hmatt's blog

Yeah! I spent all day scanning my documents.. a task that would have normally been EXTREMELY tedious with my flatbed scanner. I wish I would have spent the cash for this ScanSnap S510M long ago! I scanned over 1000 documents!!

I’m using YEP to organize them with various tags.
I’m using the bundled FineReader to do text recognition on most of them

Amazing. They currently only take up 810MB, but I figure it will triple after they’ve been re-written with text under them.

Awesome. It is so nice having access to these files, but not having to deal with the actual paper items themselves.

Next up, buying a shredder for all my old bank receipts and other old sensitive materials.. I’m going to buy a REAL shredder too.. the ones that rip the paper into bits. I’ve always thought those were better than the ones that turn them into strips instead.

This book was read at a Bookpals event I went to back in college. I’ve been trying to remember the name for a long time. I just did another websearch and there it was!

Oh man, this book is awesome. It has to do with this fellow, Mr. Hatch, who lives a lonely life until one day he gets a box of chocolates. His attitude is changed and then his life is changed.

I like this story because sometimes life can seem very lonely.. but all it really takes is to put out a little effort and you can meet all the new friends around you.

.. but you don’t have to take my word for it.

Do-dun-dunn

The day began with me working on my website. I was using iWeb to organize my ideas on what it could look like. Robin had told me that she got out of work at 6 and we were going to meet up then. Then around noon she called me. Apparently some water line had burst and she was able to leave work early.

We met up around 2 and walked around Koreatown together. We explored a couple buildings and went into the Wilshire Christian Church. There was a man there who gave us some literature on the history of the cathedral and we sat there in amazement. We also walked over to a wall whereupon a variety of photos was on display. They were against the wall like when you browse through posters, how they are attached to frames that swing back and forth.

Next we ended up at the Wilshire center. Apparently every friday they have a farmers market! We sampled the variety of oranges and apples. So delicious! We bought a few fruits and began walking back. I mentioned how the first time I’d been in that area was when I and a bunch of monkeybutler people saw speed racer. Her eyebrows raised- “You saw speedracer there? I was there!”

I only recall vaguely that skyler had introduced us to a friend. That friend was her. It seems funny to me.. how you meet people and then remeet people.

Back at my place we drank tea and ate our fruit. Robin is a thoroughly interesting person to talk to. She has visited a variety of places and she is so full of life. She works at a mission and loves to serve. What a spectacular heart she has. = )

I love meeting people like her.

This is where the market is every friday.

I finally got to see a silent film in a theatre! It was so magical!

I decided to make friends with this older couple that was seated next to us. The room was mostly white-hairs. The lady commented that she didn’t expect to see younger people. The man made some comment that when the movies came out everyone was our age. It was a pretty fun exchange.

Robin and I took in the theatre- The Orpheum had been recently restored. It has a HUGE ceiling and extravagant decor along the walls. The room was filled with excitement. A man came out and announced the special guest, the grand-daughter of Harold Lloyd. She talked about how KID BROTHER was always his favorite film. Then the organist from Bakersfield was introduced.

He began to play and the crowd began clapping. Organists are so lively! Their feet are moving around and hands are flying everywhere. The organ slowly lowered as the movie began to flicker. The title page appeared and the audience clapped again.

It was such a spectacular sight. It was everything I’ve been hoping for when watching a silent movie. There was LOTS of laughter and you got so involved!

The first film was only about 20 minutes. “One Week” with Buster Keaton. It was a cute little film where he and his wife buy a house and it is a put together kit. I don’t know how those guys did that slapstick and stunts without getting killed.

It was great to share the experience with someone too. Robin had such a huge smile on her face which made me enjoy the experience even more. I wish more of my friends were into old films. I have always enjoyed thinking about how it all looked as they filmed it back then. Some are long, but always so interesting! At least to me.

The second film, KID BROTHER, was longer than I thought, but all in a good way. The plot was so interesting and there were so many great gags throughout. Also the inventive ways he trapped or tricked the bad guys was hilarious! Also, there was a monkey wearing shoes and I nearly fell out of my chair.. You’d have to see it.

Oh man, what a great way to end an evening.

The original organ!

