Chris Dwan

Author: cdwan

  • Travels

    Tomorrow morning, I’m off to College Station Texas. Gonna re-build a compute cluster for the nice folks there. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to work in with the Judo club at the same time.

    Friday, I return, and Saturday I get a brief day at home. Perhaps – perhaps, I say, I’ll do laundry.

    Sunday I fly to Richmond and spend a day with my dad. Then it’s off to Hampton Roads, VA for some more cluster fun. While there, I hope to drop back in with Hybrid Academy.

    Looking up judo clubs and gyms on the road is so very much healthier than looking up microbreweries. Oddly enough, it’s also the easiest way I’ve ever found to make friends.

  • Level up

    I tried something new at the gym today: There’s a guy who teaches karate and does (light) open sparring both standing and on the ground on Sundays. He’s around 220 pounds of solid muscle, has perhaps 2 inches of height on me, and is wicked fast. I worked in, with some nervousness. Stand-up sparring is hard work, and I’ve never grappled without a gi before. Very different, very humbling, and yet one more thing that I don’t know.

    The phrase that kept going through my mind was: C’mon, it’ll be fun. You’ll level.

  • Art

    technolope was part of another art showing last night. Good times were had all around as the party rolled from gallery to bar and onward.

    Pictures…

  • Knees

    Met with the orthopedic surgeon yesterday and agreed that he’s going to go in and repair or trim the medial meniscus in my left knee. I’m walking around pretty well these days – so there’s some debate on whether cutting on me is justified. However, I live in fear of my knee freaking out. Mornings are solid, but by the evening it’s usually pretty sore. I certainly wouldn’t go running, skiing, or play judo at anything close to full force. I’m 33 years old. I intend to be athletic for 20+ more years. At this point if I can repair my “bum knee” and get back to enjoying my workouts … I intend to.

    This is a routine outpatient surgery that takes about 30 minutes There are three possibilities with this surgery, and we won’t know which it is until he gets in there:

    (1) The meniscus is screwed up in such a way that all he can do is trim off the ragged bits that are flopping around and getting stuck in my knee joint. In that case he trims it up nice and neat. I’ll be in a knee brace for two weeks, have two more weeks of limited mobility, and then I’ll be back at full strength. Full strength will be slightly reduced because of the removed bits … and I’ll have to be careful to protect the knee over time to prevent arthritis.

    (2) The meniscus is “cleanly” torn, in such a way that he can repair it. This is a better situation than (1), because it has a decent chance of healing up completely. However, in order to allow the complete healing, I would be in a brace for 1 to 2 months, and out of action for an extra two months after that.

    So, if it’s the “good” possibility, my recovery will be about fourfold longer … but it’ll be a better repair.

    Oh yeah: I mentioned that there’s a third possibility. That’s because it’s surgery, and after watching redmeds experience last year … I no longer have much faith in even the most ordinary and routine of procedures. The “consent” form includes infection, loss of limb, and so on. There’s a reason they put that crap on there.

    C’mon body – work with me here. We’re in this together.

  • Paper reduction

    An update on my paper reduction project: This is has been difficult but worthwhile. It is, of course, doomed to failure in a number of ways that should have been apparent at first.

    A simple first step was to actually implement my existing document destruction policies. Anything for which statements are available online, I keep the most recent mail they sent me. This provides a link into their system and a reminder of my account number if the interweb goes away. Turns out that while I talk tough about this, I hadn’t actually *done* it for the lower three drawers of the filing cabinet. Three bags of shred later, I was much happier.

    Then I went through the retained documents and asked “is there any reason that I will ever need this.” Printouts of real estate law for Minnesota, for example, got the axe. Also removed were warrantee documents for appliances that stayed in MN when we sold that house. Et., cetera. I had a disturbing number of what might be called “I’ll get the bastards!” folders. Four or five times I realized that the only reason I was keeping a bunch of stuff was – seemingly – so I would get pissed off again. Examples include the financial advisor who told us to rack up some credit card debt, and the records from the moving company who damaged our stuff in the move to Rhode Island. I mean seriously: get OVER it.

    I went after the books on my office shelf and got it down to the references that I actually consult. That’s PERL and Mac OS X Programming. That gave me a spare foot of shelf on which to put knicknacks. I loves me my knicknacks.

    I shredded any receipt or travel document that has already been reimbursed / billed out by work. In the future, those are getting scanned and destroyed immediately.

    Now it gets difficult: I *like* getting paper magazines and reading them on the train. I think that my current policy of “one issue of any given magazine at a time” is sufficient. As pointed out by the Kindle doesn’t carry all the magazines I like to read.

