One of the most super fun, navel-gazing pursuits a person can undertake is digging around in Google Analytics. For just the cost a few lines of Javascript a day you too can see all the traffic statistics of everyone who visits your website. While looking at the analytics for this blog the other day I noticed a spike in traffic. Searching further I found the keywords that were leading to all this traffic.

“Jesse Yeary”

It looks like the cast has been revealed for his television show which I’m going to assume has lead hordes of reality TV followers to my digital doorstep. In case they come back do I have a treat for them.

I emailed Jesse after my last post to give him a warning that I was selling him out promoting him and got a quick response. I also asked a lot of questions, questions that I got answers to back in response.

What are the answers you ask? To channel my inner Captain Jack Sparrow, I now know that he knows that I don’t know what he knows about what everyone wants to know. Savvy?

Toward the end of Swingers, Vince Vaughn climbs on top a table at a diner and drunkly yells to the world because Jon Favreau has just gotten a girl’s telephone number. Specifically he says:

“Cause you’re growns up and you’re growns up and you’re growns up!”

You try to feel the same about your interns and co-ops. You try to teach them right from wrong and instill good habits while beating the bad ones out of their impressionable brains. Then one day you have to send them on their way. You pack them a care package, a C compiler and a Mountain Dew, and watch them walk out the door. In the end you hope they succeed.

Or that at least don’t have to program in something like VB.

Or Perl.

Dear god Perl.

It is the rare occasion though that you find out though that a former intern goes on to claim television fame. Jeff said it best in the email he sent out about it:

Recently former TestTrack intern and engineer Jesse Yeary disappeared without a trace for a month. When he returned, he was not at liberty to say where he was or why he was gone.

Over the weekend though, conditions changed. Today I can tell you what I’ve been keeping secret for about a month now (I knew ;)). Jesse will be appearing on the reality TV show Beauty and Geek this fall (FYI - Jesse plays a geek).

“FYI - Jesse plays a geek.” I know good one-liners when I see them and that’s a gem. Best of luck to Jesse, I hope he wins whatever he is supposed to win on the show.

(Does he win a girl? Can you do that? Is that legal? Maybe I need to watch more reality TV.)

This past week I was on vacation. That fact is actually germane to the story, it isn’t just boasting or a catchy starting sentence. You see we were driving back home when my wife decided to call and check our voicemail. When she got into the system there was a long pause followed by her replaying the message after muttering, “That’s weird.”

Me: “What?”

Her: “There’s a message for you from a law office.”

At this point my natural reaction was that I was being sued for something. I ran a quick mental inventory and found nothing particularly lawsuit worthy. I also figured that they would never find THAT, I mean that hole we dug was pretty deep.

Err. Right. Probably not the time and place for that. Plausible deniability and all.

It turns out the message said that they had found a wallet with my name in it and were trying to contact me to see if it was really mine. Now, it is very important that I am clear on the circumstances of how I lost my wallet. My best guess was that I was filling up my car and for some reason dropped it at the gas station. I had even gone back there hoping and praying that it was turned in by some kind soul. I also ransacked most of the house looking for it until I finally gave up and did all that crap you need to do when losing a wallet. (Cancel credit cards, get a new license, etc.)

Oh, I should also mention that all this happened TEN YEARS AGO.

It was during my last year of college and I remember it well. It is clear to me because it meant I had no ID, which meant no going out that night, which meant no beer, which at the time was a colossal traveshamockery.

So first thing yesterday morning I gave them a call to find out what was going on. After I passed the interview questions proving that it really was my wallet they explained that some of their workers cleaning out a flower bed at one of their properties had found it. They then looked me up (sometimes having a unique name really works in your favor) and here we are.

I asked for the address so I could come get it and the puzzle started to fall into place. You see, here is where I lived when I lost it.

And here is what is right next door to the left:

Their office is the red brick house on the far left. The wallet was found in the landscaping of the square building which was right next door to my house. Ten years it had sat in the elements twenty feet from the house where I lost it. If you’ve ever wanted to see what happens to a wallet being outside in Cincinnati after all that time today is your lucky day:

I can’t remember if I had any money it, if I did it was certainly a minimal amount. I’m thinking I probably dropped it getting out of the car or something, someone helped themselves to the twenty or so bucks it probably carried, and then chucked it into the foliage along with all the cards still inside.

That’s right, except for the cash everything else was still there. The wallet itself pretty much disintegrated when I opened it but inside, safe and sound, were fifteen cards.

Apparently in 1997 I liked to carry around:

1. a driver’s license
2. my college ID
3. a Visa card
4. a Visa Check Card (those were wild new back then)
5. an ATM card (because the Check Card wouldn’t work in an ATM, ha!)
6. two AAA cards
7. an AT&T phone access card for the university
8. a Sprint “Foncard” (remember that stupid spelling, also remember cell phones weren’t wildly spread in college back then)
9. a Dave and Busters Powercard
10. a Firestone card (which I’m not sure why I had, maybe I bought some tires)
11. a Sunoco card (of which I have no recollection of ever having)
12. a medical insurance card on my parent’s plan
13. a Finish Line rewards card
14. a video rental card for some place called Picture Show Video (I have no idea where this was, if I ever rented anything there, nothing.)

