Ramblings From Justin Penney

I'm not really a "clean" person. Every once in a while I pretend to be, like my desk at work was clean for at least 3 weeks, but I'm messy and I don't always put stuff away. I'm pretty flighty overall and things get left out so that I don't have to get them out. I'm really bad about instruments. Right now I have my acoustic, Quentin's Tele, my upright bass, and Ampeg B-1 and an old Zoom 705 just laying around in my living room. I use all of these almost every day. I'm messy.

I'm not really "dirty" per se. I clean up gross stuff... or anything that smells bad. Especially if it smells bad... especially if the smell permeates even though I'm burning 3 sticks of Nag Champa...

So I'm not tidy. I love to organise... but not be organised. I try but then I spend all my time making sure everything is where it goes. I think overall I'm actually a little more productive if I just leave stuff mostly out.

So this carries over in to everything. At work i keep a notebook with me to take notes, what a concept, and keep track of the things I need to do. For a couple weeks I kept it neat! I mean NEAT. Every phone call I wrote the time on. I wrote down what the person needed and what I did. Thsi was good for very linear tasks. Then I had to really take notes on something. I was not prepared for that. So I'm in the struggle of keeping just clean enough for reasonable recall but messy enough that I'm free to work how I need to at the time. I think I have my notebook in reasoanble order now. It's jsut chaotic enought ow rok for me.

The power saving ties in with my home computers. I'm almost organised with my files. Almost. Everything is logical but not in the right place. Some have been on our server, some are on my workstation. Some are in both... it's really pretty wild. But I'm wanting to turn the server off. It's up 24/7 and I figure it's costing us around $10 - $11/month to operate and most of the time it's just eating power. Along with my workstation that gets used more but can be shut down sometimes.

The server is really nice to have though. I have it collecting email from all of my accounts and filtering through them and making all of my personal mail available on the web. It's also easy to export our photo galleries to it for sharing with our family. We even had a family blog for a while that was fun but we lost interest with our other blogs, mysapces and forums. It's handy and a setup that I've been using for half a decade but I think realistically it's time to go.

The other sad part of this is that it's my last home Linux box. I really like Linux, really I do, I work with it all the time. But it doesn't make sense for my normal computer usage. After years of evangelism for it's usefulness ont he desktop it just doesn't work for me for my home computer usage. I use just enough commercial applications with jsut enough frequency that I can't get rid of it. I paid, too damned much, for CD Architect and I use it a lot. I do most of my work on the studio computer but I'll often do comparative "masters" on both machines due to the different environments. Then there's iTunes which a lot of people hate, and I have some issues with it, but it works well. I listen to a lot of podcasts, manage my iPod, have some interesting smart playlists, etc. I really can't leave it and I have found nothing suitable on Linux. I use xmms mostly and I do not like Amarok or Banshee.

So I'm cleaning. I'm moving files around. Merging them all together then I'm moving. And it will be nice and orderly for at least 20 minutes!