New blog location

I have moved my blog to a new location. Please update your records. http://duanehubbard.homelinux.com
I will be working on transferring the posts from here to there.

Feeling geeky

I've been wanting to setup a server at home, that I could access from anywhere; too bad I have been too cheap to pay for a static IP, or a Dynamic IP service and I haven't had a domain name in a while.
Since work has been a bit slow as of late, and I've been working on learning shell scripting, I thought I would try my hand at creating a few scripts to help me out. One script to fetch the servers outside IP address and upload that to an FTP server (yes, I know security concerns), and another to pull that IP address from the FTP server and apply the updated IP address to my laptop's hosts file. I have it working on my server at work, and should have it working on my home server after I set the box up this weekend.

The only thing I'm not happy about is using an outside FTP server, bit I'll look for a better solution to that a bit later.

Anyone familiar with DynDNS.com? I happened to spot it while looking for a Dynamic IP service, good, bad, or ugly?

While I'm feeling geeky, I think I'll try writing the AI for Data (from TNG), should be done in a week or two.

Changes, we all go through them

During my last years of high school I became a vegetarian, that lasted for about five or six years*. Then for reasons that I still don't completely understand, I started to eat meat again, that was about five or six years ago*. Looking back, I don't feel that either of those changes were completely driven by me, but were also driven by external forces.

Why did I just bore you with that? I'm not really sure, but I think it was important for me to write out, or maybe I just like to bore people (I'm leaning towards option two).

Now I look at things and I think it is time for a change, one that is solely driven by me, and my conscience. In the not too distant future (not cosmically speaking), I will be changing to a vegetarian diet again, and I think I will be the better for it. Now I just need to tell Jana.

** The exact dates are a bit fuzzy to me.

One sad thing, and one funny thing

First the sad thing. Jana's father passed away tonight. Yeah, can't get much more sad than that.

Now for your laugh:

Diet and Exercise

Okay, I admit it - I'm fat. Nothing too shocking there, but it's still good to say it. I've known this for a while now. I've said that I was going to do something about it before, but never with too much conviction. Well guess what, I'm doing to do something about it (feel free to imagine the conviction in my voice). Before, when I would try to do something about it, I would setup complicated workout routines, and diet solutions - this time I'm using a different approach, nice and simple (K.I.S.S - Keep It Simple Stupid). Simple seems to work, when I started exercising I weighed 223lb, as of today I weigh 215lb (217lb after a shower), I've lost about eight pounds in two weeks.

Exercise

First thing is first, I decided to exercise. Rather than a complicated list of what exercises to do on what day, I decided to do all of my exercises everyday. Simple. I have a set of eight exercises (not counting walking) that I do every work day when I get up. The total workout time is about 35 minutes. I started this on the last day of April, I'm still going and getting stronger everyday. I push myself when I exercise, but not to the point of exhaustion, I think that is the key for me.

Diet

I started exercising first, and I started a diet second. The reason for this is because I needed to make sure that I would stick with what I was doing, rather than letting it fall away.
Many diets focus on what you can and can't eat, or how many calories you take in. I'm sure each has it's advantages, and it's disadvantages - but one thing each have in common, they are not truly simple. So I decided to go with the most simple diet plan I could find, the No-S Diet. It has three rules, and one exception, can't get any more simple than that. I started the diet on 10-May, so I'm still young on it, but it so far has been rather easy to follow. It would be easier if I didn't have someone trying to shove half of a Hostess Cup Cake in my mouth.

I'm trying out ScribeFire to post this.

Man Paperwork sucks

Last week I looked around the house, and noticed all of the important papers that were just lying around the house, on the couch, on the floor, between the cushions of the couch, in the cat's play area, on the computer table, and none of it in the filing cabinet that we had bought. I won't say that I'm a neat freak, never have been, but the amount of paperwork that was just lying around really bothered me. There have been times when we needed a certain piece of paperwork, but to find it we had to turn the house upside-down.

Okay, the house needs cleaned, and organized, that much is obvious. Now how would any good computer geek proceed in doing that? I had no idea, till I finished my tax paperwork and wanted to make a copy - I used my scanner to make a copy. Eureka! I would scan all of the paperwork into the computer, and save it that way - easy to organize, file, and search. The best part is that once I get everything scanned, most of it can then be shredded - saving me space.

I don't exactly have the most amazing equipment to be scanning. I have a Lexmark printer/flat bed scanner, a desktop running WinXP (30Gig HDD, and 128 memory), and the only software that I have is what came bundled with the Lexmark and Windows.

Before I started, I did a search for others who had done this same thing, going paperless, I found articles and blog posts. Two things seemed to be common, almost each person complained of what a huge task it was going to be, it would take all day or longer, and almost each person had a document feed scanner, not a flat bed scanner. I can't help what scanner or software I have right now, but I think I could do better than scanning a huge amount of paperwork at once, and making myself sick of the project right from the beginning - so I set up a process in how I was going to scan the paperwork, in hopes that I would not get sick of the project so quickly.

The process
The process that I setup is rather simple, and is designed to be used over a long period of time.
First thing is first, scan the paperwork that managed to make it into the filing cabinet, get that out of the way first. I moved all of the paperwork in the filing cabinet to the front, then as it was scanned, it was refiled. Next, I will gather all of the loose paperwork in the house into one spot, and will sort it into three piles (Recycle, Shred, Scan).
Recycle:
Anything that is not of a sensitive nature, and doesn't need to be kept will be placed into the recycling bin right away, there goes a quarter of the stack.
Shred:
Anything that is of a sensitive nature, but doesn't need to be kept, will be put in a box of stuff that needs to be shredded. I will explain what I do with that stuff later. There goes about half of the remaining pile.
Scan:
This is everything else, the stuff that needs to be kept, if it is of a sensitive nature or not. This gets placed into a pile near the scanner.

I have no incentive to complete this project quickly, but I do want to see some progress as I go. So I decided to make sure that I scanned at least five pages each work day, along with anything new that comes in.
As each page is scanned I decide if I should put it in the shred box, filing cabinet, or directly into the recycle bin. I spend about 10 - 15 minutes scanning pages (depending on if the pages are front and back, or just front, black and white, or color) each day. I know that seems like a long time for only a few pages a day, but I have to set and reset each page, and the software is not exactly automated. As each page is scanned, I will take a collection of pages from the shred box, and shred them - I get as many done as I can while I'm scanning.
Each scanned document is saved as a PDF file.

The largest problem that I'm having is deciding where to backup the files once I'm done. I'm thinking that Amazon's S3 service could be good for this, but I don't have internet access at home. I have a portable drive, but that has the difficulty of not being stored off site. Right now I'm thinking that I will have to do a combination of the two, keep a copy on the portable drive, and upload a copy to the internet when I'm at work.

I still haven't perfected my process yet, so if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to share.