First thing tomorrow morning I am going to: Sign up to stop credit card offers, reduce my junk mail, and opt-out of catalogs.

I think that will be a good start. At least it will eliminate some clutter and save some trees. I still haven’t decided if I am going to eliminate mail further through a paid service - I’ve heard good things about Earth Class Mail.

I’m still mulling over a few techniques I’ve found to handle my existing documents.

Well there is no “Home and Business” edition of Quicken online, and the online version of QuickBooks only works with Internet Explorer. WTF was Intuit thinking? Microsoft was even worse - they don’t offer an online version of Money at all.

After some research I found there was… nothing. Unbelievable. Every day I read about stupid websites and failing online startups and I find it hard to believe no one has made an decent online accounting package.

I think it’s about time someone got on that.

Yes, my physical world lacks organization. But my electronic world is immaculate. You want a copy of that email about that thing we saw at that place some time back? No problem, I’ll have it to you in ten seconds. You want a copy of my W2 from 2006? Too freakin’ bad.

So I’m going paperless. I just made this decision about five minutes ago as I pulled an old document out from under a rusty hammer in the closet we keep all our tools in. How did it get there any way?

Any way. Aside from a computer, a scanner, and a good backup system I’m not sure what’s involved in becoming completely paperless. Though I have a good backup system at home (a 1TB Buffalo Network Drive) it may be time to get off-site backups. In addition to that, I have to consider searchability of the documents I store - I hope OCR technology has improved a lot since I last used it.

I still haven’t found everything I need to file my taxes, but I ‘m close. I’m just a few calls/faxes away.

Currently the inventors of this technology are looking to give the power of speech to the vocally disabled. However the possibilities for us all are endless… from a new way to hold a private conversation to changing the channel on your TV without lifting a finger. Imagine being able to tap your thoughts into the internet for instant research - that would be useful for way more than trivia night at Mellow Mushroom.

I am blown away.

What followed was a very happy mother and some fascinating information about India and the somewhat controversial celebration of Valentines Day there.

Now that I’ve read through the research that was done for my mother’s gift, I thought I’d share some of the tidbits I found most interesting:

• About 10 years ago, Valentines Day was dubbed as “another decadent influence of the west” and written-off by most. However, today Valentines Day is widely recognized and celebrated.
• A big influence on the success of Valentines Day in India was the globalization-fueled economic boom which brought with it foreign television channels that often aired Valentines Day specials.
• Weeks before Valentine’s Day, “Street Romeos” appear everywhere, reenacting Bollywood style boy-meets-girl stories.
• Protests against Valentine’s Day customs have included stealing Valentine’s Day greeting cards from and ceremonially burning them as well as threats to beat the faces and shave the heads of those who participate.

I’ve never had these troubles people keep talking about. I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 100 messages in my inbox, though the number of messages generally hovers around 5 - 10. How do people accumulate thousands of messages in their inbox, many of which they never even open? Probably the same way I accumulate mountains of clutter on my desk: No one will clean up after me.

Though I’m terrible at keeping my desk nice-and-neat my email tends to be a pinnacle of organization, mostly because I don’t organize it myself. No, I’m too lazy for that. My computer does it for me. Always has. With that in mind, I present my simple little system for effective email organization…

Step 1: Eliminate

If you get newsletters, unsubscribe. If you get spam, get a spam blocker. If your crazy aunt keeps forwarding you meme emails, create a rule to automatically delete them or move them to a “low priority” folder (I also call this the “some day” folder). Links to instructions on setting up rules are in step three.

Step 2: Replace

What about those newsletters you actually want to read? Unsubscribe to the email, then subscribe to the RSS feed. No RSS feed? Use Gmail to get it via RSS anyway.

Step 3: Organize… automatically.

Create folders or labels. Setup rules to organize, flag, forward, etc. Gmail is my favorite way to read email (I even get my Art of Progress email via GMail) because you can label emails without moving them from the inbox. However, most email clients will indicate unread items in folders other than your inbox.

It’s important not to go too crazy with organization. Remember that, unlike paper filing systems, you can easily search for items. For example, instead of creating ten different folders for your various insurance companies, create one called “Insurance” and use your email program’s searching, sorting, and grouping features to find the message you’re looking for.

I’ve taken this concept a little further: A few months ago I eliminated my Insurance, Utilities, and other folders to combine them into one “Personal Accounts” folder (I also have a “Business Accounts” folder). It’s easy enough to find messages in this folder without separate categories and if it ever gets too cumbersome, it only takes a minute to change.

Don’t know how to create a rule? The internet is your friend. Here are instructions for some of the most popular email clients:

• Microsoft Outlook
• IBM Lotus Notes
• Google GMail

Tips

You don’t have to perform these steps sequentially and it’s probably a waste of time to do them all at once (unless you’ve got nothing better to do). Instead, perform them as they come up. In other words: Don’t spend time hunting down each newsletter you subscribe to, just wait for them to come to you and then unsubscribe. Don’t go hunting through decade-old emails for filing, just set up folders and rules as you read new messages (just be sure to apply those rules to previously received messages). But DO it. When a message comes in that needs a rule, set it up immediately.