PROS
– being around people who are up on tech news.
– I get paid to be trained on software and time to study up on new stuff
– Plus there are people like Nathaniel there. He is one of those people I can talk to about productivity/organizing files. We are both passionate about workflow & ease of use of certain programs and exploring new options to use tech to make our lives easier.

CONS
– whenever I’m at parties people always ask me about mac stuff. I don’t mind it most of the time because they are my friends and I want to help them out. However, it limits the types of conversations I have with people. It always leads back to tech and they are either for or against apple. ‘For apple’ and we align or I have to explain why probably the developers did what they did. Against apple and I have to defend the entire time. … Fortunately I’m not an apple genius so I don’t have all the super tech knowledge why things stop working so I can deflect those questions.
– I noticed earlier this year I had stopped trying to research computer stuff on my own and I’d wait to do it while at work instead… it kind of took the fun out of it. I was getting paid, but the passion went out of looking at those forums and reading about tips and tricks. That happens to every profession though. I can imagine acting being like that.
– most important CON is that I am too busy full-time to pursue acting. WHAT! Crazy talk right!? But I’m always so exhausted from thinking at work and especially having to wake up early to ride the metro. Sure I could try to transfer to another store.. but I need to address my other passions in life aside from tech. Even then there is no way I can remain full time and try to get auditions.

I do like working there, but man.. you know how some days at work get. Plus I’ve been down because I feel so stuck. I want to make this year different- major positive change.

I still am having a bit of trouble trying to wrap my head around the difference between tags and categories. I guess categories like folders I suppose. Hmm, I used to remember this.

It’s like that last analogy- a t-shirt could be categorized as a top or an undergarment. Hmm.

Anyway, I was thinking about how I process information and I came up with some typical types of things I’m writing about. Those will be categories for now (although they are probably supposed to be tags… whatever).

Pros and Cons will be me trying to suss stuff out. And they are all ways of me organizing information in my head so they’ll go under organizing too..

yeah.

Ah, the computer age has brought us lots of great information. Trying to sift through this information can be challenging though. I’ve often thought about what are the best ways to keep digitally organized.

I imaging the following analogy:

Putting something in a folder is like folding and putting your clothes away in a dresser. It is great when it gets done, but more often than not.. you get lazy and they end up on the floor (or your desktop or junk drawer folder).

Tagging is like taking clothing to the dry cleaners. A little tag is attached to it and you write what it is and stuff so it can be found later. Then it goes wherever. To get it back you have to explain what the item is and what was on the tag so the dry cleaning guy can find it among the sea of clothing.

It sounds like tagging is a lot easier right? But, what if you are someplace where there isn’t dry cleaning.. or the dry cleaner guy doesn’t understand what you are trying to find?

This is how I see information problems occur as I use more than one computer device. On my computer I can type whatever I remembered about the item into spotlight and it finds it right away. On my iPhone I can’t carry everything so I have to figure out a way to have some information with me and keep track of what is back at home. This is where it gets complicated.

My website is facing the same issues. How can I attach the right information to each article of clothing (or post) so that I or anyone else can easily find alike items.

My blog is like an ongoing thought process, with limited organization.. just tagging it with some info so I can hopefully can retrieve it later. This versus keeping a webpage-like folder structure. This page belongs to this group which is like this group. Webpages are harder to maintain because they take time to craft because they are all about presentation. A webpage is kind of like putting those clothes I mentioned earlier in a fancy dressing room and then inside a handcrafted dressing cabinet.

It looks pretty, you have to give a tour of your house and show them the dresser and then the clothing piece.

Of course.. if you wanted to quickly add another sock or straigten up the clothing differently you’d have to go inside the proper room, move the other clothes out of the way and kind of sift through the clothing until it looks right again. Then if you wanted any type of record of you going in and straightening up, you’d have to manually write down when you were there, that you added some new socks and moved the shirts and sweaters together. Then you’d have to post that list back out in the entry of the house so your guests can see that there is now a new pair of socks you just put in.

With tagging though, you have to remember what you called all those other objects that were alike. There’s no set sock drawer per say. On the computer Spotlight can read inside of documents.. but there’s no iPhone app that works the same way (at least not one that works like it does with Finder)

I’ve mentioned this issue before & I’m probably taking the analogy too far.. but hopefully it illustrates the problem I see when trying to maintain my website or computer files. I want to make it easy to navigate and to preserve those ideas so I can come back to them later.

