Clean Up, Clean Up!

I have gotten lax in my cleaning routine on my PC.  Take a look at my downloads folder:

I’ve got multiple versions of installers in there, old stuff that I don’t use and need to archive, just a general mess.  My downloads folder ends up looking like the area under my bed when I was a kid.  I would take a book to bed and read it, and then it would get pushed under the bed by the next book that I brought along.  After a few weeks (or months) I would notice that I was missing a book I wanted to read and I would need to clean out the literary mulch pile that I had been working on.

The same thing happens with my Downloads folder.  Part of this I attribute to the default behavior of Firefox, which always saves files to a default location.  IE at least gives you a button marked “save as” for saving in a non-default location.  So with FF3 I download something, open it from the downloads window in FF, and forget that it even existed.  133 Items, what are they?

Unfortunately the same thing pretty much happens to my email inbox.  This in only a couple of weeks of detritus, and I delete most irrelevant stuff.

So, for the rest of the day, I will not rest until my inbox and downloads folder are clean!  Can I do it in under two hours (so I can get home on time)?  I’ll post an update on Twitter so you can find out.

 

[edit] – I found the setting in FF that prompts for a saving location when you download something.  Looks like i just needed a little RTFM medicine!

Sweet Sounds

I work in a cube farm.  I think this is one of the most annoying half-measures foisted upon us by our corporate overlords.  behold the sight that greets me when I stand up in my cube:

Now don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy having some personal space and some privacy, but in a cube farm you only get the illusion of space and privacy.  It reminds me of a description I once heard:

“Having the appearance of [personal space and privacy], but lacking the power thereof.”

That’s the problem.  I have somewhere to sit, somewhere to hang up pictures, somewhere to store all my junk, but no real privacy.  I have no door; people can walk in and bother me at will.  I have no (real) walls or ceiling; I hear everything that happens around me with astounding clarity. Even my boss doesn’t have an office, so when we need to have a “real conversation” we need to go find an empty conference room so we aren’t overheard.

Give me an office.  Or at least let me hope for one someday.  There are engineers/managers/directors here that are pretty senior that are still in cubicles.  Granted, they are big cubicles, but that doesn’t solve my problems.  I’d rather have a smaller office that I can close the door and shut out the outside world with all its distractions.  Somewhere that I can paint the walls and hang some real pictures.  Somewhere that I can play some music, albeit not very loudly.

So this brings me to my temporary imperfect solution: I use a white noise machine.

Okay, okay, technically it’s not white noise, per se.  It’s an environmental sound generator.  And it’s not a machine, it’s a computer program.  I like the sound of the ocean breeze along with some light surf.  Since using it, my cube has become a much more enjoyable place.  It feels like coming home (kind of).

Here’s the linkage, freeware, works with XP and Vista:

http://www.relaxingsoftware.com/atmdeluxehome.htm

Twitter me This, Twitter me That…

I am a Twitter user.  If you want to follow me, go here.

Twitter is kind of a fun little thing.  Posts have to be less than or equal to 140 characters, about the size of an SMS message.  That’s nice, because Twitter is designed to be updated from anywhere, SMS, email, IM, web, etc.

I’m a cheapskate and don’t want to pay for an SMS plan, so I update twitter on the web, either from my desktop or my phone.

Just be careful not to follow too many people or the SNR will become unmanageable.

Proof of Life

Over the weekend I was chided for not updating in a loooong time, so this post is to let everyone know that I'm still alive.

My excuse for not posting is that I have been very busy both at work and at home.  The project that I'm working on at work has been a serious effort, what some of us around here would call a "death march" effort.  It started out as a quick eight week project that turned into a protracted effort that involved misunderstandings in scope and complexity, trying to design to hit a moving target, failed partnerships with external companies, and serious intra-team conflict.  (Please not that the previous list is nowhere near all-inclusive of the difficulties this project experienced)  By the end of the day, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and write on a computer.  I thought I needed something more mind-numbing than that.

I was wrong.

It turns out that man is made to work.  Work is like exercise for your productivity muscles.  By doing, one further increases his capacity for doing more.

At any rate, I'm still here and I'll be posting more often now.  If nothing else, writing helps me to focus my thoughts and gives me a good pause in my thought cycles.  Sometimes that's just the thing to break the blahs or the non-productivity loops I get stuck in.