Data normalization for your shipping container
August 4th, 2008
It to me a while to calculate this, but I figured out that this is my ninth international move and my 42nd move overall. I’m sure that’s higher than average, even in this footloose age. Luckily, I didn’t have to start the reckoning from scratch. I calculated several years ago that my family had moved 21 times before I turned 17, so I just added the moves from when I left for college (exactly double).
When you move internationally, you fill out reams of forms: volume estimates, insurance forms, customs forms, powers-of-attorney, and shipping inventories. All of these forms ask for basically the same information (what you are shipping, what it’s worth, where it’s going), and each time you move, you start from scratch, even if you are moving basically the same stuff (i.e., you haven’t acquired or discarded much). This sounds like an opportunity for automation!
When I was in Tokyo (two moves before the current one), I bought 28 clear plastic boxes with locking lids and printed out 28 A4 pages with the following information:
Property of Shanghai Bob (bobby.dazzler@shanghaibob.com)
Full contents online at http://shanghaibob.com/contents/1
Box 1 of 28
Then I put the pages into plastic slip-covers (more plastic!) underneath the box lids. The main numbers are one-third the height of the page, easy to see without opening the box.
I use the numbers as IDs (primary keys) for an online inventory. Some of the boxes I don’t even open from move to move (old photos, archived files, etc.), so I don’t have to re-do any of that work. And if I move the contents of a smaller box to a larger one or vice versa, I just swap the ID pages and repoint the online content listing. When the movers come, I print out a copy for them and myself, and we use the same file for insurance.
When I store my stuff, I just store the boxes in numerical order. If I need something, I look the location up on my website. When I was in the US and my stuff was in storage in the UK, I needed my tux (dinner jacket) for the Christmas party. I looked online and saw that it was in box 13 — if only it had been as easy for my UK-based friend to ship it through customs as it was to identify the correct box.
Normally primary/surrogate keys don’t convey any information, but I took advantage of a few mnemonics: I put Christmas ornaments in box 25, my old (paper-based!) journals in 17 (my birthday), and my go set (a Japanese board game) in box five (the Japanese word for five is pronounced “go”).