Cleaning out the desk
Somewhere in the fun of the last week, I lost track of time. As can happen when you're jobless or working for a small company I was surprised to find that today was Saturday.
As Sue mentioned in one of her posts, I've been straightening my desk and computer at home. And I have been. When I left FusionOne I returned their laptop, which had been my daily computer for better than 2 years. Ken loaned me his old laptop and I've been building it out as well as cleaning up a desktop linux box I had not quite gotten around to setting up.
It's sort of a zen thing for me, I guess. Much like chewing gum keeps a smoker distracted from quitting the habit, mussing about with computers and workspace is a crutch to distract me from from being laid off.
Side notes on that process:
- Mobile me and iDisk kicks ass at maintaining files and preferences between macs. I know the tech is not that difficult, but still have a small dose of that wonder from when I was a kid first learning computers when I turn it on. All my bookmarks, mail settings, file settings, preferences for more programs, etc all just are instantly back. Oh, and my calender and contacts are automatically bidirectionally synced with my phone.
- Mandriva linux (the distro formerly known as Mandrake) still kicks butt at having a lot of high end applications packaged cleanly and supporting a lot of the "nice" X stuff that most distros are clunky at. To me is still feels more finished as a desktop linux than Ubuntu. The downside is that urpmi on the command line drives me batty. (asame thing for apt - I guess I'm just hooked on yum.)
On the flip side, I am preparing a home work space that I think I will make good use of in the next week.
I've narrowed my mind down to two major projects. Both might grab some attention online and one might grab a little money. Perhaps next week I will try one and see how far I can go.
In the mean time I've listed myself as available on linked-in, have pinged one or two folks, and have put together a list of who to start contacting as a hit list next week.
But before then, we have Valentines day tomorrow. Having lost a little track of time I realized that I had let some of my prep for Valentines day slide right by and missed a window on getting a specific set of gifts. Dang.
I don't like improvising on such things but I think we're going to just take tomorrow as it comes and make our own good time. It'll be fun to see what happens.
As Sue mentioned in one of her posts, I've been straightening my desk and computer at home. And I have been. When I left FusionOne I returned their laptop, which had been my daily computer for better than 2 years. Ken loaned me his old laptop and I've been building it out as well as cleaning up a desktop linux box I had not quite gotten around to setting up.
It's sort of a zen thing for me, I guess. Much like chewing gum keeps a smoker distracted from quitting the habit, mussing about with computers and workspace is a crutch to distract me from from being laid off.
Side notes on that process:
- Mobile me and iDisk kicks ass at maintaining files and preferences between macs. I know the tech is not that difficult, but still have a small dose of that wonder from when I was a kid first learning computers when I turn it on. All my bookmarks, mail settings, file settings, preferences for more programs, etc all just are instantly back. Oh, and my calender and contacts are automatically bidirectionally synced with my phone.
- Mandriva linux (the distro formerly known as Mandrake) still kicks butt at having a lot of high end applications packaged cleanly and supporting a lot of the "nice" X stuff that most distros are clunky at. To me is still feels more finished as a desktop linux than Ubuntu. The downside is that urpmi on the command line drives me batty. (asame thing for apt - I guess I'm just hooked on yum.)
On the flip side, I am preparing a home work space that I think I will make good use of in the next week.
I've narrowed my mind down to two major projects. Both might grab some attention online and one might grab a little money. Perhaps next week I will try one and see how far I can go.
In the mean time I've listed myself as available on linked-in, have pinged one or two folks, and have put together a list of who to start contacting as a hit list next week.
But before then, we have Valentines day tomorrow. Having lost a little track of time I realized that I had let some of my prep for Valentines day slide right by and missed a window on getting a specific set of gifts. Dang.
I don't like improvising on such things but I think we're going to just take tomorrow as it comes and make our own good time. It'll be fun to see what happens.