War on clutter - Casualties

All wars have casualties. With a few tears I bid a fond farewell to my pencil collection. Back in the day, whenever we'd take a trip I'd buy a pencil from the gift shop (it was a heck of a lot cheaper than a t-shirt). I'd also save pencils with cool designs, fun toppers, and whatnot, but for many years now it has simply gathered dust on a shelf.
And so, I donate them now to a charity that sends school supplies to Africa. May they find as much utility in the collection as I found joy.

Database interfaces

As part of cleaning up I stumbled across this draft that I apparently never published back in 2007. I'm a little more database savvy now, but I think the crux of the article still holds. Reprinted in it's entire, incomplete state due to my laziness to properly edit. 

Database interfaces continue to prove an enigma to me. I’ve tried to work with Access, MySql, along with a couple others whose names I don’t remember or have since blocked out of my mind. They’re wretched to setup, harder still to change, and seem to specialize in one of two categories:

Those that are easy to put information in.

Those that are easy to get information out.

Wikipedia is a great example of a database that’s easy to get information in. Bugzilla is another one. People who need to get information into a system love these types of systems. You freehand in information and do not require any particular type of structure. They’re very approachable, and great when you wish to amass information from a variety of sources very quickly.

But have you ever tried to compare two articles?

Let’s say you want to know the name of Franklin D Roosevelt’s dog. In wikipedia, you can probably find such a thing, but you can’t search for it directly. You have to search for Roosevelt, and then cull through the various pages that reference him to see if they mention his dog. You can add a string modifier to look for dog, which will reduce the time, but you still have to scan through the article to see if the information is relevant. Inconvenient, but not a show stopper.

But what if you wanted to compare articles referencing Roosevelt’s dog? What if you wanted to find out the context of someone’s life that an author would reference a famous man’s dog? There is no culling of data to gleam some greater insight. There is only an upchuck of that information that has already been deposited.

Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, more business oriented databases like Access exist. My former employer used Access to keep track of clients, inventory, and various product models, as well as employee records. These systems require a lot of forethought. One must first consider Exactly what types of information you’re going to need to enter. For a product that you sell, you could include information like:

Sale price, sources of goods, prices your vendors charge, prices you sell for, etc. This is all well and good. Often someone who is entering information into the database needs a certain level of training so that they don’t enter numbers into a cell that requires text. However, you can design custom search strings to compare similar pieces of information. If you want to compare the prices of your different products, or look at what goods are the most expensive and the most cheap, you can do this fairly quickly and effortlessly.

But, if a year into the business you decide it’s time to start considering multiple vendors for a particular good you need, something you hadn’t thought of originally, your database needs a reworking to support all that. Cells have to be added, new information has to be entered. New queries have to be created, and some old ones have to be changed as they may not work anymore.

War on Clutter, part 3

Progress is never as swift as one may like, but progress is still progress. Our reclining chair is now gone, and just in the nick of time, as it gave us a place to setup our Christmas tree. That act alone was enough to galvanize me back into attacking the stacks of paper that had begun to gather dust next to my desk.

Manuals continue to fall prey to the recycle bin as I find their digital counterparts online. I’ve also become more lax about what I’m willing to throw out, and have to laugh at myself for holding on to some things so fervently before. Why do I need assembly instructions for the entertainment center? I’m not going to put it together again.

Going paperless has also had a positive impact on the amount of mail we receive. It’s mostly junk now, and I’ve not figured out how to make Chase Bank stop sending me credit card offers, but the sheer mass of paper flowing into the house has decreased dramatically.

One odd note. It turns out that when you call the yellow pages distributor to opt out of receiving future copies, the try to sell you books. They also ask for your email address to verify that you wish to continue to opt out in the future. Sketchy?

Storytellers

The thing about storytellers is, the telling’s the thing.

Everyone loves a different part of a story. For some people, it is the narrative structure, tracing the arc of presentation to building tension to climax to denoument. For some people, it is the people, their characterizations and mannerisms. For some people, it is the scenery and the setting that makes the story compelling. And apparently, for a lot of people, it’s about sex. I can only guess that’s why most of the free contemporary ebooks on amazon are stories I’ll never read to my son.

But for storytellers. It is the act of telling the story that they find enjoyable. A storyteller can tell the same story to the same person 5 times in a row and enjoy it every single time, unlike the person listening to the story for the 5th time in a row. I think it is important for both parties to realize this.

The telling’s the thing. For the storyteller, it’s more about how the story is told than the story itself. While the listener may hear the exact same story told 5 times in a row, the storyteller is actually tweaking the story each and every time it is told. A little more dramatic cadence for these sentences. Take out the ‘and then’ for that part, it’s extraneous. Pause for half a second longer at this point. They are artists for which the story is a canvas whose paint never dries, forever allowing itself to stretch, squeeze, and twist into new variations. The stories evolve over time. Sometimes the canvas tears, the endings change. It’s not about consistency. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about the telling of the story. The telling’s the thing.

Worst. Map. Ever.

It looked fine on the screen before I printed it out.

Repeated refreshes and reattempts to print yielded the same result. I know Google wants me to print less, but this is not the way to do it!

The spoils of war

In a word: Booyah!

Our recycling gets picked up every 2 weeks and normally our paper fills one of the plastic bins, while our glass plastic and cans fill the other. This time, everything you see here is paper. Shredded financial statements, old manuals that have been replaced with digital copies, and misc errata that filled the filing cabinet for years for reasons unknown.

