Keeping A Log Book

I recently read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll in preparation for seeing him speak at THOTCON this year. The book was incredible, and I would encourage anyone to read it.

The book follows Cliff’s journey to catch a hacker he originally noticed through a small accounting error in the Berkeley computer system. From that error he tracked the hacker to Hanover Germany and kept a meticulous log of the journey.

The astronomer’s rule of thumb: if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.

• Cliff Stoll ~ The Cuckoo’s Egg

His idea of keeping a log book stemmed from being an astronomer. I assume if you view a celestial event and don’t properly record it, it’s hard to remember convey the findings. This was very helpfully also in bringing the Hanover Hacker to justice.

Cliff would regularly reference his logbook throughout the story to draw patterns on the hackers activities. He would also send it off to the various agencies, this gave validity to his claims of a hacker and eventually prompted them into action.

This inspired me to keep a log of my own. I realized that times at work, I would be asked something and my response was “I remember something like that and I can’t recall exactly…” Now with keeping a log, I can search entries and follow my day remember exactly what I did and hopefully some context around it. This may have put a small dent in my productivity. However, I think if I spend downtime writing the log as opposed to scrolling through Reddit it would be a wash.

Recently my work has signed up for Microsoft Copilot. This allows AI to work on all your local documents, and has made keeping a log indispensable. Now, instead of searching for keywords in my log and scrolling through I can just ask “When was this changed?” and boom response with reference to my own log. It has been helpful and I can only imagine it will get more helpful as my log grows.