As within, so without

When my mind and life get cluttered, so do my physical environments. When I lived on my own, it was the whole apartment. Now, it's pretty much confined to my home office. But as I celebrate the end of the semester and contemplate what to do with myself this summer, I scan the office and see much clutter. Starting on my far left and moving clockwise (that's left to right, for you folks who only know digital clock faces), I see:

  • My graphic novels and comics bookcase, groaning with unread material
  • Two small wicker baskets holding 1) an Airport Extreme router I've not been able to sell and 2) a stack of old MacWorld magazines, a MacBook for Dummies, and a binder of Take Control ebook printouts
  • On my desk, books to take back to the library
  • My seltzer can
  • My overflowing inbasket
  • My 10-year diary
  • My MacBook and laptop stand
  • My desktop PC and monitor with old CDs in the hutch and a 5-ft CD rack sitting atop a 2-drawer filing cabinet
  • A poster I've not had time or opportunity to put on the wall
  • Stand with a boombox and 2 big messy piles of CDs, with a turntable (unplugged, bereft) on the lower shelf
  • My banjo case and materials (restarted my lessons this week)
  • A box where I'm collecting books to take to BDFAR for trade
  • And let's stop there, shall we?

Zoiks. Probably the first thing I should do, to put my mind in order, is to put my environment in order. As without, so within.

Extinction

The language of the slot-machine industry:

There’s a term bandied about at the trade shows: “extinction.” We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to-extinction, and so on.

What’s…

Extinction