This isn’t everything from the filing cabinet. But it is a serious dent. And it feels good!

This week we also said goodbye to 3 lamps and an ironing board. They’ve gone to a place that will appreciate them more. We also trying to get rid of the chair shown in the above picture. Does anyone want it?

Going paperless, manual edition

About 4 years ago I went online to find the manual to our ice cream maker as it had a recipe we wanted to try, and at the time we could not find it (that was before we used the filing cabinet and even were really organized). It took about 3 hours of searching, traversing various sites, before I found what I was looking for. The manufacturer’s site was of no help. Their site looked like it was made from geocities. With that in mind, I was hesitant to begin the phase of going paperless where you download or scan your manuals to get rid of the paper copies.

I’m happy to say things have improved dramatically in the last 4 years. The ice cream maker’s site? I found the manual in about 45 seconds. For most manufacturers even, you can now track down a manual for something you own to download and throw out the paper copy. It’s fantastic!

But there are still limits. Store brands are woefully under-represented. It is still possible to find such manuals online, but you have to go to sites that advertise themselves as manual repositories, and usually just contain links back to the manufacturer or store front who doesn’t have that manual available for download. Some of the sites do have manuals, but the download link is obscured around several dozen google ads they try to make you click by accident. I’m pretty sure that’s their business model.  They can be found, but it does take some hunting. Craftsmen and Husky proved particularly challenging.

Another limiter is that a lot of the manufacturers only provide manuals for products they are actively selling. A shop vac I bought from Ryobi is no longer offered and the manual cannot be found anywhere.

There are also time limits, even for larger companies that you wouldn’t think would be a problem. A Frigidaire refrigerator we bought in 2005 had an easy to find manual, but the chest freezer from 2001 could not be located. If you want to go paperless, start downloading manuals now! Just because you can find them now does not mean they’ll still be around when you need them.

It has been a good two weeks of getting rid of paper. I hope to snap a photo of everything that we’re putting out for recycling this Thursday.

The War on clutter, Part 2

A fantastic weekend! So much gone. Though so much remains. It’s astonishing how much of a mess is created by cleaning out all of the junk in your life. But to get rid of it, it must first be exposed.

We got rid of our filing cabinet.

The paperless effort has made progress over the course of the last year, but it can be hard to find the time and motivation to pull a file folder out of the drawer and proceed to scan and shred. So, last weekend, I realized that to get rid of the paper, we must first get rid of the container that holds it. Just like getting rid of the coffee table eliminated the junk that accumulated upon it.

Where there was a filing cabinet now sits several small stacks of file folders. But again, as with the coffee table, the room is now much bigger. Even with the floor littered with file folders, the room has grown in size. It’s not about increasing how much space you have, but rediscovering how much space is already there.

We also got rid of our old home stereo system, and will hopefully today be rid of a charcoal grill that came with the house and the second litter box we no longer use. Last week about 7 CD’s sold, and we went through our books to see what to donate, so the shelves are now more spacious.

The goal has become to move out of our house with less than we moved in with. This will be a challenge given that we’ve since had a kid, but I think it is possible. At the very least, we might be able to break even, which is still saying a lot.

So, yes, a fantastic weekend!

The War on Paper is now the War on Clutter

The war on paper is not over. The soldiers got temporarily re-deployed onto other projects to reduce home clutter in other ways, but they’re starting to trickle back and hitting the paper hard. The 2009 finances are done, as well as half of the car records. I’ve also started downloading pdf versions of some manuals.

We finally got rid of our 20 year old TV, and replaced it with something a little nicer. More importantly, we got rid of the old entertainment center. The thing was massive, and a magnet for odds and ends to accumulate upon. The newer one is much smaller. Less footprint = less mess. I swear, our living room doubled in sized once we got rid of that thing.

When we got the house, it ended up being a foreclosure auction, and some things of the previous owner were left behind, including a pretty sizeable collection of Blues and Jazz CD’s. We held onto them for a couple of years in case the previous owner ever came back looking for them, but have started to sell them off on Amazon. Listing on amazon is pretty easy, but it still takes a while to list over 300 CD’s, especially when you need to sample each one to make sure it works, given that they’ve been sitting in the attic for quite a while. Over half of them are gone now, which feels pretty good.

While getting rid of junk is important, Julie and I are trying  pretty hard to minimize how much we actually throw away. There are lots of recycling programs. The TV was donated

The war is not over, but neither is it lost!

On the Topic of Dreams

Julie asked me the other night if I thought the American Dream was  dead, and it got me thinking.

Do dreams really die? If so, where do they go? Is there a dream heaven or hell? Is there a dream purgatory? Is it possible to kill a dream? If so, should it be made illegal? After all, killing is wrong, so should you be able to charge someone with dreamicide? But what if the person dreams about killing other people or their dreams? Do you then kill the dream? Does that then kill the dreamer?

Dreams have been known to take on a life of their own, but does that make them killers? After all, where did they get that life? Was it stolen? Was it gifted? Was it leased!?!

July 8th, 2010

An amazing end to the work week! We started and finished a work project. It was not painting. We put a windshield to guard a front door from the high winds that often roll through and can easily rip a storm door right off its hinges.

