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.

Dasher part 2

Now back to Dasher. This is too fun not to play with! Okay now onto some work with this program.
Yesterday I started using this program just as a thing to play around on, now I'm finding that I almost prefer to use it, when I compare it to a regular keyboard. While I can't get the words out as quickly I do like it for the following reasons:
1) It feeds my natural geek.
2) I seem to make fewer spelling mistake than when I use a normal keyboard (because I can see each possible word in front of me and the most probable spellings are the largest things on the screen, rather than having to guess how it needs to be spelled)
3) It's fun to feel like you are driving a word.
4) I can use while holding the cat in my lap.
Time for me to explain a bit about how the program works. Imagine a racing game where you know approximately where the next turn was going to be, but that the track was all was changing - now imagine that the track has an infinite number of possible routs for you to follow, but only one will get you to where you want to go. With me so far? I didn't think so , it is rather difficult to explain - though if you try it everything I just wrote will make perfect sense. Here try it: http://www.dasher.org.uk/TryJavaDasherNow.html Iknow that it is a bit small but it should give you some idea of how Dasher works.
I'm sure you are asking yourself how anything like that could ever be useful to anyone, but just imagine that you broke your arm, this would provide a quick way for you to be able to quickly type out long documents with very little practice, now imagine that you had a more debilitarting problem this would be an absolute lifesaver.
This could almost be the first step towards that 3D computer environment that sci-fi writters like to write about, a guy can dream.
Yes I only used my mouse and Dasher to write this post.

Dasher - not the reindeer

Well, I'm trying out a program called Dasher http://www.dasher.org.uk , I even had a nice message all "typed” out about what exactly Dasher is and my experience with it so far - but the program crashed when I was almost done, needles to say I am a bit annoyed. I will try to write it out again tomorrow. For now I'm off to bed.

Dvorak

Okay, here is the deal, I prefer to type in the Dvorak keyboard layout - it's just easier and quicker (once you get used to it). A couple problems with this though:
1) Work computers are not normally setup to use this layout - though you can normally change that if you are the only one using the computer.
2) In Linux (the version that I use), it is difficult to tell what layout you are using - if you are also using the US QWERTY layout - the few times I do. I'm hoping the ever helpful Linux community can help with this one.
3) In Windows if you start out with the US QWERTY layout then you have to change each separate program use dvorak (it doesn't change on the whole system).
Despite these few problems, I still prefer to use Dvorak, it even came in handy when I hurt one of my arms and had to type with one hand (it has layouts for people who have the use of one hand versus two. Plus it's fun to say.

Happy one month

Well, It's a bit late, but happy one month of blogging to this blog.
Not much going on in life right now. I finally got into the Yahoo Mail Beta (only been trying since I first heard about it) - of course anyone can get into now that it's a public beta. It's a good interface, runs well. I like it much better then the new Live Mail (Hotmail). The Yahoo interface is cleaner, easier to read, and much easier to use - plus half the screen isn't taken up with an ad (though I fixed that with the use of Adblock). As for which webmail I prefer to use, despite all the nice enhancements that have been made to Yahoo and Hotmail, I'm still sticking with my Gmail account. Gmail doesn't have as fancy of an interface (which is important to some people), but it is faster then either of the other two, I can use POP and SMTP access with it, plus I prefer the way it organizes the emails.

Now onto the question of the day, this one is borough to you by all the restaurants that Jana and I go to after normal dinning hours. Really this is a simple question, but one that I just can't answer. First a little background on this. Whenever Jana and I go to get something to eat after normal business hours (from about 10pm to 4:30am), if we go to a restaurant that has both smoking and nonsmoking sections, then Jana and I are usally the only ones in the nonsmoking section, while there can be two or three tables of people in the smoking. Why is that? If I recall correctly, about 75% of the US population does not smoke, but I seem to run into more smokers then nonsmokers, especially at night. Anyone have any ideas why?

Online Music Services

Well, I'm going to rant here for a minute - so if you don't want to read that, then please don't read on. You have been warned.

Okay, today I have one simple thing that I want to do - I haven't wanted to do this in a while - since before I changed to an all Linux system. I wanted to download one song - I even wanted to pay for it. Simple, right? Nope, not when you use Linux apparently. I don't blame Linux on any of this, I blame the places that sell the music.
Previously I used iTunes on Windows, they don't make a Linux version (I searched high and low for a version that would work with Linux). Then I thought, well Wal-Mart sells music, and it doesn't require any large program to sell it, they don't support Linux either, basically only WinXP (not even Mac).
Okay, so I don't find any programs that will download music nativity on a Linux machine - so I do what any simisane computer geek would do - I hop onto the forums. Oddly enough, I came up blank, I saw where someone asked about this same thing - about a year ago, but there was no solution posted. I did find ways of getting iTunes for Windows to work under Linux - but it doesn't work that well apparently - not worth my time to try that...
I really don't want to spend $14.00+ on a CD, just for one song - even if I would like the other 10 songs - it's still cheaper to download them all.
What BS.

Long sleep, short sleep

20 guesses what this post is about...If any of your 20 guesses involved sleep, then you would be right - more on that later.
Today went pretty well, didn't do much - it's nice for a change. Jana made sloppy Joes for us, they were good. Other then that, I played on the computer, and worked on another one.
Well, Jana and I are planning on our diet to start Friday - after I get paid so that we can afford real food. This is going to be a joy. As I think I said before, I will need to make a checklist - information sheet - I need that kind structure to make sure it works for me - I think Jana might too.
This week has been kind of rough on me, the previous week I worked the overnight shift, then this week I went back to working the morning shift - well, it's not an easy change. So the first part of this week (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday), I didn't sleep well - you know, can't fall asleep due to being used to the overnight shift, keep getting interrupted with the bloody phone when you do fall asleep, etc. Well I had yesterday off, and I literally slept 14 hours - so naturally I could not fall asleep all night. I slept about 30 minutes so far - and I have to be to work in 1.5 hours. Ugh.
On the positive side, it gave me the time to finish fixing the computer that I was working on. I must say one very simple thing - I have Windows, what kind of OS gives people access to a root account first thing, and doesn't ask them to make another more limited account? I also must talk about Windows Defender talk about a useless program. I installed Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware, both of which were detecting problems long after Windows Defender said everything was perfectly fine.