Everything You Do Should Be in Version Control

Excerpt from Theo Schlossnagle's tech talk:

Switch configurations should be in version control.

Router configurations should be in version control.

Firewall configurations should be in version control.

System configurations should be in version control.

Application configurations should be in version control.

Monitoring configurations should be in version control.

Documentation should be in version control.

Application code should be in version control.

Database schema should be in version control.

Everything you do should be in version control.

Where do my favorite eateries in Oklahoma get their food?

Over the last couple of years I've become more conscious about what I eat. This is mostly thanks to my wife, Savanah, who is a vegetarian and who was (and is) passionate about eating local, organic and healthy. As I've put more effort into actually figuring out what I'm actually eating, I've discovered that if you're not cooking it yourself, it's hard to know.

Tonight I found that on Chipotle's website they give you a map with their locations and tell you what percentage of their 3 meat offerings are naturally raised. I was excited to see that here in Oklahoma, it's 100% across the board for beef, chicken and pork. http://www.chipotle.com/#/flash/fwi_whats-where

My overall mission is to figure out what places that I enjoy eating actually do purchase locally, use organic, and/or buy meat from naturally raised animals. These restaurants will stay on my list, those who don't will be dropped.

This will be hard, but I think it's worth it for the long term sustainability of both my body and the entire food supply.

So if you own/manage a restaurant, especially in the Oklahoma area, I'd love for you to leave this information in the comments.

Short list of some of my favorite spots in OKC area in no particular order:

• Tokyo Japanese Restaurant
• Iguana Mexican Grill
• Carnita's Michoacan
• Pink Swirls
• Big Truck Tacos
• Gopuram Taste of India
• Misal of India West
• The Wedge
• VZD's
• Nic's Grill
• Iron Starr
• Flat Tire Burgers
• Cuppies and Joe
• Cafe do Brasil

Going Paperless... Mostly

So a few people were asking about my process for going paperless, now I don't have this down to a science yet but I think I am probably 90% of the way there, that last 10% will make it heaven, and I'll let you know once I figure that part out.

First I want to say that the single most important thing you can have is a kick-ass scanner. If you're scanner sucks, you're not going to keep up, I promise. My personal choice is a Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M, (Mac model, they also have a PC model) this thing is solid. It's small and portable so easy enough to sit next to you on the side table in the living room if you want to be somewhat entertained and it's really fast and full-duplex. All you do is set the sheets of paper in and hit the scan button, it fires up the software and scans front and back at an amazing rate. It strings all the scans into the right order and allows you to save them off as a PDF.

I then batch process entire sets (usually when I have 20 to 30 PDF files) with Adobe Acrobat and IRIS OCR that comes with the scanner. Once this is done, just grab all the files and drop them on your GDocsUploader shortcut on your desktop.

From here you're fine, once the readable PDF files are in Google Docs they are searchable, but if you're a little more OCD on stuff like this like I am, you'll want to put them in some folder structure. I don't go crazy but I have some general areas and then within each one of those I break it down by year. I might simplify this down to just organizing tax documents into folders and then letting everything else just be found by using the search function, I'm not totally settled on this part of it yet. Would love to get feedback though.

Two last notes, if you have important information like PIN and account numbers that are really sensitive, I would suggest storing those in a password safe and then omitting them from the documents. Finally, I don't get rid of everything that is on paper, I keep all tax documents for 7 years, and then anything that I might deem as ultra important to have the physical copy, say um, like you're birth certificate go into a filing cabinet/safe.

What does everyone else do?