There has not been a single project that went straight forward. The painting project on day 1 ran into mold. The skirting project on day 2 had no electricity on the site. The painting project on day 3 ran into a paint shortage (and some administrative difficulties I’m told). And, the windshield project for day 4 did not have enough posts that were long enough to anchor it to the ground. We started with 3 4”x4”x12’ posts that we cut to 10 feet. Only problem, we needed a 4th and the longest they had was 8 feet. This is what the Re-Member people mean when they say something is Rez-ified. It’s not about planning, it’s about working with what you’ve got, which is never sufficient.

The difference? This time we made it work! We reconfigured the design on the fly to work with a shorter pole we were able to anchor directly to the house. No more giving up and leaving it to be finished by another team. April and Nicole learned to drive screws into the wood as well as use a circular saw. By the time we were done they were making better cuts than me.

Theo got to play with an impact wrench as well. He mastered the lag bolt insertion. It’s always exciting when they argue over who gets to lean the new tool.

Anyhow, the redesign worked, we had time to paint it, and left them with a fully functional windshield.

Clean up upon return. We were charged with gathering the recycling and tying up cardboard which took no time at all. Used the extra time to untangle and rewind an otherwise useless mass of twine.

This is where I’m going to end the journal transcription. There’s not a lot to say about the return trip. Everyone made it back, safe and sound.  A full blown presentation of the trip is in the works and tentatively scheduled for October 3rd, 2010. You can check the church’s calendar at www.uccburlington.org for the time and address of that. Pictures are still being gathered and added, but I plan to send a link to those out once they’re all posted after the presentation. Thanks to those who had read this.

July 7th, 2010

Our group has been split to do different things today. Group one, which consists of myself, Kate, Nicole, April and Theo are on tour today. Group two with is Sara, Brian, Samantha, Jaime and Geoffrey have a work today. Tomorrow they’ll tour while we work.

I would’ve preferred the groups stay together. Tried to get it reworked, but it was not an option.

Summary of the tour day:

All in all, I wish we could have worked. The tour was nice, but I think we could’ve been more effective building or painting. But there were highlights:

• Visited Red Cloud school (as well as Red Cloud’s grave). Saw his gun in the museum. Red Cloud, for those that don’t know, was really the Lakota Chief who realized that they would have to give up their way of life if they wanted to live at all, and negotiated a lot of the original treaties between the tribes and the US government.
• Saw a very cool dreamcatcher. Very Escher-like:
• Learned about the transit system. They’ve only recently gotten it working, and are very proud of it.
• Had Lunch at Bettie’s kitchen. The buffalo burger was fine, the chocolate cake was great!
• Hiked up past the kitchen for a great view, though I spent a lot of time keeping kids from trespassing onto the neighbors property through a break in the fence.
• A Lakota college I found something for Alex (at last!)
• Saw a picture of the Buffalo Sherman slaughtered to reduce the Native American population. Each of those white dots is a head of a buffalo that was killed, and it’s meat left to rot. Average buffalo yields 350 lbs of meat.

• Visited the Singing Horse trading post, where they had puppies!
• Craft fair tonight. Bought a necklace and earrings for  Julie, was definitely worth the wait.
• Kids got to practice beating a traditional drum, and we danced.
• Tomorrow we paint. From the descriptions of team 2, it will not be a lot of fun, but I remain optimistic.

Last work day. Barely feels like we’ve done anything.

Advertising for kids

I girl got my attention as I walked to the train the other day. She asked me what I thought about McDonald’s advertising to kids. I didn’t have time to take her up on the subject, as I needed to catch my train. Plus, I’d never really thought about it.

I’ve thought about it now.

We do not see much TV, so I don’t know if McDonald’s advertising has recently ramped up to warrant this street campaign, but otherwise they’ve been advertising to kids for years. One of the original Ronald McDonald was in a homemade costume by Willard Scott, who later went on to found The Today Show. That was a pretty creepy costume made out of popcorn bags and soda cups. I’d say that the advertising I saw from McDonald's as a kid gave me fewer nightmares that that costume did when I saw it as an adult.

I would also prefer that advertising to the stuff put out by cereal and cookie companies that are aimed at kids. That stuff is what I imagine when I picture an acid trip. Cookies melting to form chocolate rivers as cereal erupts from fissures in the ground. It’s either a tasty treat or the end of the world. Those commercials would do Salvidor Dali proud.

Now, let’s say that we all say enough is enough. These commercials encourage far too much of a consumer mentality in little kids, who lack the income to sustain such appetites, and it strains parent child relationships because the kids develop needs for things they don’t. We ban advertising geared toward children. This leaves a lot of open advertising space that needs to be filled. And it gets filled with adult advertising.

One thing I will say about advertising to kids, it is largely void of excessive sexuality. The same cannot be said of adult advertising. A lot of such commercials seem to try to make up for the lack of it in kids advertising. If I had to choose between my son watching a commercial with a clown dancing with a cookie, and people enjoying the way viagra makes themselves feel, I’ll opt for the former. Especially once he gets old enough to ask me to explain what the commercials mean.

So, I guess I don’t have a problem with McDonald’s advertising to kids.

July 6th, 2010

Another work day done. We went to a mobile home to add an insulating skirt underneath to help with the heating bills. When we got there, we found that the electric company had cut off their power. So, no power tools. Not the most promising start. All we had to work with were a few cordless tools until the batteries ran out and hand tools. We also were not able to use the table saw to rip the final wooden covers that will go over the insulation and actually stop the wind.

Once again, the kids did a fantastic job. Sam to to use a reciprocating saw, which she handled with aplomb, along with brushing up on her hammering skills. Nicole practiced with a hand saw and enjoyed it so much she went looking for more wood to cut once we finished cutting the cross members.

