The Aerie

Small Victories

It takes so little to make me happy sometimes. While the workload over the past two weeks has been hectic to say the least (29 hours worked at Buy More alone by the end of the day Wednesday), the flip side of that is that some things have been working out.

First was Monday. I had two domestic clients to assist Monday evening, one of which had been extremely troublesome. I had met her a couple of months ago at a social event, and offered to assist her with her computer. When I got there I discovered that her computer was a 1999-vintage system connected with a dialup modem. Any work I did on the computer would quickly cost more than the computer was worth by any measure, including simple utility.

I convinced her to upgrade to a new system, and on a subsequent visit connected her old hard drive to the new system, intending to copy her files over. That was when her "My Documents" folder went "GLIQ" and lost all her files. Stressful days ensued wherein I attempted to restore her files, and all sorts of little things went wrong - from being unable to locate her CV to her building's door not buzzing open for me. Little stuff that indicated that the Mummy's Curse under which I have operated all my life was in full force.

Monday I visited her apartment with a second DVD of painstakingly-recovered files, following a process that took a couple of days to run but searched every byte on her old hard drive. However, due to the overwork at Buy More I had not had a chance to inspect the findings at all. Were her Address Book and CV going to be found? I didn't know! But things were looking up when I dialed from the foyer, and the building door actually buzzed open. Somehow I knew everything was going to work out.

Sure enough, we found a full copy of her address book. And both her CV and her husband's. Then she asked me to migrate the addresses into her new ISP's address book system - amazingly enough, it worked the first time. Then she said "Do you have any tools?"

I'd forgotten that she wanted me to cut a hole in the back of her shockingly cheap desk in order that she could close the front cabinet door over her larger new computer. I had forgotten to bring my keyhole saw, and opened my pocketknife with trepidation. If the back was more robust than balsa, this was going to be a chore.

it was cardboard. I quickly sawed a hole and closed the door over her computer. In less than fifty minutes I had transformed her from a very cranky and unhappy client into a satisfied customer, which was good - we're both slated to be at another social event on Saturday, and the icy glares would have been awful.

Then I went home and attended to my second domestic client, which was much more straightforward, and also a case of file recovery.

So those were two nicely positive outcomes. Tuesday night my wife an I ate out, which was all well and good but I was so tired I could hardly stay awake. Last night a friend visited from California, and for some reason the Green Mill on Hennepin Avenue where we all met decided to wedge about a dozen people into a tiny little alcove, behind a pole, arrayed with every chair in the building. I and my friend Terry found ourselves wedged into the far corner behind the pole, jammed up against a tiny table in the corner, with Tam from California all the way at the opposite end of the crowd. She did come spend a half hour with us towards the end of the evening, but it was a frustrating and uncomfortable night. Still it was good to see Tam again.

But my big victory was much smaller than all of these events. No, my big victory was the card scanner.

I have a bad penchant for cheap electronics. Every visit to Target involves a stop by the clearance shelf at the back of the electronics section. Most times these visits turn up nothing, sometimes they turn up real finds (I got my daughter a belt holder for her cell phone for 75% off), but frequently I take home a clinker. For example I dropped $50 on a photo printer which, while it works, requires hilariously expensive cartridges that yield half a dozen prints each time. Much easier and cheaper to go to a photo processor.

Well the other day I had to pick up a cable at the MicroCenter, and as I always do I stopped to inspect their business card scanners. These are stupidly expensive devices. I know what their component parts are, and I know they cost under $20 to assemble, and they always sell for $150-$250. So I look, then I go home to my pile of mouldering, useless business cards and I weep quietly over them (might be why they're mouldering).

But Monday (on my way to the apartment with the door-buzzer problems) I looked on the shelf and here was a tiny, tacky looking card scanner, for under $100. I was tempted, sorely tempted. I took the box down to inspect its features more closely, and behind it was a second box, marked "Opened: Returned," for $60. Despite being broke and in debt up to my eyeballs, I put it on my credit card.

Didn't have a chance to play with it until last night, between dinner and leaving for the Green Mill. Full of trepidation I hooked it up, loaded the driver, and ran the program. After fumbling with the software for a few minutes I put a business card in and... it worked!

By "it worked" I don't just mean it scanned an image of the card. That was certainly worthwhile, but the part that worked was the Optical Character Recognition software. In under 10 seconds this device not only scanned in the card, but analyzed it, read the characters into digital text, and did a very creditable job of figuring out what blocks of data go where.

Mind you, this is a big challenge. Business cards follow no set format, so the person's name could be anywhere, any size, any font. Like wise the various phone numbers, the e-mail address, web page, and snail-mail address. A onetime coder, I know the work involved in writing software this smart.

The software seems to look for keywords: from a dictionary of common names it recognizes names as being names; the word 'cell' or 'mobile' or 'fax' directs a given phone number to the appropriate database column, rather than just a generic "phone number" entry; the @ sign indicates e-mail, and "http" or "www" indicate web pages.

The program reads 95% of the cards successfully, despite noisy backgrounds and weird swirly fonts. It places 90% of the data into the proper fields. Probably its biggest challenge is discriminating "o"s from "e"s from "a"s.

The end result is, I scan a card, I glance at the data, and I scan the next card. If there's an error I might spend a minute correcting an "o" to an "e", or moving data into the proper fields, but even that is point-and-click easy. And then every dozen cards are so is one so noisy or full of swirly font graphics that I have to type the whole thing by hand.

Before an hour was up I had scanned more than 60 business cards. to expedite things I actually taped the scanner up on the side of a filing cabinet, angled so that the cards would fall out into a trash container. Another hour or two and I'll have taken all my business cards from ten years and thrown them away.

There's still the task of determining which of the cards contain obsolete data, but at least now I can do so in an automated fashion. The never-going-to-do-it megaproject of typing all my business cards into a database has turned into a "do it while watching television" chore of an evening.

So I'm quite giddy over my find, which proves how little it takes to make my evening.

P.S. this item gets poor reviews on the Amazon website to which I have linked. All I can say is, for $60 I was quite satisfied. It's probably not as good as a more expensive product... but it's not a more expensive product!

Posted by Albatross at November 8, 2007 11:10 AM | TrackBack