Over the last two days I’ve been dealing with the issue and consequences of having my mail stolen.  What  a great way to kick off my weekend

I came home really late Friday evening and discovered that 2 days worth of mail was stolen.  It was impossible to know everything that was possibly in my mailbox, but I do know for certain that it contained at least one credit card statement, a bank statement and a credit cart statement.

I was fearful of having fraud or identity theft committed against me, so I did some quick research to find out what exactly I should do in this situation.  Here’s the info I have gathered and figured it was useful to share it with others:

1. Call your bank and have a “watch” put on your account. All major banks and credit unions will have this capability and most will also have the added protection of adding a supplementary password added that must be given for any access to your account.
2. Call all your credit card companies and also put a watch on your accounts.  If you’re ultra-paranoid, you can get your credit card company to issue you a brand new account # and card which you should be able to get within 3-5 business days.
3. Contact the credit reporting agencies to put a “Fraud alert” on your credit file.  Calling each one individually is a pain in the ass, and in the process I found out that if you place a fraud alert through Transunion, they will automatically notify and process fraud alerts to Experian and Equifax also.
4. Update (6/16/2008): As an extra precaution, I’ve also added a Credit Freeze on each credit bureau. This is a higher level of security on your credit file, and basically nothing can get pulled or approved without my specific approval.

• Transunion: You need to submit a written request including your full name, SSN, address and credit card # and expiration (for the $10 fee).  Address is on the Transunion site.
• Equifax: Same as Transunion except they also want you to include a copy of a recent utility bill to prove your current address.  See info on their site for mailing address.
• Experian: Has the easiest way to request a freeze with an online application process.  Unfortunately in my case, something about my info didn’t line up with their records so I had to submit a request in writing anyways.

I also filed a police report through the non-emergency number (206-625-5011) and a separate report with the US Postal Service “Postal Inspector”.   For the latter, you have 2 choices to file a report – you can either call them on the phone at 206-442-6300, or alternatively file an incident report online at the US Postal Inspection Service website.

It was  real eye opening experience to have my mail stolen due to both the invasive nature of it, but also the uneasiness of not knowing exactly what was stolen. Eep.

The good news is that my building has security cameras that has the little f’ers on tape which the police now have.   Since mail theft is a federal crime, I hope those punks get what they deserve.

I was listening to the DL.tv podcast on my Zune in my car on my way back from work today and got to the final 5 mins of the episode.  I unplugged my Zune (which automatically paused the device), got to my desktop and plugged it into my PC.  The Zune software automatically opened and started to sync. 

I wanted to listen to those last 5 minutes I had left, so I selected the episode within the Zune software and hit play.  Amazingly, the podcast resumed exactly where I left off in my car!

Not sure why I was surprised by this, or if any other portable music player does this, but I definitely was impressed!  Nice fit and finish feature that made the whole experience seem really polished.  Kudos to the Zune team.

I’ve been on a quest the last 6-8 months of trying to get rid of all my hard copy paperwork that I keep at home.  I had a massive filing cabinet with paperwork that included:

• Tax filings from previous years
• Receipts and paperwork for upcoming tax year
• receipts
• immigration
• mortgage
• car maintenance records

The list just goes on and on. It was so easy to have a filing cabinet and just throw things in there and, the next thing I knew it, I had years worth of paperwork accumulated.  Some of it was important to have the originals, some not, and most of it useless.  So I decided I wanted to go all digital with my paperwork, to not only reduce physical clutter, but also make it easier to find specific documents. I had visions of all my paperwork scanned, OCR’d and tagged so I could do a search in Vista for a particular and all the pertinent documents would be shown.

So I decided that I would go through nearly 10 years of paperwork, throw away what was irrelevant, and sort the remaining into 2 buckets: what needed to be kept in original hardcopy and what could be scanned.

I did this sorting process over a 4 day period and the net result was 3 full garbage bags of papers that I brought for professional shredding and disposal.  The rest of the documents for keep and scan was very, very small which wasn’t surprising.