Because there was no power, there was not enough work to go around. But, no one complained about being bored. When given direction, each of them tackled it with gusto.

The rolls of insulation were just a little short for the frames to tack them into place properly, and a few times we’d get the frame into place only to have the insulation fall down. I got to climb under the mobile home in a space about as large as I am when lying prone and crawl down its length, nailing the insulation back in place where it had fallen. There were a lot of spiders, apparently many of them poisonous. Huzzah, no bites! Art, one of the leaders from the Danvers group told me he’d never be able to do that. I’m glad the kids did not try it either.

There were also lots of grasshoppers and a pair of dogs showed that the kids nicknamed Rabies and Dead. For the record, they did not have rabies and did not die. April is writing in the group journal today, so I’ll leave it to her to cover that in more detail.

After getting back I drafted April and Theo to help me in the kitchen to bake a birthday cake for Brian. Again, a classic example of these guys not stepping up, but leaping at the opportunity to help out and do more.

Our 3rd speaker tonight. Not quite as engaging as last nights, but still quite good. He gave a more detailed creation story and described a lot of the parallels between Christianity and Native American stories. Plus, info on the 7 sacred ceremonies. Twice in a row now, Brian has gone to talk with the speaker afterward. Awesome!

The cake went over well. Brian was completely surprised, even though probably everyone else had heard about it by this point. Julie would be proud of me. The oven didn’t work right but I still managed to get both cakes baked with no burning (though some sticking, don’t trust Crisco spray).

Next morning

I forgot to write about a conversation I had with Ted that clarified my concerns about the trash issue. It turns into an excellent lesson about the extreme poverty. We spent a lot of time picking up trash during our first workday, and yet they tell us stories about how important it is to respect the earth as part of the Lakota culture. But, when it comes down it, they have to choose between buying food and buying trash bags. Given that families already run out of food before the month ends, food always wins. So, the garbage gets thrown under the deck, or in a hole in the ground. The wind picks it up and it goes everywhere. There is a trash pickup service, but you have to pay for it, and it’s not cheap. Garbage collection is a luxury your average Lakota simply cannot afford.

July 5th, 2010

Our first work day. Everyone did a fantastic job! We spent most of the day painting a wheelchair ramp to protect it from the elements, as paint is cheaper than urethane, and the wood that gets donated is not pressure treated.

Got the most important surfaces covered, but cut it short while painting the understand as mold was discovered. Most likely not the black mold of legend, but better safe than sorry. At that point we moved to pick up litter. It being the day after the 4th of July, there were lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of expended fireworks. Fireworks were actually going off pretty frequently during the work day as well. We got done with the yard of the house we’d been working at and moved down the street. Ended up filling a lot of garbage bags. Of it firecrackers, but a lot of it not from this year. There were a fair amount of firecracker remains that was definitely not a day old.

The funny story from the day is that Brian asked me if gangs were  a problem. I said I didn’t think so but that there was a fair amount of theft. As if on cue, a kid rides up to a bike that’s lying by the side of the road, says “Hey, that looks like a nice bike” grabs, and takes off with it before any of us can react.

It’s worth noting that later on we found out that gangs are a problem on the Rez, along with theft.

Speaker that night was Will Peters. He was a fantastic speaker. He’s  full time teacher, and really got everyone’s attention from the get go and kept it the entire talk. I got his email address and hope to talk to him further. If we’re going to try to solve problems post trip, he can provide some insight I think.

Stayed up too late. Getting up tomorrow to watch the sunrise.

I miss Julie and Alex.

A lot.

July 4th, 2010

A day both intense and lackluster. We visited Wounded Knee, learned the story of the massacre, wandered the cemetery (which is still active). Saw tombstones of veterans of World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, all buried next to people from the 1890’s.

I’m used to cemeteries with flowers on the graves, and there were plenty of those, but other things too. Speaking with Dave, one of the project managers, explained that loved ones will bring that which people enjoyed in life. There was a can of Pepsi on one tombstone, cigarettes on another. There was a purple ceramic hand. There were also Teddy bears, for those that died young.

There were a lot of teddy bears. Makes me want to give Alex a hug.

Dave told me about a drink called Hurricane. It’s half beer, half energy drink that’s sold almost exclusively in depressed areas like ghettos and reservations. The idea is to keep you awake and active, so you can drink more. It was, sadly, among the offerings. Apparently you have to do a lot of research to find the connection between Hurricane and the Brewer, Anheiser-Busch. Took a research student 3 months to trace that back.

Next came a hike into the badlands. Sadly, a very short one. A storm front was moving in so we only had a short while before getting washed out. The badlands is not a good place to be in a storm. Actually, no place out doors on the Rez is a particularly good place to be outside when there’s a storm. The rain is hard, it hails often, and the wind can be pretty fierce. The hills in the badlands are effectively dry mud, so when the rain comes, you’ll have a hard time getting down safely, assuming you don’t drown in a mudslide.

The scenery was beautiful. Those with cameras burned through a lot of shots while we were there. There was not enough time for silent contemplation.

Returned to the badland visitor center for lunch. Had it in the basement next to a stuffed deer. Food was good. Deer did not provide much in the way of conversation.

After an extra long drive back to Re-Member (I think they were trying to kill time), we had some time to play games. I introduced Chrononauts, which went over well. April seemed to like it a lot. I also learned that Geoff and Jaime cannot be trusted to play Uno alone. Uno can be a surprisingly violent game, especially after Jaime beat Geoff 6 times in a row.

