Avoiding Temptation
I'm sitting on my hands today – avoiding the temptation to “build a better homepage” on the internet. I own my own name as a .com URL, and have a freebie site from Weebly sat on it, with links out to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Wordpress – all under my real name, and all filled with geeky rubbish related to my job (apart from Facebook, which is filled with old school friends, relatives, and acquaintances that have no idea I have blocked them).
Here's the thing – I don'tneedmy own website, other than as a vanity project. A few years ago I did freelance web design and development on the side, and it was useful as a place people could go to find me – to see projects I had worked on, testimonials, and so on. I no longer do any of the freelance work, so I no longer really need a place of my own.
I'm also avoiding buying one of the new model Raspberry Pi computers. I have one of the old ones, and have never really used it for anything, beyond messing around with the default build of Linux that came with it. I have nowhere to put it, and nothing to really do with it, beyond “mess around”. Is this a sign of finally “growing up”? Probably.
I already have tons of gadgets around me – a smartphone, a Kindle, a Kind Fire, a Netbook, a Chromebook, a Macbook, and yet I always gravitate to the old desktop PC in the junk room at home. It's the worst computer in the house, but it just kind of keeps going. I've referred to it in the past as “Trigger's Broom” – a reference to the BBC sitcom “Only Fools and Horses”. Very little of the insides of the computer are original any more, because at various times things have failed, and I have scrapped other things to source replacements. I'm amazed it works at all, to be honest. A quick search online tells me it's 7 years old. Not bad. Not bad at all. It would have been the cheapest computer in the shop at the time too...
Half the reason I have so much stuff is because I look after things. The netbook is probably 5 years old, and the Macbook is 7 years old. I'm surrounded by museum pieces. Maybe I should open the house up to visitors, so nosey people can wander in, and point out all the things they used to have to their children – like the 1st gen iPod Shuffle that I still use from time to time (if the Macbook goes, so does the Shuffle, because there's no way I'm installing iTunes on one of the Windows computers in the house ever again).
Anyway... I didn't set out to write about my plans to build a museum. I set out to waste some time not getting on with my work (hey, it's lunchtime – give me a break) – and I think I've achieved that rather admirably.