Monthly Archives: May 2006

I was going through some of my old files today. I carry my 500 gig external drive with me on long trips, and this seemed like a perfect time to clean up and remove duplicates. I’m also looking at creating “Binders” in Adobe of my published articles, my essential documents and my business portfolio. If it works well, I may create one for my fiction pieces — current, past, complete and still underway. And, I may swap over my many formats of journals (since 1979 when I started keeping journals) into a binder organized in date order. Yeah, I know, … it’s anal-retentive… but I like being organized and I like being able to “lay my hands” on what I want when I want it. I may be a minimalist with the physical stuff in my life, but my “digital” belongings are getting rather overwhelming… so I am “cleaning” virtual house.

I’m also knee-deep in the decision making process on what type of portability I’ll be seeking for my business and my life during the next year. I think the UMPC’s are really cool, but I don’t think this first pass is what I’m going to need for real productivity. I’ll probably wait until the new VISTA OS comes out (which promises some energy saving additions, particularly helpful for mobility) and that new hybrid hard drive so I can have quick boots and PDA-type response times on a full-fledged hand-held PC. I want the touch screen and the Tablet-PC write-on screen capabilities… but for now, I’m going to get a Tablet PC (probably a Motion Computing model) and learn to think about my computing styles in different ways. I’ll learn to write more and type less and get comfortable with the concept of “pen” computing. Right now, I’ll concentrate on organizing my data and learning the new software — the software types that I think will be the future of the everyday-computing styles of average individuals within the next 5-10 years.

So, all this led to cleaning things out to determine how much HD space I need in the Tablet I’m going to get while I await the next generation of UMPCs. And, while doing so… I came across the following article that I wrote back in 2002. I never pursued getting it published, and I still feel that it’s relevant to my own personal philosophies of living small and deliberately, so I decided it was time to post it to the web.
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