Tag: music

Operation Cleanup

If all goes according to plan, when I get home from work today, there will be a dumpster in my driveway.

It will be there for two weeks, and it kicks off a flurry of cleaning and purging that will hopefully result in a much more organized and less cluttered house.

I am already thinking about process changes I can make to keep it clean once it gets to that state.
Recently, I’ve been doing “zero inbox” on my email, which means I deal with all emails in my inbox, either deleting them, archiving them or replying and then archiving them. The idea is by keeping your inbox clean, it’s easy to see new stuff, and by dealing with it as it comes in, it never gets overwhelming.
So far it’s working really well. I’ve been doing it at work and at home, and my email boxes are clean and tidy. If I need to find an old email, I just use search, or filter based on some simple tags.

I’m thinking I could do the same thing with physical mail as well. I could move the shredder and the filing cabinets out of my bedroom, and when mail comes, either shred it, file it, or if it’s a bill, pay it and file the receipt – immediately. That way I won’t even let paper into my bedroom, since once it gets there, it just builds up in huge drifts.

The dumpster will allow us to throw out some old crappy furniture which has just built up and is taking up space.

I also might convince myself to part with some packratted stuff…

I need to go through my clothes, and decide for each item if it needs to be tossed, donated, or filed as winter or summer or all-weather. My closet and hamper are overflowing with clothes, I definitely can do some paring down.

And gadgets… I have a bunch of old gadgets built up. One laptop is garbage, a 486 that I don’t even think I could give away. Then there are two other laptops, a Dell Inspiron and an Apple Powerbook… they are old, and need new batteries, but work fine… I never use them, I should give them away or eBay them. I also have an old Palm IIIx, for which I have just about every accessory made. Seriously, I have the little digital camera attachment, and the GPS attachment, and a bunch of other stuff… I doubt it’s worth much. Again, I should give it away or sell it. It’s hard to do, though. Every fiber of my being tells me “keep them, they are old but still work – if there’s an apocalypse, they might come in handy…” But they are just taking up space, and it’s time to pare down.

Heh, as I type this, I’m listening to the new They Might Be Giants CD, and the song “Climbing the walls” is playing, which has this lyric:

Too much junk
Too much junk
Can we please clear out this house
In the trunk
In the trunk
And then we’ll take it all to the dump

Garage Band

Garage Band is a fun app, which somehow simultaneously gives me the sense that putting together a song is easy, and that composing music is very hard.

Almost everyone I know can play an instrument, somehow music has always eluded me.

Maybe I’m too dumb to learn, or maybe I’ve been too lazy to try and learn.

Either way I feel like an idiot who missed out.

Here’s the start of a tune I did in Garage band last night.
I don’t know if you can really call it mine, since I just made a mix using the built-in loops.

Song1.mp3

Handy Tip

If you ever want to boost your productivity when programming, just pop in the Run Lola Run soundtrack. Your fingers will really want to get moving on that code.

Rush concert

Went to the Rush concert last night with Ray and his friend Ty (aka Farrah).

It was a great show, a very slick lighting setup, with lasers and pyrotechnics, even.
The high point of the show was Neil Peart’s extended drum solo, which is the best drumming I’ve ever seen. He has an amazing drum kit, the whole of which rotates and has another set of stuff on the other side, including a keyboard made out of little drum pads.

I haven’t seen that many live shows, and this one was pretty impressive. Probably partly wasted on me, though – I’m not a huge Rush fan, so only knew a few of the songs.

After the show, we had a bit of an adventure. The train we thought would take us back to the car instead stopped after a few stops, dropping us in the middle of nowhere in NJ (along with a bunch of other fellow show-goers). People slowly found rides or took the bus, Ray called his roommate Steph and she headed out to get us.

While we were waiting for her to arrive, we walked around the parking lot chatting. Then we noticed a guy and his girlfriend on the other side of the parking lot. He was yelling at her loudly, at it looked like he was hitting her and knocked her down. Ray called 911, and after the rude 911 operator finished swearing at him (seriously) he reported what was going on. Shortly a small fleet of cops drove up (guess there was nothing else going on that night). After a while it looked like the guy and the girl walked away, guess she said there was no problem or something. Then Steph drove up as the cops were driving away. Her car is very loud, the muffler being only partly attached.

During a harrowing drive home (Steph likes to take on ramps at full speed regardless of the sharpness of the turn) there was a large *clank* as a chunk of metal fell off the bottom of the car and onto the highway.

The car kept going fine though, we made it home ok, and I collapsed exhausted on the couch.