BELLAMYBUDIMAN

The end of the year is getting near, and the holiday is on its track toward the new year. For me, most of the time, having a holiday from the office means that this is the chance to unclutter myself from months worth of bills, receipts, and a tremendous amount invoice copies I’ve accumulated throughout the year. I always try my best on keeping my life paperless, which means less hassle, less storage, and cleaning up my home would be a snap. But this is not without a challenge.

One of the first rules that I always keep in mind is that I get rid all of those unimportant receipts (Such as dinners, lunches, parking tickets, ATM receipts, and everything else that doesn’t go up to IDR 100k and more than 3 months old). This is fairly easy, just pile them up, put them in the shredder, and boom, it’s safe for disposal or recycling.

The next step I always took is to keep all the receipts for all items that come with a warranty. This could be cellphones, PDAs, computers, automobile spare parts, softwares, and sometimes books. Or in my case, generally everything that costs more than IDR 300k. You’ll never know when you would get into trouble, especially when your country doesn’t have a 30-day money back guarantee. But I do dispose them after the usual 1-year warranty expires.

The last step that I haven’t quite figure out is actually account statements. Over the years, I’ve got at least like five or six different account statements from various services, be it credit cards, cellphones, insurance, cable TV, and so forth.

Since last year, we’ve been a continuing design service provider for our US-based client called Pixily. Who are they? Long story short, they can keep all your documents, receipts, and things like that online for easy access. That means, you can simply recycle all the original papers once they have it stored on their servers. A brilliant idea which makes your documents accessible from virtually anywhere, as long as you are connected to the internet. And since they existed, that means companies in the US consider digitized copies of their receipts legit. And unlike our country, the US Government also has the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which is a good start for having less paper clutter in your life. But giving the benefit of the doubt, can anyone point me if our government has such act as well?

As for the office, I kept a copy of Yep on my Mac. Regularly, we digitize all of our office’s receipts and statements, creating digital copies in PDF for archiving and easy retrieval whenever we need them. This is way easier than to have ourselves messing around with horde of receipts every time or so.

But even after all this effort, I still can’t decide whether I should recycle all those credit card billing statements or not. Here are some questions that I have in mind, particularly when living in Indonesia:

• Do Indonesian banks consider digitized copies of account statements legit? I once applied for a credit card (Bank Danamon), and they asked me for the real cellphone billing statements for the last three months. I asked them whether I could print digital copies and send those out instead. They said no, they wanted the REAL ones. And oh, BTW, they promised me a Gold card, and even until now, a promise is just a promise. But that’s another matter.
• How can we be paperless if PDF document copies from governmental sites are not even real PDFs. Mostly, they are actually scanned paper documents which they created with typewriters. This means, our own government doesn’t even know if Microsoft Word can export documents to PDFs for the citizens to download. Try the Direktorat Pajak, for example. Messy… Just messy.
• We don’t have a dedicated recycling center where you can go there, bring along your paper waste, and just drop them off for recycling. We do, however, have those so-called dedicated trash bins that allowed us to separate different kinds of trash into different bins. But, of course, we know that here, this method does not work at all.

Bottom line, I’d love to get rid all of the account statements that I’ve scanned, but in particular for my first question, does anyone know if that works here? Is it really hard to live efficiently here?

I have no idea why this never crossed my mind before, but I’m trying out Twitter Tools to announce if there are new posts in my blog. We’ll see how this goes.

Update: Oh, it does work! Cool!

Today I started using Flickr. Yes, I know, where was I back in 2004? But for some weird reason, it just never got the attention it deserves from me. So I am now going to start using the service apart from my Facebook albums, and I’m also trying to figure out how to integrate both Facebook and Flickr as I am writing this post.

My next target would be, integrating Flickr to this site, so that I can gradually remove the expenses of having to host my image gallery myself :D.

Note:
This post will definitely come out in my Facebook Notes. However, it does not apply to that context.

Yes, I finally used the latest Pwnage Tool, made the custom firmware, and upgraded my iPhone’s firmware to 2.0. On the last post I made about this, I wasn’t too sure about upgrading since the lack of applications I need that are compatible with the new firmware. Well, the iPhone/iPod Touch community is apparently swift as a fox when it gets to this point, it’s only a week after I wrote the last post, and everything I mainly need is covered. Right now the only thing that I’m missing is probably the iSMS, which in functionality, works better than iPhone’s own SMS application.

So the upgrade actually went very well and smooth for my iPhone. It takes no more than 15-20 minutes for the initial custom firmware creation and restoration, and it takes another one hour or two to get all the settings back to my iPhone as I see fit, and testing the whole thing to make sure that it works as it should. Disabling the keyboard’s auto-correction was also easy enough and quite non-destructive.

One of the most interesting appeal that made me eager to do the upgrade is the now-native applications available in AppStore. And those are really really great. Most of the essential things that I need, such as Twitterrific, WordPress, NetNewsWire, Palringo, or Facebook, come as free applications. And the only thing I actually bought so far is Things, which hopefully in the future, connects and syncs with the desktop version that I use daily. I also found BookReader (in Cydia), which is a barebone version of Books.app, and completely supports HTML files that I used for the Alkitab. Although it is extremely bare bone, I think it would do justice for now, and I will have the instructions updated on that one.

So, bottom line, if there are still applications that you really do need and irreplaceable, I suggest that you keep refraining yourself from upgrading to 2.0. But as for me and a day with the iPhone 2.0, I must admit that I’m excited on what lies ahead.

I was probably overly excited this morning as my RSS news reader pointed out a new feed from the iPhone Dev Team’s blog. The next generation Pwnage Tool is out, and we can both jailbreak and unlock the first generation iPhone running on the 2.0 firmware. I then immediately download the tool and left it to church.

Earlier tonight, I decided to give a try to upgrade my iPhone to 2.0. After downloading all the necessary firmware and bootloader files, there’s a catch. First of all, Installer support is not there yet, so we can only install apps outside Apple’s AppStore from the Cydia Installer. It’s basically the same thing, but there’s a second catch: Not all of the third party apps work with the new 2.0 firmware. While we could probably live off for the next few weeks with the barebone 2.0 firmware and several apps from the AppStore, one thing I probably can’t live without is the keyboard tweak that disables the annoying auto-correct feature. Apparently, the old patch does not work with 2.0. Oh well, that means, a few weeks of wait is probably worth it, at least until all of the old apps are updated for 2.0, and until most of the bugs are ironed out.