Now I had to move onto the task of going digital with my paperwork life. In order to achieve this, I needed the following things:

1. A folder structure and file naming convention that would make sense without looking at the document contents or tags.
2. A scanner that made it easy to scan multiple sheets, double-sided in a single pass and gave me some sort of automation to easily get to a PDF
3. Reliable backup and storage method

Folder structure

I decided to make top-level folders for all major buckets of documents:

• Car
• House
• Mortgage
• Insurance
• Immigration
• Taxes
• Business
• Model Releases
• Taxes
• Business License
• Misc

The first 5 root folders fit nearly all my documents very neatly and the last miscellaneous category was created to hold outliers that just didn’t fit in the main set.

File naming convention

For the file names of each scanned document, I wanted to ensure that the names conveyed the purpose of the document as well as the date so each individual file was self-describing without relying on any folder structure so that if I was ever looking at an individual file, I wouldn’t need other files or the containing folder structure to describe it.  The other added benefit was that if I ever changed the folder structure, the file names could stay the same.

I ultimately settled on:

<YYYY><MM><DD> - <Document name>.pdf

The date prefix always matches the date on the document itself, or if that’s missing, the date I received it.  I never wanted to make the date the day that I scanned it since that date is never relevant.

Scanner choice

With the help of my friend Fil, who also went all digital (months and months before me), I decided on getting a Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 which satisfied all my needs.  It was the newer model to his scanner, and much more compact which also fit the bill for what I was looking for.

Features that were important to me:

• Scans double-sided in a single pass
• 10 pages document feeder
• 8 pages per minute
• One-touch scanning
• Auto PDF and OCR after scanning
• Support Vista
• Very, very compact

Basically, this scanner has it all!  I love the convenience of it’s small size and the fact it will create a PDF and OCR automatically after I initiate a scan. The only manual thing I have to do is choose the folder to save the file and specify the file name. 

The things I don’t like about the scanner:

• Doesn’t have TWAIN drivers which means it isn’t recognized as a scanning device through Windows natively – in other words, you need their software to drive the scanner. Fortunately, the software operates well enough and also has a good OCR engine
• It’s not clear from their website whether or not it supports 64-bit which will impede my eventual move to 64-bit Vista.

Reliable back and storage

Backing up all the scanned documents is obviously a key part to this whole process. No sense in scanning all this paperwork and have it stored on a single hard drive on my computer that is bound to fail at some point.  Luckily, due to my past investments, this was the easiest part for me.  I have a Windows Home Server machine that backs up all my documents to its local RAID.  I also have all my data (including scanned paperwork) backed up off-site using Carbonite.

Closing thoughts

Overall, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 document scanner is a dream and everything I was looking for.  It’s the best on the market that I’ve seen and it’s price point is quite low in my opinion for the value that I’m deriving from it.  My entire process now with document scanning is that as I receive mail or documents that I want to keep, I keep them on the edge of my desk then at the end of each week I scan the lot of them.  I’ve found this works better for my lifestyle rather than scan each document as it comes on a daily basis.

Now with my investment in workflow at home, I can actually do a search in File Explorer in Vista for a particular word, and the contents of the scanned documents are now actually searched in addition to the rest of the files on my system.  So my vision of searching for a particular keyword and getting back all pertinent documents is now a reality.

If any of you are still keeping hordes of paperwork at home in massive filing cabinets, I encourage you to at least experiment going the (nearly) all digital path.  It’s made things SO much easier for me.

Special thanks to Fil for providing advice along the way and  the original scanner recommendation. 

Another photograph of me at Gas Works Park in Seattle by my pal Danny.  Very similar to my previous jumping splits shot, but at the same time very different

Great news from Greg about those nifty Sysinternals tools that I’ve been using for years:

The Sysinternals tools are a whole slew of great troubleshooting and analysis utilities for Windows. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals  some time ago. The tools are now available online for anyone that needs or wants to use them, via a web page (http://live.sysinternals.com/) or direct UNC link to each tool.

The simple web page lists the latest version of each tool, where you can click to execute. This is a terrific and eleganly simple resource. No more maintaining thumb drives or CDs of utilities necessary. I like it.
Ed Bott has the details on his Microsoft Report blog at ZDNet.