Chris Dwan

Tag: geek

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • MRI Images

    –UPDATE–

    Re-posted since the pictures ought to stay put now.

    –/UPDATE–

    I got the raw data from my knee MRI on a CD. They gave me the full DICOM data, which is the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard. The vast majority of medical imaging devices produce DICOM formatted files … which means that, basically, there’s no need for the radiologist interpreting the results to be physically close to the machine. Now, there are still advantages to physically seeing, touching, and smelling the patient – but in terms of an upgrade from “ink on plastic,” it’s pretty awesome.

    OSIRIX is a piece of software (for apple) that reads and displays DICOM data. Until yesterday, I had not realized quite how powerful this stuff is:

    this is about to get geeky, contain some big images, and have pictures of slices of my thigh

  • Medical geekitude

    That last post was heavy, this is less so:

    My MRI was totally relaxing. They gave me a selection of CDs to listen to for the half hour I was in the tube. I picked coldplay.

    There were signs up all over the hospital indicating that patients own their own medical information, and that we could request a CD with our imaging results. So I did … and it took them about three minutes to burn a CD for me. I got home, opened the envelope, and I have two CDs … one with x-rays from yesterday .. and the other with MRI data from today.

    Here’s the best part: I got the raw DICOM data … which is the standard by which medical imaging types toss around full resolution medical data. I downloaded OSIRIX, which is a free and open source DICOM viewer … and now I’m busily scaling intensities up and down on these 6.5MB images of my knees.

    Of course, it was a total buzzkill when I opened up the “metadata” portion of the files and found my social security number in there. Bummer! Of course, they do have a “confidential” sticker on the envelope … I guess that’s par for the course.

    Now, if only I knew what any of this crap meant!

  • Chair

    I need a new office chair. My current one is old and busted. What do you people sit on while you work your long hours in front of a keyboard?

    * Does your back hurt?
    * Do your shoulders hurt?
    * Does your butt get all sweaty and/or go to sleep?

  • No privacy on the web.

    Remember folks: There is no such thing as privacy on the internet.

  • Sysadmin gig in Basel

    Email me if:

    (a) you’re an amazing network / sysadmin, able to set up a Force10 network and a Linux environment for a major research shop in about 2 months.

    (b) you’re available to go to Basel Switzerland for about 2 months, oh, now-ish.

  • Go team!

    Our newfound ability to gather web statistics on the corporate page has outed this as my blog to my employers. I got an “Is this you?” note from one of the owners. Well, that and the picture of myself that I posted there. That can’t have helped.

    After the shock wore off, I found myself somewhat dismayed that we beat spam by only two links. Come on people!

    - http://fdmts.livejournal.com 8 8
    - http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ 8 8
    - http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/exhibit_floorplan.asp 6 6
    - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Grid_Engine 6 6
    - http://www.linkedin.com/jobs 6 6
    - http://tvsetmp3.com 6 6
    - http://guide.apple.com/action.lasso 5 5
    - http://biojava.org/wiki/Main_Page 5 5
    - http://www.worldwidemoviesonline.info 4 4
    - http://www.apple.com/server/resources/ 4 4

  • Rock Band

    I have just discovered the game “Rock Band.” It is the most stunningly awesome computer game ever, and I will own it tomorrow.

    That is all.