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Some people vacuum their living spaces frequently. You can guess from the mere existence of the previous statement that I am not a member of that tribe. While I have a decent enough vacuum cleaner, I do not usually rouse it from its slumber more than twice a year. I don't have dust allergies and I kinda like staring at the cobwebs near my ceilings, so I don't get too involved.
Last week I was annoyed by the feeling of grit on the TOR (threadbare oriental rug, a term first used by Paul Fussell in his 1983 book Class) in my bedroom as well as the TOR in my living room. So yesterday we had to haul most of the furniture out of the living room, vacuum loudly, and then put stuff back.
Tackling the bedroom rug was a little trickier. I only needed to move one piece of furniture, an office chair on caster wheels. However I also had to remove the Modulo Pile from the floor, which left that pile on the bed yet again. The pile was significantly smaller than last time: it only took up three quarters of the bed's surface instead of all of it and it had no stacks of things). I still didn't want any of it back on the rug after the vacuum had done its duty.
I decided to put most of the stuff on the bed onto the dining room table, where there is already a clutter. As of today I no longer have any cardboard boxes on my bedroom floor, which is a major achievement. Unfortunately my dining room floor and table are each littered with unresolved objects, even today.
It's very important to reward oneself after a couple hours of cleaning labor at home or one will never want to resume the process. Therefore I took drastic action after I vacuumed: I watched old episodes of Dragnet and then played Bioshock. Jack Webb invested a lot of money into the TelePrompTer company and was determined to get every penny's worth.
Last night was also garbage night. We had three large bags completely full of garbage (a third on top of the two from earlier) and another bag of normal garbage. It felt good not to see any of it in the morning.
I have about a dozen medium-sized shopping bags full of items. Each bag could contain random amounts of anything, from magazines, old bills, PCI cards for desktop machines or even a lollipop hiding inside Jar-Jar's mouth (a vaguely safe toy that really only exists to frighten adults).
Today I consolidated a couple bags of crap, freed up a couple boxes for sorting but still had a pile of stuff on my dining room table. I have to sort the bags and boxes of crap into five major types: wires, papers, computer hardware, CDs and tchotchkes. This isn't even the part where I toss stuff, although sometimes that happens along the way. This step makes things obvious, thereby making container selection easier. For example, I found enough PDAs and components to fill a shoe box.
The big scored of today was freeing up an entire hard drive. I had moved from one Windows XP Pro desktop machine to a newer one when I bought my first dual-core processor about a year and change ago. The old machine still hadn't been dismantled, but it's a fine box and would make an excellent test bed. It boots from a 200 GB IDE drive, which is the older kind of hard drive. Then it has a 160 GB SATA drive which held my MP3s and some older files. I spent a couple hours confirming that I had already moved all of the SATA drive's files to my dual-core machine, then repartitioned the drive.
It feels really good to get an entire hard drive back. That's real progress -- I can save money, I can start new projects, I can learn new things. Once I free up the other drive only has 86 GB of stuff on it, but it's as well charted as the planet Venus. Once I free up the older drive, I'll have made real progress.
I can hardly wait to reclaim the name of that machine and give it another life. I name all of my physical computers after cities on the Pacific Ocean (except for my old iBook, which I just call iBis). This old desktop machine is Vladivostok, a city on the east coast of Russia. Vladivostok is also the name of a Camper Van Beethoven instrumental, which was the original inspiration -- no one I knew had named any machine after a place that obscure.
Vladivostok has become the Dread Pirate Robert of my life. The first machine with this name was my first PC, which I bought new in 1998. Every time I upgraded machines, that title would move over -- except this time, because I didn't expect this nicer desktop to become so comfortable. My dual-core box is named Oxnard, a word that sounds immensely ugly in English. I want this box to become Vlad and the title Oxnard to vaporize.
In case you're wondering: my household media server is named Yokohama, my big laptop is Shanghai, my last Solaris box was named Valparaiso (a beautiful city in Chile, whose name means "gateway to paradise") and one of my other boxes is Astoria (a place in Oregon). I even named a small NAS box Sitka, for a city in Alaska. There are still opportunities for Lima, Iquique, Townsville (that's in nothern Queensland) and Suva (in Fiji).