Talk about a little time capsule buried in a little topsoil. I have to send my thanks out to the folks at Thomas & Thomas, in particular Evan Thomas for taking the time to track me down. If you need any lawyerly stuff I highly suggest calling them up. Unless you need to sue me, at which point just put that off. Procrastination is a Good Thing.

About once a year I get terrifically bored and decide that I want to mix things up. Unfortunately I never mix things up in a way that’s somehow a betterment of society. No, I just go and dork with my electronic system of working until I get fed up and go back to the old system.

This year, I decided I was going to ditch Mail.app and iCal in favor of Entourage.

My reasons were simple (digital wanderlust not withstanding):

1. We use Exchange for email and scheduling. iCal’s integration with Exchange is, hmm, “If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all”, all what the heck, it’s terrible.

2. Mail.app sometimes shows my read email as unread even after I tell it that yes in fact I did read it and no I didn’t just stare at it blankly.

I knew that Entourage wasn’t really an Exchange client like Outlook and it wasn’t a Universal Binary yet but I could add some rationalizations to my list of reasons:

A. The MacBU said that the Universal Binary version was coming out this fall so no more emulation was in sight. I even had a guy who had a source who knew some stuff that let it slip that this might actually be true.

B. Entourage has this tempting “Project Center” feature where I could setup these elaborate projects that would keep all the files, contacts, emails and everything together. In short, I would be The Organized.

As you can guess by now, this was all a dismal failure.

Before we get to the gritty details, here’s a little background on the two possible ways of dealing with email/calendaring data. The first way, which I will call “The Big Heaping Pile Stack” way works where you really only have two email folders, an inbox and an archive. When a mail comes in you read it, do something about it or reply to it, and then off it goes into the archive. There’s no hierarchy, no structure, just a big folder filled with all the emails mixed together which then relies on the power of search to find what you need later.

The other way, which I shall dub, “The Dewey Decimal without the Decimals” has a whole bunch of folders in which you can move emails. There can even be folders inside folders, massive towers of structure where everything has a place. The workflow here is that you read your email, do something with it or reply to it, decide where in the folder pyramid it is supposed to live, and then finally move it there. The theory is that because of the organizational structure and because you’ve preprocessed where the email is supposed to go that you should be able to find it when you need it.

Given my penchant for stacks, which one of these do you think is my more natural way of living?

Come on. Seriously. Look at the names for Pete’s sake.

“The Dewey Decimal without the Decimals”

“The Big Heaping Pile Stack”

Looking back at my rationales we can see being The Organized just doesn’t fit the way my mind is set up. I am certainly organized, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around any kind of taxonomy where I have to decide what I’ll need in the future now. “Do I put this email about how to apply field dressing for a burn into the ‘Safety Tips’ folder or the ‘One thousand reasons why owning a flamethrower would be the coolest’ folder?” See, there’s no right answer there for me and god knows I don’t want to go looking in the wrong place when I have a massive burn on one hand and a flamethrower in the other.

The thing that pushed me over the edge though was Office 2008 for the Mac being delayed until January. The speed penalty for running Entourage in Rosetta was just getting to be too much. I mean, if I was running in native speed checking two folders to solve my burn problem probably wouldn’t be too bad. I’ve got the feeling though that that situation has a real time is of the essence thing about it so I probably best not dawdle.

All this means is that I’m now back to Mail.app which has fast search for my big archive folder even if it still shows some mails as new. I’m also back to iCal and the copy/paste sit-ups that are required for using it with Exchange but the path is now paved for fun with napalm. Now I don’t have to waste time organizing my email and I can instead focus on buying something that will put me on a number of government watch lists.

Toasty yours,

Smokey Grant Lammi

Before we get rolling with the new stuff let’s pause for a minute for a little more old stuff. Honestly we could do it the other way around and put the new stuff first and the old stuff second as a kind of addendum. But you know, that’s just delaying the inevitable, it’s best just to get the darn thing out of the way so we can focus going forward. It’s like when you’ve just eaten way too much Skyline and you’re ready to get going on your way but that Skyline wants to see the world again. So it really really really pays to deal with that first. Not that I’m implying that the old stuff is, well, poop, but you get the idea.

Right.

So, all this talk about stacks got me some responses from people that fell into one of two camps:

1. You must a be big freaking slob.
2. You’re insane to be writing a blog post about stacks of a paper.

Through the power of digital photography I’ll prove #1 completely false. The other one, well, the jury is still out but my lawyer doesn’t seem particularly hopeful about the outcome.

So right now my desk looks like this:

and this:

There it is, thirteen stacks of stuff officially at the moment. Everything is orderly though, right angles and whatnot. So slob, no, obsessive compulsive, err, maybe.