Nice talk from the speaker after he smudged us with wheat grass. He spoke very softly, which made it hard to heard and I think put some people to sleep. Turns out the badlands were known as the white hills prior, which makes a lot of sense. It’s basically a bunch of white hills. The badlands were a name assigned to give the area a negative connotation, so that it would sound like the army was doing the Lakota a favor by taking it over.

July 3rd, 2010

*Note, I’m skipping the first travel day. Not much to report beyond heavy bags and a lot of time in a plane and a bus. I’ll try to edit out the boring stuff, but no promises.

What a day. Watched a couple of movies on the bus, one of which was ridiculously inappropriate, what with the endless profanity and gratuitous sex scene. The movies were pulled from the Re-Member list to learn more about Native American culture, but apparently were not previewed to determine their appropriateness for the audience.

But, the bus did not break down, and we managed to get to Re-Member without incident.

It’s worth noting the watch story. When we started this trip, I did not have a watch. I stopped wearing a watch a few years ago and have relied on my phone, but given that my phone will spend most of the time turned off, and given that there seems to be a fair bit of scheduling going on that I should keep track of, I opted to buy a watch. At the gift shop in Colorado, they only had one kind of watch. It was a Timex watch for kids, which had a button specifically to animate a dog running around. It just barely fit, and had a motion sensor so that any time the watch moved, it did an animation where the numbers sweep away and back again, taking about 7 seconds. You cannot skip it, so you have to wait for it to stop before you can check the time. You also have to hold perfectly still while checking the time or it starts all over again.

Less than one day and I was done with that watch.

So, on the way to Pine Ridge we stopped at a gas station where I finally find a decent watch. Between the two, I’ve spent about half of the money I’d budgeted for the trip, but at least I had a working watch.

Arrive a Re-Member, attend orientation. The first thing Ted says, “Here on the Reservation we do things a little bit differently. The perception of time is different, so you can take your watch, put it away, as you will not need it for this trip.”

As Jaime tells it, she turned to look at me and my head was on the table at this point. And the entire Burlington group cracked up.

For Dinner we had Buffalo stew, which was quite delicious.

Oh, and we saw Car-Henge on the way up. Fantastic!!

The Pow-Wow was a lot of fun. They started it by having all of us go out and dance for about 10 minutes. It was a simple round dance, but it was also about 10 minutes. It was pretty exhausting.

Next, I got to go up and say a few words about our group, why we’re here, and what we hope to do.

Some friends were made. The girls befriended some young girls named Cecilia and Morningstar. Apparently Cecilia “Brings the shizzle, up in here!”

All in all, a good time was had. And now: Too sleep!

The Rez

It finally happened. After a year of planning, fundraising, and psyching myself up, we made the trek to Pine Ridge. There’s too much to cover in a single blog posting, so suffice it to say that it was very, very intense. Perhaps at some point I’ll transcribe the journal I kept (edited for content, language, handwriting, etc.), but for now I’ll simply say that things need to happen there. Big things. Important things. Otherwise, people are going to keep dying. Imagine a place that is in a state of triage for 150 years. Imagine a place that is so pretty it turns your stomach to know that to see it on a regular basis means you will likely not live to see 50. I was sad to leave, but at least I can. Not everyone is so lucky.

Etiquette oddities

Normally, standard etiquette dictates that people exiting a space are granted the right of way. You let people off the elevator, or coming out of a restaurant first. It makes sense logically, as you’re making room for yourself by letting them out, but I’ve noticed one distinct contradiction.

Subway entrance gates while the train is parked in the station with the doors open. It’s best to step aside and let the people scrambling to get onto the train before the doors close and the train leaves go first.

I try to do it for them. I’d like to think they’d do it for me.

The war on paper, part 7

A lot of you have asked (and by a lot of you, I mean one, which technically is infinitely more than none, the more common number of questions, so I hold a lot to be valid) about organization and backups of the scans.

Organization: Currently I organize the files the same way I organized them in the filing cabinet. Scansnap creates folders where it deposits the PDF’s, as well as running a pretty decent OCR algorithm through to make them searchable. So, if I ever needed to find record of a purchase in ‘07, I browse to the ‘07 folder and perform a word search. A couple of test runs has thus far proved fruitful.

Backups: Currently backups are performed onsite. I have a simple D-Link NAS setup in the living room with a 1TB and 500GB hard drive in it. I run GFI Home backup which works well and is free. Every 10 days it performs an incremental backup of my system on one of the two drives. I have the same setup running on my wife’s machine. Admittedly, this means that I can lose up to one week’s worth of work, but at the same time it can take a while for a corruption to manifest, and I prefer incremental backups, so I prefer a method where my backups are a few weeks out of day vs. having recent updates that are both corrupted, and then all of the data is lost.

At some point in the near future I hope to setup a backup of critical data to a cloud source. I’ve not settled on a particular solution, though I’ve looked at Mozy, Carbonite and Skydrive. I’d rather avoid the monthly maintenance fee so I’m trying to keep critical data to minimum to remain with the free offerings of the different services.

On a side note, you may notice that there is a wireless router next to the NAS. It’s actually a WiFi repeater, not a router, configured to extend my existing network to make it wireless and have the NAS in the living room without running lots of ethernet through the ceiling and walls. Admittedly, this slows down the backup process, but there are multiple reasons to set it up there. Some may ask why (or not), but that is a story for another day.

