clutter

On Friday morning I wanted to go to Fitness First before departing for my weekend holiday in the Whitsundays. But I was unable to find my little membership card as it must have fallen off my keyring at some point. It is a crummy keyring and too loose. Now it might cost $25 to replace the card. (There's a little voice in my head repeating "for want of a nail"...). Although I'm messy I'm usually very careful not to lose my things. So it is very annoying that this has happened.

The positive side of the experience is that I've launched a cleaning frenzy at home and in my office. My desk at work is now absolutely clean except for the mouse, keyboard and monitor. (Maybe I should use an antibacterial spray now.) The cables are snaking through a hole in the desk down to the crappy Pentium 4 1.8GHz machine with 512MB of RAM on the floor. At home I found a $20 note in the drawer and some Medicare receipts that I really must submit. I have been browsing "Household Management for Men" on the bus to work. I am reminded of my friend David's statement that he lived a life of bohemian clutter in his 20s but now it makes him anxious... I should start living a neater life now.

On the theme of clutter... the webmail interface to my two work email accounts is annoying. I would say that over 90% of the mail I receive on either account is not relevant to me at all. One of them uses CommuniGate Pro and anytime new email arrives the webmail interface pops up a new window with Javascript and beeps, and no matter what I am doing, Windows jumps to that tab in Firefox, which is pretty annoying when I get about 20 emails a day and the vast majority are crap. The other one uses a self-signed SSL certificate so I have to click through about three windows every time Firefox starts. I will switch to Thunderbird or Eudora, I reckon.

Today, I will ask the IT support people at work to fix some other computer problems too: the icon for PDFs doesn't work and there's a Cygwin icon on my Desktop I don't have permissions to change.

Firefox on my PC is still more stable than Safari on my Mac.