Kinko's et al

I was thinking about weird stuff on the way in to work this morning.

I had wanted to work from home, because today's the day that the cleaning service woman comes. We want to give her a small bonus -- we're impressed by how well she does, and a hearty handshake wouldn't quite do it -- but we wanted to do it in person, both for the pleasure of doing it and to make sure that it went to the right person (sometimes they send someone else). And that meant that one of would have to be there. But yesterday I told one of our customer's managers of a problem, and he said well, lets talk about it tomorrow, so I had to come in. Not that its a big deal -- I try to remember that most people don't get the chance to work from home as I do. Just a little deal.

A couple of years ago I heard a horrible story of an elderly woman who was essentially trapped in her car, and died there. From the news articles, she was unable to unlock the door or roll down the window. Examination of the battery showed that it had enough power to unlock the window and door, and the door's mechanical unlock worked -- but she couldn't get out. The detail that particularly terrifies me is that she apparently wrote Help Me on the window in lipstick, before she died.
That image still gives me the shivers.

I have a document thats in PDF format. I think that PDF is good stuff, but its a bear to search -- the little search box is seriously inadequate. So, undoing years of technical progress, I took it to a local Kinkos and had them print, punch, and binder it. Search capabilities go to zero, of course, or just about, but the note taking and tabbing facilities go almost to infinity. While I was waiting, I started thinking about document search techniques again. Thats one of the many things that I know just a little bit about, and wish I knew more, except that 'more' means many, many classes and deeply technical discussions, the nature of which I cannot fathom, let alone the content. Still, I wish I knew more about how you 'extract' information from a document. You've got this codified information that someone went to the trouble of putting into print, but its become 'static'. How do you make it fluid? How do you make it updateable? Hell, how do you make it searchable in a way that doesn't make you guess what the format of the word might be?

Sigh.