Learning from babies

I’ve concluded that the reason we shake our heads to signify ‘no’ comes from people trying to feed you when you’re a baby. You move your face left and right, away from the spoon, with your mouth closed to say “No, I don’t want to eat that!” I don’t know why nodding means yes yet. It is an orthogonal action, which is logical, so it may be as simple as that. But I plan to keep watching Alex for any other insights. Also, if I’m not paying attention he’ll throw his cup on the floor.

Road Rage as it applies to a Superiority Complex

I’ve long contended that the purest form of equality available in America today can be found on the road. When you’re sitting in traffic, you’re sharing the road with teachers, CEO’s, migrant workers, engineers, lawyers, grocery store clerks, and anyone else able drive. You’re just as likely to be cut off by a soccer mom as you are a doctor.

I sometimes wonder if many people don’t find such a level playing field frustrating. After all, there are so many “bad” drivers out there. Consider that a lot of people feel the need to exert some degree of control or superiority over those around them. Such people try to steer conversations to topics where they are most knowledgeable, to leverage an advantage. Sometimes they’ll put down (publicly or quietly) other people to make themselves feel better than them. Now take such a person, and put them in a car behind the person they are better than. In traffic. With no way to pass.

Road rage stems from many things, but I’ve had a fair deal of experience driving in 3 different states (Texas, NY and Mass), and I have to say that Mass is by far the worst when it comes to road rage. Specifically, the closer you get to Boston. I also believe that the level of pretentiousness, competitiveness, and need to exhibit superiority correlates with this level of road rage.

Admittedly, I’m writing having just read an article on Confirmation Bias, which states that once you have an idea, you’ll start seeing evidence that you feel validates your theory, and ignoring evidence that contradicts it. I don’t know of any studies that point to strong ties between road rage and superiority. I also don’t know of any studies that contradict. But this has never been about being right. It’s been about getting thing out of my head so I don’t have to dwell on them anymore.

My Grandfather's WW2 stories

Back in middle school I interviewed my grandfather about his experiences in World War 2 as part of a class project. We recorded the interview on a cassette tape. Then, in college I found the tapes and digitized them, creating an MP3 collection. It's available here for anyone who might be curious.

The war on paper, part 6

Another quick update. I’ve gotten back to scanning.  I was going to say that the pile on the shredder has gotten bigger, but Julie has discovered that she loves to shred paper too. These bags are filling up fast!

It should be noted that shredding is messy business. Especially when you have cats that love to play with the bits of shredded paper and them track them all over the house.

Also, I’m an idiot (no surprise there). I’ve still not signed up for receive statements electronically, so things keep coming in the mail. This must be resolved quickly!

The War on Paper, part 5

No giant revelations today. The fact is, work has consumed my life for the last two months, and I’m only just now able to be at home and not doing work. As such, progress has been slow.

But, I am proud to say that we’ve kicked off the next phase, and perhaps the most gratifying. The shredding!

This is but a small sample of what needs to be shredded. Sadly, our shredder like most consumer grade devices can only handle a few hundred pages before the motor starts to overheat. Mind you, it’ll keep going, but that’s bad for the life of the machine. If it came down to it I suppose I could retrofit it with a 24V boding double worm reduction motor that weighs more than the shredder itself, but that would  be cheating, and probably destroy the gears instead. Because of the bandwidth limit on the shredder, we’ve started shredding before we finished scanning, which is a little intimidating. I can’t say, “Okay, that parts done and solid, now on to the next part.” I’ve been waiting to say that for the last few months, but due to work instead I just look at massive piles of paper that sit there, already scanned, waiting to be shredded, simply taking up space in an ever shrinking office.

It was a little nerve-wracking at first, but quickly gave way to a game of how long I could string together pages without changing the cadence of the shredder mower before the bin got full.

Pedestrian SUVs

I can honestly say I do not care for umbrella’s. In the pedestrian world, people with umbrella’s are the SUVs. Umbrellas are oversized and impractical. They do the job of a hood. There is no value added by having an umbrella. Your pants still get wet. You keep your jacket dry, which is intended to get wet and keep your shirt dry, so there’s no real point there.

In some ways, however, umbrellas are even worse than SUVs. SUVs are constrained to a single lane on the road. Even if they fill it pretty tightly, they cannot spill over. A single umbrella can cover an entire sidewalk, slowing or blocking the traffic of people moving behind them. Stepping off the sidewalk easily results in water in the shoes, soaking the socks, leading to a general state of misery for the rest of the day. I really don’t like wet socks. I keep a pair of dry socks at work as an emergency in case a puddle incident happens. Not everyone can do this, and so must suffer soaked sock syndrome when forced to bypass an umbrella walker while in a hurry to get to work.

Umbrellas are dangerous. Shorter people hold them at a level that is just right to smack a taller person in eye. I’ve had more than one umbrella spoke glance off my glasses.

Umbrellas can lead to dumb behavior. I’ve seen a woman stand and get completely soaked because her umbrella got blown inside out, rather than walk the remaining 15 yards to cover with her umbrella. I cannot count the number of times someone comes to a door, stops, takes the time to collapse and shake the rain off their umbrella, all the while blocking the door while people try to get in or out.

So please, if possible, leave the umbrella at home if you can. If you’re walking with a little one whose hood cannot stay up, or in a stroller with no cover, use them by all means. I will not begrudge you. But if you’re strolling down the path side by side with a friend, talking about what so and so said at lunch yesterday while a pack of 8 people wait behind you for an opportunity to get past, please leave the umbrella at home.

