Bon Voyage, my little diesel friend

It’s a bittersweet day. We bought the Fusion a year ago, as the Jetta replacement, but we really like the Jetta and have not been eager to part with it. But we’re cleaning house and it was on the list. Last week a kindly fellow from Canada responded to my craigslist ad and now the Jetta has a new home. Farewall little buddy.

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What women want

10-13-2009

Jen complains about the difficulty of cleaning an old muffin tin.

Matt suggests getting a new muffin tin.

Jen says, “I don’t need it, I already have another one.”

Later that night, the old muffin tin finds itself outside with the rest of the recycling.

10-16-2009

A box from Amazon.com arrived. I wonder if it has a 5-star rated muffin tin inside?

10-19-2009

5:29 PM Jen: I like the new cupcake pan.  It cleans up soooooooo nice. 🙂

5:29 PM Matt Simerson: 🙂

5:29 PM Jen: Very easily!!!!!  Sickeningly easy cleanup.

5:30 PM Matt Simerson: awwww, shucks

5:30 PM Jen: maybe we should ditch the other one too 🙂

less paper, no regrets, part 2

As with all systems, the results reflect the [lack of] planning that went into them. Since I had goals greater than just getting rid of all the paper, the next step was defining what exactly I wanted. In a nutshell, I wanted all my paper documents more accessible (ie, find them faster on the computer than I could in the file cabinet), easily backed up, and securely stored. I also want a ‘system’ in place that makes it easy to prevent the accumulation of paper in the future. The following feature list embodies my goals:

1. Tagging:  Tag documents with metadata about them. Examples:
2009, Receipt, Gas, Shell
2009, Receipt, Climbing, Trekking Poles, REI
Statements, Investing, Vanguard, 401k

2. Custom Fields: places to store specific types of data. For example, dates, prices, expense category, pay method, etc.

3. OCR: The files in the cabinet are orderly and it takes mere seconds to put my hand within an inch of the right document. But it might take 10 minutes to search through that file folder to find the document I’m after. Once scanned, each document is a PDF among hundreds of thousands of PDFs. OCR is the key to being able to find documents faster on the computer than in the file cabinet.

4. Spotlight searchable. Spotlight is the search technology built into my mac. It can index and search most document formats, including PDF. In order to be useful, the OCR results must be searchable via Spotlight.

5. Aggregation of numeric data: Perform summary math on contents of custom fields. Ie, when I select a group of receipts, automatically sum them all.

6. Backups: Make it easy to use standard backup tools to keep the documents safe.

7. Security: It must be easy to keep all the data reasonably secure. Fortunately, this can be easily accomplished on the Mac by creating a sparseimage and storing the document library on it.

8. Open & Future-Ready: The file format of all the documents must be an industry standard with multiple vendors supporting it. PDF is one such standard. In addition, once the documents are “archived,” I want the ability to manipulate them with external apps. For example, I may want to re-run the OCR against all my documents in a couple years when the technology has further improved.

Part 3 will explore the workflow used to achieve my goals.

light in the tunnel

Mid-summer, when the economy was sitting in the doldrums, there was a tempest in a teapot regarding the economic stimulus. One side argued that a second stimulus was called for. The other had buyers remorse, wishing we hadn’t done the first one. I argued that we had done enough and the only missing ingredient was time.

Some time has passed, and things are looking up. It appears that Bush and Paulson’s $700 billion TARP program may actually turn a profit. And it’s not just TARP; the Fannie-Freddie rescue could turn a profit too. The good news doesn’t end there.

A friend recently asked, “Is it just me, or are other people also seeing a lot more job offers lately?” Apparently it’s not just our industry that’s perking up: “A monthly gauge of U.S. online labor demand soared in August at its fastest pace in four years, indicating steadier footing for nationwide labor demand…”

A recovery in the job market typically trails a recession by 18 months. And there’s still plenty of hurt left in the housing market, but it sure seems like the worst of it is behind us.

physi-cally fit

Biking 10 miles to work is almost fun. After all, it’s downhill nearly the whole way. Riding that same 10 miles home is not as fun, because it’s nearly uphill the entire way. But it keeps me in modest shape as it’s a challenging ride. But for the last 4 rides home, I’ve had a headwind all the way home. Tonight it was 6 mph steady with gusts of double that. I’ll sleep well tonight.