar in Changsha, China a few years ago. My Smartphone carrier and China Mobile weren’t partners then. The TX worked like a charm and kept me on schedule until I realized that I hadn’t packed the sync cable and couldn’t backup to my laptop.

To avoid some of these disasters, here are the top 5 must have accessory upgrades:

1. Keyboard
2. Mouse
3. Surge Protector
4. External Backup
5. USB Hub

For frequent travelers:

1. Keyboard—a good keyboard is even more important on a laptop
2. Mouse
3. Surge Protector
4. External Backup
5. USB Hub
6. Universal AC adapter
7. Travel outlets

I’ll go into greater detail in upcoming articles with suggested products and services.