I do not care for umbrellas.

CAD Blues

Badum! Badum!
The model won't regenerate!
Badum! Badum!
The sketches are bad!
Badum! Badum!
Promotion requests are screwy!
Badum! Badum!
No approvers to be had!
Badum! Badum!
I'm up working late!
Badum! Badum!
And my left eye is dead!
Badum! Badum!
What the hell is iritis?
Badum! Badum!
CAD says this part's gotta be made out of lead!?!?!

I've got the CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD Blues!!

Is Globalization good for the environment?

We recycle a fair amount. Often enough, that we wish the recycling was picked up every week and the trash pickup was only once every two weeks, the reverse of what it is now.

That being said, if I decided to stop recycling, the impact on a global scale would be pretty small. Yes, every little bit helps, but for global change that means you’re relying on a lot of people to go out of their way when there is little incentive beyond the basic “I feel good because I’m doing my part”

How much money is spent on awareness campaigns to encourage people to do something just because it’s the right thing to do?

Consider two models:

One is a vast array of 10,000 small, self sufficient farms. Everyone operates in a largely self sufficient way, occasionally bartering with their neighbors, but nothing more beyond that. For each farm you have basic overhead (the farmers) as well as infrastructure: Barns, fences, and hand tools. Historically, a system like this has allowed people to subsist, but not necessarily prosper. If a season goes well, you eat well that year. If a season goes badly, you starve to death. Morever, let’s say that out of 20 lbs you harvest, you lose 1 lb to damage, spilling, general human error.  That’s 5% waste, but to the individual it’s only 1 lb. Multiply it by 10,000 farms and you’ve got 10,000 lbs of waste. But, the cost of saving that last 1 lb becomes prohibitively expensive for an individual farmer.

Model #2: One farm that occupies the same area as the previous 10,000. There are fewer barns, farm houses and fences, meaning that more land is available for farming because of reduced overhead. Suddenly, a single farmer is faced with the prospect of 10,000 lbs of wasted food, you can bet they’re ready and willing to invest the capital to reduce that, because it means more food for profit, because by this time they’re making far more than they need, and are selling off the excess. While I acknowledge that greed is a vice, it’s one that can be leveraged to do good, no?

Obviously, one giant farm that produces all of the food for the world is a bad idea, because monopolies are a bad idea. Free markets dictate that people will choose the price, and competition is necessary for people to have a choice to dictate that price. But does that mean that an inherently more viable market economy is intrinsically more wasteful? Is the best system an oligarchy of farms under the watchful eye of publicly funded watchdog group ensuring that the farms collaborate on efficiency, but compete on price? Is that even fair to the markets? If everyone is on equal footing, then they are dependent on geography and weather to produce competitive yields, and those will never be the same. If we then impose restrictions on sale prices, or subsidize those that had a bad year, we’ve just taken away the market incentive to be competitive.

I’ve always perceived globalization as a homogenization of larger corporations leveraging global resources to optimize efficiencies (which tend to reduce waste and emissions) as a means of maximizing their profits. This has the benefit of also being better for the environment. But does that mean that what is good for the environment is bad for the economy? If so, then who wins?

I guess I support the current method. Let free markets reign while attempting to increase awareness and leverage available knowledge and tools to increase individual’s efficiency and environmental responsibility.

At the very least, I will keep recycling.

The war on paper, part 4

I think it’s fair to warn I’ll be talking about this for a while. Given that there’s little about work I’m permitted to speak about, and for fear of becoming one of those parents who speak incessantly about their child as though he’s the first person to ever go through any of that (though those posts will emerge, to be sure), I’m going to stick with this topic for a bit. At least until I’ve managed to win the war, or achieve a cease fire.

For comparison sake: Here is the filing cabinet:

And here is what scans the paper:

There’s obviously more to it than that. What do you do with the paper when you’re done with it? What do you do with the things that you can’t scan? What about data loss?

I have answers to most of those questions, but not all. As they become more relevant I will update. But for now, I’ve still only gotten as far as the 2006 finances.

So, I will simply link to a video of Alex crawling with his freakingly adorable hat on.

Unboxing

My apologies. This is a rant.

When did unboxing become an important part of purchasing something? It started with gadgets, but seems to be spreading to more and more items. Lots of reviews now begin with a person’s experience as they take it out of the box for the first time. Why is something that amounts to less than .01% of the time you spend with something actually matter. I can understand the importance of first impressions, that whole Blink response, but I would think that applies to the first time you use it. I could appreciate a review that powers a device on for the first time. How much configuration is required, how long does it take you to get to the good stuff? If anything, the time spent capturing the unboxing experience is reducing the objects desirability, because it lengthens how long it takes you to actually be able to use it.

Moreover, I’m concerned that design efforts to improve the unboxing experience result in greater waste of packing materials. When designing for consumer products. Price is very important, because that’s the psychological barrier people have to get past to own the product. If the price is too high, people don’t buy.

That being said, someone once told me that the price will only be remembered for the first week, but the quality will be remembered forever. Please take the money you spend to maximize your product’s unboxing experience and put that toward improving the product’s quality.

I like that Samsung has a similar appreciation for the exaggerated importance of unboxing. It’s an older video, but here is their unboxing experience for the Omnia:

The war on paper, part 3

I’ve scanned up through our 2006 finances. It’s interesting to watch the trends in our organization emerge, dissolve, re-emerge, etc.

