random thought

I had one of those rare moments of clarity this morning. Remember the “organizing the kitchen” project? I’m starting on the office space now. The kid and I aren’t going to be able to deal with each other for long if his clutter keeps encroaching on my side of the desk. So I went back to the Container Store this morning and picked up a few things that I needed, and then I saw some things that I didn’t realize that I needed until just that moment, and some other stuff ended up in the cart too.

I’m going to have to pull the desk out from the wall over the weekend to take down the cork/wipeoff boards from where they are now and move them so they can be reached. Some of the art we have in the room will probably end up hanging in the middle spot as well. Who knows, I’ll get around to it later.

The whole moment of clarity in the midst of my ADD morning came as I was driving home, planning out how I was going to rearrange things. I hadn’t posted yet today. Now I know that technically the Blog365 rules say that I don’t have to today because it’s the 29th and that just works, but I started thinking about writing regardless. The brain spew started and I thought to myself that the whole reason for starting the blog back up was to get back in the habit of writing. Honestly, the posting every day in November thing worked out well, because I had just kicked this place off and it gave me a nice chunk of content to begin working with. Same thing with the 365 plan, after November was over, I still posted consistently, but there was no one standing over me telling me I had to do it and so I started to slack off.

My problem now is that I’m throwing something up here every day, that’s the good part, but in all honesty, it’s not really that thought provoking or entertaining, aside from the tales of dogs eating full pieces of furniture and the kid being insane. So I’m sitting here now debating the whole “must write every day” aspect of what I’m doing here. I would much rather read something good once every few days, than read about someone picking their nose all the time because there wasn’t really that much going on to start with.

This blog isn’t really about traffic to start with, but I do appreciate the ten people that stop by regularly, and the three or four of you that actually throw a comment as well. I’m not really looking for opinions on what I should do, because I’m not sure myself yet how I want to proceed. Did I mention the cat puked on my counter this morning? Yeah, I see where this is going. I just wanted to let everyone know that there is a chance that things are going to slow down a bit here in Stepford, and rather than informing you every time someone farts, I’ll just let you catch up with the highlights each week.

In other news, the desktop is now running a small xp install that is enough room for games and that’s it. The rest of the machine has been given over to Ubuntu linux and is doing well after a short adjustment period where it twitched a bit when it looked at the network card. I feel the need to say that I think I have dealt with the last of Microsoft that I’m going to for a very very long time. I can understand why they’re pushing programs to get kids interested in development and dropping prices on their new system, because honestly, linux is getting to the point where it’s just as easy to install, and there is a ton of open source software available. I’m not totally a geeky enough person to jump in on a terminal window and change things around, but I don’t have to.

The kid’s school is one in the area here that has switched from windows to a client based linux system. They’re learning early on that the words open source and free are not bad. We live in a world where consumerism has taught us that “good stuff” costs more. That’s not always the case. They’re learning that having a passion for making things work, and thinking through problems instead of around them can make things a lot more simple in the long run. If someone comes up with an idea and shares it, it changes and adapts into something new and useful in ways it wasn’t originally planned, and if more people add their ideas and share their way of doing things, everyone benefits, and we’re not sitting here ten years later with a pretty box that kinda does something new but not really and only if you put these other things that you don’t need in as well. In those same ten years, I’ve gone from looking at a patched together system of openly developed programs that I was afraid to even contemplate, to throwing a disk in my machine and having a brand new os installed in under an hour with full network support, office suites, online tools, graphic programs, etc and all it cost me was my time.

I’m going to go make some tea and see if I can shut myself up for a bit now. I think this is a perfect example of my brain running off on its own and I should try and sedate it with warm milky goodness.