A Personal Update

Over the last few weeks I've found myself trying to do too many things, being caught up in some to the detriment of others, and all the while feeling my wheels are spinning but I'm getting nowhere. From the day I first got a PC until now, I've had various systems of files and folders with multiple copies of stuff in different structures with different names, backups of backups of backups of a lot of stuff I've never accessed in years and likely never will. I have been trying to work through that backlog. It's very time consuming but it's long overdue.

To complicate matters I'm also facing a mirror in the real world too, where I've built up a lot of junk that I'll never need, and some of it requires special disposal arrangements. I have two old PCs that still work albeit the performance is incredibly limited. Where possible I'd want to dispose of anything that could be of use to someone somewhere, to a local charity shop to sell. The rest will be thrown in the bin. This is also time consuming.

This is further complicated by the CCTracker and Unseen Studio projects, including the Crivins audiocast. In both cases I've been distracted and not able to do much with them. They are both active but at the moment I feel that it's important psychologically to clear out the detritus of the past to give a reasonably clear flow for the present and the future. This is in part why I couldn't do NaNoWriMo this year; I couldn't focus on the preparation nor the actual writing because I have a lot of crud to work through and clear out.

I'm not sure how long this will last, I continually plan for "long term" and hopefully I have this nailed now. By long term, I mean a stable distro that I can set up and don't have to worry about reinstalling at a later date adding more backups of backups to the already overcrowded mix. A few days ago I was happily using Xubuntu 11.04 but for reasons that I can't be bothered to go into now, I found myself on the reinstall path.......again. Cutting a long story short, I've found myself back on Linux Mint LMDE XFCE. A few key features I need all work just fine, and it's rolling. My netbook is the same, so when I want to record either a screencast, or audiocast all I need to do is fire it up, put the USB headset on and record.

During this time I've found myself being frustrated and kinda snarky both online and in real life. I am hoping that by concentrating on clearing out the past, I can ease that frustration. It means logging into IRC a lot less, as some people may have noticed. It also means using Identica less too. Normally Identica isn't an issue, but the updates and cascade of issues with the site, services, clients etc just add to the frustration. That's something I can pull back from while I sort stuff out. By the time I'm ready, hopefully the teething issues with the new Statusnet software and various clients will be fixed.

I'm not disappearing, I'll just be logging in less than usual for a while.