General > General Technical Chat
Urgent request for US West Coast shipping contacts
TerraHertz:
--- Quote from: bdunham7 on October 27, 2021, 05:57:46 pm ---
--- Quote from: TerraHertz on October 27, 2021, 10:43:55 am ---Yes, I know it's crazy, and I know how much it will cost (approximately.) Call me nuts, I don't care.
And yes I can afford it.
--- End quote ---
I'm not sure what your cost estimates are, but given my luck finding people to do 'stuff' lately, I think you're in for a challenge. To get all that done in the time you have seems unlikely, so your backup plan needs to be to find someone that will, for a substantial fee, go get everything and move it to another larger storage facility for starters. Then it can be packed up in a more leisurely manner while you arrange a shipping container. With shipping containers, there seems to be an abundance of them here right now and it is inbound shipping that is maxed out, not outbound. So maybe, just maybe, that part will work out. I hope your overall budget is at least--the very least-$10K US.
--- End quote ---
I'm hoping to get it done for under $20K. But I can go above that if necessary.
It's quite an amazing coincidence that this opportunity came up so suddenly, NOW, when I happen to have sufficient funds available. That alone is very rare. Fate... But I'll wait till after completion and they are actually here, before thanking Fate.
Then there's subsequent costs. Need to do some building mods in my home, arrange a LOT of shelving... then maybe a year of sorting and cataloging, then offloading unwanted duplicates. THEN a long development effort (software and technique) before even contemplating a large scale scanning effort. Part of my motivation is that I think ALL scanning (past and present) of tech docs like these, has been atrociously poor. Results so far below acceptable aesthetic and ergonomic quality that they are an insult to the original doc producers. Just one point: There is no PNG in PDF. ALL the built-in image formats in PDF are either very poor compression, or excessively lossy. There is no way round this with PDF. So everything scanned to PDF is junk and needs to be redone at some time in the future when a better file standard is developed. But even PNG lacks features required for this use.
Many other problems with PDF. I personally think it is a deliberately crippled standard; for reasons I suspect but can't prove so won't discuss.
Anyway, that's one reason I'm doing this.
--- Quote from: andy3055 on October 27, 2021, 03:54:58 pm ---What are the chances of getting them moved to a facility to scan, index them and transfer online for you to download?
--- End quote ---
That's completely impractical (for many reasons) but also fails to meet my primary objective. Which is to preserve the physical documents for posterity. (And future improved scanning technology.)
People place far too much faith in digital archives. Wait 500 or 1000 years, before saying it's a good idea to totally rely on digital archives.
Someone:
Having done blind and/or unaccompanied moves:
Hire a moving company to do it! Sounds obvious but the larger "house moving" companies do this sort of thing for corporates all the time. Some are international and will have personnel/locations at each end already. They will:
repack into boxes/crates
hire a container
load into container (co-ordinate backfilling if you want)
organise container movements (at a speed of your choosing, can be very cheap if you don't mind slow)
organise import/customs/biosecurity
unload and unpack at end point
All taken care of for you. Its amazing how cheap the container movements are when you don't mind waiting.
amyk:
Jason Scott might be able to help; he's done something similar before: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/rescue-mission-25-000-manuals-baltimore/
TerraHertz:
--- Quote from: Someone on October 28, 2021, 12:31:19 am ---Having done blind and/or unaccompanied moves:
Hire a moving company to do it! Sounds obvious but [snip]
All taken care of for you. Its amazing how cheap the container movements are when you don't mind waiting.
--- End quote ---
Yes! It is obvious. That is what this thread is about! FINDING such a company, known to be capable and getting a quote. As quickly as possible.
There are so many moving & logistics companies, not enough time to search for and evaluate them properly.
Got any suggestions for an actual company that you used before? URL or contact details please. Several leads I've been given elsewhere turn into briar patches because I was just given a name, but there were company mergers, etc since.
Currently have three lines of inquiry active, but more would be better.
--- Quote from: amyk on October 28, 2021, 12:44:07 am ---Jason Scott might be able to help; he's done something similar before: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/rescue-mission-25-000-manuals-baltimore/
--- End quote ---
The ManualsPlus debacle/tragedy. I had followed that one closely. See my posts in that thread? Also my notes about it here: http://everist.org/NobLog/20190223_full_spectrum.htm#alex
That was not really similar. Mainly because they were able to organize many volunteers to come onsite, to select and box what manuals they could deal with. Over several days. (And they still only got a fraction of the ManualsPlus collection.) What they did was nothing like hiring a moving company to just come and box up everything, in one day. (Which is feasible in this instance if well organized.)
Someday I'd like to talk with him about where those ultimately ended up. "Somewhere in CA." It sounds like archive.org gave up on keeping them. But not now. No distractions...
If I'd had half a million dollars when ManualsPlus was closing, I'd have rescued the entire lot. No kidding. With a million, just bought the entire building and kept that company going even if at a loss.
bdunham7:
--- Quote from: TerraHertz on October 28, 2021, 03:17:19 am ---Got any suggestions
--- End quote ---
Yes, if you haven't already tried this, find a company at your end that does moving internationally and let them set it up. They will have contacts and associates for whom the deal will be somewhat normal, instead of some random guy on the phone from across the globe.
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