Grant Neufeld

I’ve actually been making progress on “the cleaning of my apartment” (note the singular) – particularly since I got my computer back and met my print deadline.

Some friends came by last night and expressed shock at actually being able to see my apartment for the first time.

I’ve started pulling out things I’m going to get rid of – books, videos, magazines, etc. – either by selling, giving away or junking.

There is still a lot of work remaining, but it actually seems feasible now. It’s definitely stretching out a lot longer than I had planned, but that’s always the way. My hope now is to have my apartment thoroughly cleaned up and out by the end of August.

Well, as anyone who knows me well might have predicted, I’ve been doing more of my computer organizing first, rather than the household cleaning I had planned.

(Non Mac-geeks might want to skip the rest of this entry.)

One very good thing about this is that I’ve got my backups running much more frequently, and much more thoroughly.

Organizing-wise, I’ve managed to move all of the remnants of my calendaring, notes and to-dos out of Palm Desktop and into iCal (calendar, active to-do’s) and sidenote (notes, long-term to-dos). I moved all my contacts over to Address Book a couple years ago.

sidenote is a very neat tool that I recommend for all Mac OS X users. It’s basically a notepad (with text formatting) that ‘pops up’ from the side of your screen. It’s off-screen most of the time, but very easy to bring up whenever you want.

There are a number of other new programs I downloaded and installed over the past couple of days. I found most of them through the 43 Folders listings for Mac OS X . Notable are Quicksilver and Frequency (a tool for blog posting, although the more expensive ecto looks to be better).

If it really meant I could do the blue lightning, I’d go over to the Dark Side of the Force in a snap.

Besides, the Emperor is wicked-cool.