Still overloaded? Try an auto-responder.

If the volume of email you receive is truly immense, setup an auto-responder to let people in on the rules you have setup and make them write emails in such a way that it is automatically organized and prioritized for you. Further, encourage them to make their emails useful and refer them to information that is already available elsewhere. Here’s an example:

Hi!

Thank you for your email. Due to high volume, I probably am unable to respond to your message right away. If this is an emergency, please call (555) 555-5555. To help me respond faster in the future, please include the full project name (for example: ‘jamestharpe.com’ not just ‘your website’) so that your message will be automatically categorized and therefore be easier to find and respond to. If you are inquiring about a project status, please visit http://projectsite/projectname/ for the most recent information. If this is a technical issue, please review the FAQs available at http://projectsite/faq_list/.

Regards,
-James

You can use the auto-responder any time it’s needed, which may be for your own personal e-mail free Friday or just while you’re out of the office. Unless you’re receiving more than a thousand messages daily, you probably won’t need to enable the auto-responder every day.

As a technical guru, the subject of automated organization is especially interesting to me. If you implement some or all of the above advice, I’d love to hear about your results.

There’s no reason you should be prevented you from getting your favorite email newsletters via RSS, thanks to this clever-yet-simple GMail hack I’ve discovered. Here it is, step by step:

1. Create a new GMail account. For example: thefavoritenewslettersofjames@gmail.com.
2. Unsubscribe from all of your newsletters.
3. Re-subscribe using your new GMail account. Feel free to take this time to eliminate the ones you no longer read.
4. Subscribe to your new GMail account’s RSS feed.

Taadaa!

When I first tried this trick, I had some issues with security - my RSS reader doesn’t prompt me for my password. To get around that, point your newsreader to https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom.

That should help declutter your inbox, save time, yadda yadda. If you end up using this trick, I’d love for you to post a comment with your experience.

After reading the book, I was surprised my the dissimilarities between the stories. The movie is so different from the book that it may as well have had a different name. There are some common elements, but not many. In both stories, the main character is named Robert Neville, and in both stories Neville must hide from humans infected with a disease at night so that they don’t kill him. And that’s pretty much it.

The movie was good, though I found it disappointing. In essence, the story was a good one that could have been told better. There were too many too-obvious special effects. People in makeup would have been far scarier (and realistic) than the slightly over-the-top and over-stylized CG creatures with super-human powers. A more gritty approach would have brought out more intensity and emotion, which seemed dulled. At several points in the movie I felt “almost but not quite” happy or sad or otherwise empathetic for the main character. Additionally, I felt like something was left out of the film - like some subplot had been eliminated in editing that would have given the film a boost. The movie is rated PG-13, which makes me think that an R rated Director’s Cut would make an excellent DVD purchase, if there ever is one. We’ll see.

The book was also good, but also disappointing in that it gave away the ending way too soon. I’ll go ahead and summarize (err, spoil) it: Neville, out of necessity, kills the infected during the day and sleeps at night only to discover in the end that he himself has become the “vampire” of a new nocturnal society; thus he becomes “legend.” This is a good theme that emphasizes perspective and necessity, but half way through the reader is all but told the “moral of the story” straight-out and given little room to think about it for himself. The second half therefore had me thinking “yeah, yeah, get on with it…” since I pretty much knew the ending and was reading out of self-imposed obligation.

Tomorrow marks the 76th anniversary of the ratification of the 21st amendment to the US constitution, also known as Repeal Day. As you may or may not know, the 21st amendment repeals the 18th amendment which began prohibition. I’ll drink to that.

The prohibition movement succeeded thanks to heavy lobbying by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party. By banning alcohol, they claimed, we would see the reduction or even elimination of of society’s ills: prostitution, murder, and even racism. Protesters against alcohol did everything from singing hymns to customers in saloons to taking a hatchet and smashing bottles. Amazingly, both organizations still exist.

This, of course, begs the question: What the hell were they thinking? After prohibition, virtually all the ills of society that were supposed to be reduced or eliminated had gotten far worse; even public drunkenness. Organized crime got out of hand, and respect for the authority of law plummeted.

Whoops!

With all that fervor over something that turned out to be essentially a non-issue, it makes you wonder about the policies of today.

What about the war on drugs? A quick Google search will tell you it’s about as popular as the war in Iraq. Would ending the war on drugs be similar to the end of prohibition? What, if anything, makes this form of prohibition different?

What about smoking bans? I don’t smoke but I find smoking bans that affect private businesses pretty troubling, albeit convenient.

What else?