    I think that a reasonable next step is to actually digitize the critical records. It’s worth noting that I have thought this was a decent idea for several years, but never got around to it. Passport, birth certificate, and so on. I might also go ahead and scan the lease on the apartment – as well as the insurance certificates. Those seem like things that would be useful to have electronically. Then an encrypted network backup could take on at least some of the job of a safe deposit box.

  • More generally, I wish to re-open the ‘northern passages’ between my sinuses and the outside world. Suggestions?

  • Paperless – further thoughts

    Continuing to think about going entirely paperless. On reflection, it’s clearly one of those goals that you never really totally achieve. Instead, you look up from time to time and say “how can I do better at this goal.” This means that getting to 95% is “good” rather than “failure.”

    The first really clear observation is that if this were to work, then my total time scanning and filing must be less than my total time standing up, walking to the filing cabinet, and putting stuff in a folder. Given full text searchability, and so on, I’m willing to accept a slight increase in the time to file a document, but this can’t be a complex or time consuming task.

    Right now, I use a combined printer / scanner shared out over a wireless access point. Said access point shares only the printing capabilities of the device. The scanning part of the puzzle is still very simple to access. The printer / scanner has a USB slot on the front. Totally standalone, you can scan a document and save it as a PDF on a USB thumb stick. Then, moving the thumb stick to the computer, I can copy it to whatever folder I want. I think that could get irritating after a while, because it’s so obviously not the “right” way to deal with things. I mean, there is *already* a connection between the scanner and the printer. I shouldn’t need to move a dingus back and forth.

    The second observation is that the major part of the solution is not actually the scanning. It’s the discipline to get rid of things that I don’t need to keep. Just changing from a default of “someone sent me something, I need to keep it,” over to “I probably don’t need to keep this,” would greatly reduce my ongoing document load.

    Combining those two gets the scanning load down to a reasonable level.

    The third observation is that this is an ongoing thing. It has to be that my default reaction to getting a stack of paper is “recycle most of it, shred some of it, and scan the important bits.” I think I can manage that going forward, but I need to fight the urge to go back through all my old records digitizing. That’s just an excuse to waste time.

  • Paperless

    One of the blogs I follow with great interest is Geekdoctor. He’s the CIO of Harvard Medical School, among other things. Besides being smart, connected, and talkative … he appears to live a very purposeful life. He implements his organizational and ethical decisions in a way that I admire.

    A few recent highlights include:
    * My economic indicators
    * The broken window effect
    * A Privacy Framework for personal health.

    Here’s one that I’ve been pondering: He sets a goal of having “zero paper” in his office. This isn’t so much an environmental thing, as an organizational thing. By contrast, I start with the assumption that there will always be a need to keep paper records … but I try to minimize them. What if, instead, I viewed every piece of paper that I have to stash in the monstrous filing cabinet in my office as a failure of my own cleverness?

    Could I pull this off?

    I’ve been going in this direction anyway. I used to keep everything. Banker’s boxes of credit card statements from 1996. Seriously. I first pared that down to “I only keep the most recent 12 months.” Now I’m down to “I keep the most recent piece of paper with my account info on it.

    First off, many of the businesses that I use have gone “paperless.” I already told my bank that I don’t want them mailing me statements. Ditto with the credit cards … though they insist on dangling “checks” in front of me about twice a month. Simply using all of those resources is a help.

    What if I took the next step and simply scanned every remaining bill as it came in? I’ve got a decent scanner. All I need is a structure for naming the files, and I would remove the need to save a lot of stuff.

    What of books? I keep books mostly for sentimental reasons … because I like the way they feel in my hands.

    Thoughts? I’m sure there are edge cases (my passport and birth certificate, for example – though I should probably scan those anyway) … but in general – could I go paperless?

  • Travel

    Dear travel industry:

    If I go to Kayak.com and ask to get from “any airport near Boston, including Manchester and Providence” to “any airport near College Station, TX, including Houston and Austin”, during any three day window in a particular week, I really expect to have at least one nonstop option. Of all the things that can screw up your travel plans, connecting flights are the worst. One more chance for *either* plane to screw up the timing, or *any* ground crew to lose luggage. Plus, that hour in the airport is really three wasted hours landing, debarking, embarking, and taking off again.

    The original query (BOS -> College Station, this day through that day) was laughable. I had two 17+ hour trips, each of which had multiple stops. They offered to get me from here at noon, to there at 10am the next morning.

    Seriously? New England doesn’t go directly to Texas?

    –UPDATE–

    Correction – the major airlines do not. Jetblue and Southwest both provide options.

  • Seriously?

    Jesus is Savior is pretty seriously full of broken ideas as well as entirely functional, if brain-damaged, web design

    However, they do have some pretty funny images: