Letter Never Sent

1. I just counted the number of RSS feeds I have in my Sage sidebar for Firefox and it’s nearing seventy. Yikes. That’s seventy websites I refresh every five to ten minutes in OCD fashion.
2. I got my bonus today. Time to take care of a few things that have fallen by the way side. That reminds me, taxes suck. My priority for 2005 is to keep track of all my receipts, mileage, and expenses so I can itemize my deductions for my next return. I ended up costing myself some money this year due to not keeping track of all the things I am legally allowed to deduct from my taxes. Alan Greenspan recently advocated a consumption tax as opposed to an income tax, which makes sense to me, although it creates a disincentive to consumer spending which currently accounts for seventy percent of our gross national product. Can taxes function as anything other than a disincentive? I think it’s more likely to be a consumption disincentive than an income disincentive. Income tax is a lot less visible, whereas if you had to pay a federal sales tax it would be something that touched you every day in a palpable way.
3. There was an interesting thread on the WoW Warlock discussion forum asking: “What is your job?” IRL (In Real Life), as opposed to in World of Warcraft, of course. Not suprisingly, most of the people were employed in some fashion in high-tech. It might be interesting to see if certain personalities are drawn more to certain player classes (warlock, priest, rogue, etc.) I like warlocks because of the demonic aspect, you know, deriving your magical abilities by flirting with damning, infernal powers. From a game aspect, it’s a very flexible class that takes a lot of micromanagement as far as your spells and abilities, but if you spend time playing and working on different strategies it is very powerful. In PvP situations I often win unless the opponent is very strong defensively like a Druid or Paladin.

There are a few utilities I use that are indispensable for making my life easier. I have tried several different programs, but only a handful are worth using.

• File syncing / backup / remote backup – Windows doesn’t come with anything to make regular backups and file syncs. This is essential for keeping backups of important files. SyncBack is the most fully-featured program I’ve used to do this. You just create a task profile to make regular backups of specific files or directories. It has tons of other features and will help protect your data from hard-drive failure, etc.
• Time tracking of tasks – When you freelance you need to be able to keep track of how much time you spend on a task in order to properly invoice for it. AllNetic Working Time Tracker is the best application out there for doing so. When you start a task you can access a small pause / stop / restart button from your task tray that will help you track the time you spend on specific tasks.
• Text editing – EditPad Lite is the best tabbed text editor. Tabbed is the way to go since you can open and edit multiple files.
• Image viewer / browser – IrfanView is great for browsing images, taking screenshots, resizing, etc. I’ve been using it for several years. My only beef is that when you change your file associations they use the crappy IrfanView icons. That should change.

I’ll add some more of these maybe later.

Dragonfly Jenny is feeling the existential angst that comes with living with an awareness of time, which I think everyone can relate to. What is it that we all want? Meaning? Continuance? Happiness? How do you become satisfied?

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