In the beginning, we kept separate folders for phone bills, utility bills, etc. We also separated our financial records between my accounts and Julie’s accounts. That lasted about a year. By end end of ‘05 everything went into the same folder.

We also worked to make the paper system work. When writing a check to pay a particular bill, we’d pull the carbon copy out of the check book and staple it to the bill for easy reference in case we ever had to look it up. We would also staple deposit receipts with the paystubs to reference we when deposited income. It was an awesome system. The problem, of course, is that we never actually needed to go back to look up any of that information. We meticulously documented stuff that just didn’t matter.

I still believe that record retention is important, that’s why I’m scanning it all in. I also believe that the integrity of your organization should correspond to the frequency with which you will need to access that data. Yes, it will take a few minutes longer to find a phone bill, assuming I ever need to find it, which I probably won’t.

Word to the wise. If you foresee yourself ever going paperless, avoid staples. Or, at the very least, get a staple remover.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed:

• While I appreciate that American express uses smaller pages for their statements to reduce paper consumption, it means they have to be scanned separately from most of the other documents.
• That said, the most common document thus far to cause a paper jam is a Capital One statement. They use pages that 8.5” wide but 33% longer, and for some reason that increases their likelihood to cause a paper jam.
• I really do like this scanner. It’s not taken me so long to get through 2005 and 2006 documents because it’s a long and arduous process. It actually only took me a couple of hours.

The war on paper, part 2

I must say: At first blush, this duplexing scanner is awesome. No more loading one page at a time on a flatbed scanner, flipping to get the other side. I load in 10-20 pages at a time, hit the button, and put a basket underneath the catch the spoils. Paper jams are surprisingly far between for something that is entry level for its category. I’ve not investigated the character recognition, so I don’t know how well it indexes all of the financial statements, but as long as I can search by a month and year, I should be able to get close enough to hone in on what I’m looking for.

One lesson that’s held true is the importance of having a reasonable filing system. One that gets you close quickly, without being overly specific. We used to have different folders for different kinds of bills. One for gas, one for phones, one student loan payments. We’ve since consolidated to a folder that holds all of the finance documents for a given year. Specificity is directly related to the frequency one must access the data. Don’t have a file folder to distinguish between gas bills and electric bills if you’re going to have to look back at them once or twice a year.

But folders are still needed! I feel it is important to spell that out for my own sake, mostly because of the engineering product lifecycle management software we’re getting at work. It pushes in the opposite direction, with minimal folders and an emphasis on searching for what you need by indexing documents through their metadata (information that’s not immediately in the document, but attached to it as relevant upon putting the document inside the database). Admittedly, that’s where the future appears to be headed, with refined search technologies and greater indexing capabilities to automate document parsing and knowledge retrieval. Call me old fashioned, but I like folders.

And yes, I do see the irony in that last statement given that I’m in the process of digitizing old paper to get rid of it and better embrace the future.

We’ve thus far won many of the battles, but the war is not over. The master strategy has not fully matured. This is the not beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning!! (Thanks Churchill)

The war on paper

It began with the coffee table. For the past 3 years we have lived in a 3 bedroom house. For more than two years of that, it was just the two of us. One might think that 3 bedrooms is more than enough to house just two people. That’s what we thought when we bought it. We wanted room to grow our family. But after two years we found the house seemed to be shrinking. What was once spacious had become crowded. No matter how many shelves we setup, no matter how many plastic tubs we put into the attic, the house was getting progressively crowded. What’s worse, we were plagued with clutter. No amount effort was sufficient to eliminate the clutter from our home. Many weekends were lost in the effort to clean up and organize the home better. There simply was not enough space to house all that we had accumulated.

Credit to the source of our solution comes from my sister’s boyfriend. We visited them one evening and both of us could not help but notice how clean his apartment was. Granted, he had no child to muss things up, but our problems predated the birth of our son. His toys only added to the mountain of clutter. On the trip up we’d talked about the feasibility of finding a larger home. Neither one of us liked the idea. We like our home, we like our neighbors, and the market means we’d have to sell at a loss, which would not position us well to buy into a larger home.

But, back to the apartment. Very open, very clean. The drive home was a different conversation. That’s when I realized it: Surfaces! Kevin has a distinct lack of surfaces. Surfaces obviously afford a place to put things down, but unless you maintain vigilance, they will gather rather than forcing you to tend to them. Lacking surfaces, there was no place for clutter to really gather. He had to deal with the mail when it arrived, rather than putting in a pile to grow. He had to deal with the empty grocery bags, rather than throwing them on top of the coffee table.

It took some work, but we finally got rid of our coffee table. The impact was immediate. The living room doubled in size, and was inherently cleaner. My wife looked at me and said, “What else can we get rid of?”

We posted items on ebay, craigslist, and freecycle. We donated what would not sell or people asked for. We threw away what the  donation’s people would not take. We hemorrhaged clothes we’d never wear and books we’d never read again.  Finally we came to the latest project, which is the filing cabinet. I’ve had this cabinet since college. It’s survived 5 moves (including one down the street on top of a rolling trash can in the snow), it weighs a ton, and it’s big and an eyesore. Julie never cared for it, but we needed a place to keep all of our files. The irony, is that the solution to get rid of the filing cabinet weighs about `1 lb and is the size of  a brick. It’s a duplexing scanner. We are going paperless.