Last week I was annoyed by the feeling of grit on the TOR (threadbare oriental rug, a term first used by Paul Fussell in his 1983 book Class) in my bedroom as well as the TOR in my living room. So yesterday we had to haul most of the furniture out of the living room, vacuum loudly, and then put stuff back.
Tackling the bedroom rug was a little trickier. I only needed to move one piece of furniture, an office chair on caster wheels. However I also had to remove the Modulo Pile from the floor, which left that pile on the bed yet again. The pile was significantly smaller than last time: it only took up three quarters of the bed's surface instead of all of it and it had no stacks of things). I still didn't want any of it back on the rug after the vacuum had done its duty.
I decided to put most of the stuff on the bed onto the dining room table, where there is already a clutter. As of today I no longer have any cardboard boxes on my bedroom floor, which is a major achievement. Unfortunately my dining room floor and table are each littered with unresolved objects, even today.
It's very important to reward oneself after a couple hours of cleaning labor at home or one will never want to resume the process. Therefore I took drastic action after I vacuumed: I watched old episodes of Dragnet and then played Bioshock. Jack Webb invested a lot of money into the TelePrompTer company and was determined to get every penny's worth.
Last night was also garbage night. We had three large bags completely full of garbage (a third on top of the two from earlier) and another bag of normal garbage. It felt good not to see any of it in the morning.
I have about a dozen medium-sized shopping bags full of items. Each bag could contain random amounts of anything, from magazines, old bills, PCI cards for desktop machines or even a lollipop hiding inside Jar-Jar's mouth (a vaguely safe toy that really only exists to frighten adults).
Today I consolidated a couple bags of crap, freed up a couple boxes for sorting but still had a pile of stuff on my dining room table. I have to sort the bags and boxes of crap into five major types: wires, papers, computer hardware, CDs and tchotchkes. This isn't even the part where I toss stuff, although sometimes that happens along the way. This step makes things obvious, thereby making container selection easier. For example, I found enough PDAs and components to fill a shoe box.
The big scored of today was freeing up an entire hard drive. I had moved from one Windows XP Pro desktop machine to a newer one when I bought my first dual-core processor about a year and change ago. The old machine still hadn't been dismantled, but it's a fine box and would make an excellent test bed. It boots from a 200 GB IDE drive, which is the older kind of hard drive. Then it has a 160 GB SATA drive which held my MP3s and some older files. I spent a couple hours confirming that I had already moved all of the SATA drive's files to my dual-core machine, then repartitioned the drive.
It feels really good to get an entire hard drive back. That's real progress -- I can save money, I can start new projects, I can learn new things. Once I free up the other drive only has 86 GB of stuff on it, but it's as well charted as the planet Venus. Once I free up the older drive, I'll have made real progress.
I can hardly wait to reclaim the name of that machine and give it another life. I name all of my physical computers after cities on the Pacific Ocean (except for my old iBook, which I just call iBis). This old desktop machine is Vladivostok, a city on the east coast of Russia. Vladivostok is also the name of a Camper Van Beethoven instrumental, which was the original inspiration -- no one I knew had named any machine after a place that obscure.
Vladivostok has become the Dread Pirate Robert of my life. The first machine with this name was my first PC, which I bought new in 1998. Every time I upgraded machines, that title would move over -- except this time, because I didn't expect this nicer desktop to become so comfortable. My dual-core box is named Oxnard, a word that sounds immensely ugly in English. I want this box to become Vlad and the title Oxnard to vaporize.
In case you're wondering: my household media server is named Yokohama, my big laptop is Shanghai, my last Solaris box was named Valparaiso (a beautiful city in Chile, whose name means "gateway to paradise") and one of my other boxes is Astoria (a place in Oregon). I even named a small NAS box Sitka, for a city in Alaska. There are still opportunities for Lima, Iquique, Townsville (that's in nothern Queensland) and Suva (in Fiji).
