My desktop is like my room. Usually I keep it pretty clean. Then at some point a switch goes off, I suddenly don’t care anymore, and junk ends up all over the place– random media files, shortcuts, readme files to programs I don’t remember installing, etc.. I can tolerate this state for a while before I get fed up and go on a cleaning rage. I’ve just now completed one such cycle, having spent a large part of the day cleaning up my desktop.
It’s funny how software preferences and opinions on sensible computer usage evolve over time. For example, I used to think blogs were the most retarded idea and that “bloggers” were those who had failed at life. Now look at me. Pretty sad, huh? Then there’s the view of Windows Media Player users as misguided souls who need to be shown the light (e.g. foobar2k–in right screenshot–, mplayerc, VLC, etc.), similar to the perception online bourgeoisie now have of people who still use IE.
But even software choices that used to reveal technical savvy are being corrupted. My favorite text editor for a long time, UltraEdit, seems to be killing itself by becoming bloated with more and more useless features while failing to fix existing bugs. Still, I prefer it over the alternatives like TextPad, Notepad++, etc, although not by much anymore. My new love is AutoHotkey, which allows you to create macros and assign them to global hotkeys. I can now automatically launch PuTTY, login, start a shell, and cd to my project directory with a single key, and I’ve also configured a macro to perform KDE-style moving and resizing of windows (ALT+leftclick anywhere in window to move it, ALT+rightclick to resize it). How sweet is that?