Right now I’m in the process of building a new house (hmatt.com 3.0, 2.0 was kind of shoddy when I built it) and trying to put some nice dresser furniture in the place (static pages) but still have the freedom to easily update it from wherever I am via wordpress (blog).

Part of the problem too is that I can kind of picture how this house could be built.. but I’m not a skilled architect, carpenter, electrician or painter. Hmm, there are other good analogies in there.

I spent a lot of my youth trying to learn about how to utilize the tools that were available at the time to build the house.. er, webpage. There was a lot of cross posting information in different places, and I learned about hand coding my website versus WYSIWYG editors (which were terrible then, or expensive).

A new iWeb is coming out later this month that finally allows one easily to upload via ftp. I know the code can still be a little bloated, but the ease of use is so.. magical (compared to what there used to be).

With regards to organizing on the computer I’ve been using a hybrid of folders and relying on search and tags. So I thought I could post a webpage that incorporates all these ways to organize.. pages with sections (like folders) a search box (like spotlight) and tags or categories to group alike things.

Great right? I hope I can come up with a simple, uncluttered way to give newcomers a tour of my website. I have a tendency though to go on and on.. as you can see.

*whew*

What a flurry of activity I’ve been doing! My goal for this month is to reboot hmatt.com (you know get it up to date and easier to go through). This all connects with me getting more organized in life and thoughts.

Just a warning for those following me on facebook.. I’m going to be publishing several posts in the next hour that I’ve been typing up all day.

So much for sleeping in.

At 7:30 am..

someone

is spastically using

a

leafblower.

This is my strongest pet peeve right now.

*Shakes fist into air*

~Part A~
Goals/Todos::
Last night I came home from improv and I thought about what I’d been doing right before I went to practice..

I had created a form, or rather a series of forms, a database.. to list all the things I want to do.

The way I see it there are several main variants of these goals/tasks/todos:

1) 2009 Goals
– the have dates and mini goals set.

2) My Goals – loosely defined things that I’ve defined as a way for me to get where I want in life. This could be broad topics or pet peeves that I notice about myself, why I’m doing them & how I can overcome those things.

3) Tasks – all those little actionable things that I can get done toward a larger project

4) Fun things to do list
– specific places to go or just fun activities that would be cool to do. A lot of times I’ll be with a group and nobody has any good ideas at the time.. when SO much could be done!

I wanted an easy way to share these databases in case it was interesting to others. Currenty I’m working on getting out the kinks.. there are lots of ways to deal with databases.

So anyway, I thought it would be neat to share these csv databases and offer them up in a way that wold make sense.. like a php thing that could convert csv to html pages. And there was.. and I slightly customized it.

Now I’ll just have to figure out how to make my website an enjoyable place.

~Part B~
Related::

My living space looks terrible. I need to really toss a lot of old junk and then really toss some stuff next time I’m at my parent’s place. There are so many things that I have that I need to sell or just trash that are worth very little to me.

I haven’t found an affordable scanning service. (I am totally confident that character recognition will just get better in the coming years).

I just watched a trailer for a movie called My Mother’s Garden http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3654962565270561705

It deals with this lady who is attached to just junk… That totally hits home. My place is looking like that. I don’t have like, broken things all over the floor yet, but I do have a lot of papers that are NOT needed. Even if I did scan them, there is no way I’d be able to wade through it all.. nor do I need to for most things. I don’t want to have all this garbage that holds me back.. *sigh*

A lot of the major stuff I want to keep are all those old ideas I’ve had.. like my thought processes I’ve written down and such. I want to keep a record of what’s been going on.. but how useful is that to me later?.. I don’t know yet.

My grandpa keeps a daily journal and has since his youth. It is interesting, but the paper takes up lots of space in the basement.

~Part C~
Website design.

Ah, looking at html code brings me back.. to when I had time to just sit and read about how to do all that stuff.

Now I’ve got too much going on. As a result my website has broken links, is super outdated and needs to be changed. It is hard to decide on just one way of displaying information. Plus I don’t have the right programs or the know how to pull it all off. So far I have lots of drawings about how I want my site to look. Perhaps I should just start scanning pages in and pretending that it is nice html code. Weak, but at least I’d get my ideas across.. = /